The name alone is enough to lure the intrepid. The Iron Silk Road, as the proposed new railway is called, conjures up Marco Polo, caravanserais and the battlefields of Genghis Khan.
It will be years before a train can run from Shanghai to the the Gulf, and even longer before passengers can use a line intended for freight. With the completion, nine years ago, of the missing link between Iran and Turkmenistan, only the section crossing the Chinese frontier into Kazakhstan needs to be built.
But a new land bridge from China to the Middle East is ambitious: a standard railway, running 2,500 miles through the Kazakh steppes, parallel to the broad-gauge track.
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