THIS week the European Commission (EC) ordered Adif, the Spanish infrastructure manager, to return €141m to the government that it was granted for the construction of a high-speed railway test centre in southern Spain designed to be used for trains at speeds up to 520km/h because it was never built.

AFTER four years of construction, the Lisea consortium celebrated a milestone for the Sud Europ Atlantique high-speed line on July 25, when high-speed testing began on the central section of the 302km route from Tours to Bordeaux.

MALAYSIAN prime minister Mr Najib Razak and his Singaporean counterpart Mr Lee Hsien Loong witnessed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in Putrajaya, Malaysia, on July 19 setting out a timeline and implementation structure for the Kuala Lumpur - Singapore high-speed line.

ITALFERR, the engineering subsidiary of Italian State Railways (FS), published a tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union on July 9 for a contract to design and build the first section of the €6.2bn Naples - Bari high-speed line.

CHINESE engineers have completed construction of a 15,989m-long double-track tunnel on the new Xi'an - Chengdu high-speed line which is due to open in late 2017.

This month the prime ministers of Malaysia and Singapore are expected to sign a key agreement on the implementation of the Kuala Lumpur - Singapore high-speed line. Keith Barrow looks at how momentum - and international interest - is building behind this flagship project.

PROPOSALS for major alterations to the route of the second phase of the high-speed network linking London with central and northern England were unveiled on July 7 by the chairman of HS2 Ltd Sir David Higgins.

PARIS - Strasbourg journey times were reduced to less than two hours on July 3 with the start of commercial operations on the second 106km phase of TGV Est.

TAIWAN High Speed Rail Corporation (THSRC) extended its services to the east of the capital on June 30 with the opening of the 9.2km extension from Taipei Railway Station to Nangang, the 12th station on the high-speed line from Kaohsiung.

CENTRAL Japan Railway Company (JR Central) announced on June 25 that it will introduce a new-generation Shinkansen train on the Tokaido and Sanyo lines in 2020.