Korea Train Express (KTX)

Korea Train Express (KTX)

Introduction

To improve Korea's logistic system, in 1992 the Korean government come up with the (Korea Train eXpress) KTX project. prior to this project the Seoul and Busan corridor was suffering from the congestion due to lack of transport capacity and in May 1989 government decided to solve this congestion problem in Korea by building the high speed railways

This project was jointly financed by the “Ministry of Construction and Transportation” and the “Korea Railway Network Agency”. The initial plan was to build the high speed railway system from Seoul and Busan in seven years. The project faced may obstacles; as a result the project was over budget by $12.6 billion and delay by 5.5 years more. Due to delay in the project government decided to split this project into two phases. In first phase it was decided to open the route from Seoul to Daegu for the KTX in 2004. In the second phase it was decides to further construct the route from the Daegu to Busan by the end of 2010.

Discussion

On 1st April 2004, the KTX commenced its commercial operation after twelve years from the project initiation. The main objectives of this project was to improve the railway capacity in South Korea and to acquire the high speed railways technology that travel at 300 km per speed, for the citizen of Korea. The KTX project t train was designed in a way, so that it can utilize the existing electrified link used by the existing train system of that time and this feature enable the KTX project to increase the rail capacity by using the existing infrastructure.

Due to the unique characteristic and complexity of the KTX project, resulted in difficulties face by the project managers to manage this mega project. As this project was among the mega project, it consists of 11,141 diverse activities like construction of railway roadbed, train station construction, installation of railroad system and other. Further, as this project was a high speed railroad, so it require a high safety condition that make KTX different from other tradition train service in South Korea and it was designed in a way that the train can run on average speed of 300 km per hour, on the high strength structure and important safety measures were taken in order to control any potential mishaps. Another challenge that this project t face was technical difficulties, as it consists of 26 different linear system of railway system. In case of any problem in one of the linear system, that will result in delay of whole project because KTS's integration to all the linear system of railway system.

KTX Financials Performance

According to the (Flyvbjerg, 2003) the majority of the mega projects over run the budget cost in almost nine out of ten projects. KTX budget was initially project at $5.8 billion and then it was revised to $18.4 billion. As the cost of the KTX budget was over run, project completion date was also revised from 7 ...