Construction of a high-speed line linking Beijing and Zhangjiakou, co-host cities bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, will start later this year.

Covering 174 kilometers, the line will have nine stations between Beijing North and Zhangjiakou South and is scheduled to be complete in four-and–a-half years, said Zhu Huigang, vice executive chief of the Beijing railway bureau, Beijing Youth Daily reported on Tuesday.

The section around Badaling, the most difficult part of the line, will start construction this year, Zhu said.

Extending 15.44 km, the Badaling section will go through a tunnel from Juyongguan to Badaling, with an investment of 1.7 billion yuan.

China Railway Corp, relaunched from the former Ministry of Railway, approved the project in December following a feasibility study for the Badaling section which got the go ahead from the National Development and Reform Commission a month earlier, the newspaper said.

The Beijing-Zhangjiakou project, which had been scheduled to start in August 2009, was shelved due to a change in the country’s overall plan for high-speed rail.

In other developments, Zhu said three more rail lines will be opened in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region this year, covering 800 km, or 10 percent of the country’s rail network goal for 2015.

The new lines are an extension of the Beijing-Tianjin link and the ones connecting Tianjin with Baoding and Zhangjiakou with Tangshan.

Zhu said they will relieve Beijing’s pressure as a traffic hub, quoting as an example the Tianjin-Baoding line, where passengers from the north will in future have the option to travel directly south instead transferring in Beijing.