A video of a Malaysian railway track-laying project is falsely attributed to India. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
January 31, 2024
A video of a railway track-laying machine laying concrete sleepers is being shared on social media with a claim that the video shows the work being done by the Indian Railways. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: VIsuals of a high-tech track-laying machine of the Indian Railways
Fact: This video shows a track-laying machine of a Chinese company named China Communications Construction Company working on the East Coast Rail Link project in Malaysia. This project began in Malaysia on 11 December 2023. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Firstly, a close inspection of the viral video revealed that the track-laying machine has text in Chinese. Under the Chinese text, one can observe words written in English that read ‘China Communications Construction.’
Next, to find more details about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few keyframes, leading us to a few social media posts (here and here) containing the viral video. One such post on the Chinese video-sharing platform ‘ixigua’ identified the video’s location as a ‘track-laying site of the East-Malaysian Railway…’ in the post’s description, translated from Chinese to English. It also reads, ‘China’s railway standardisation construction! #railway.’
Taking these as hints, we further made a keyword search on the internet to learn more about the track-laying machine in Malaysia, which led us to several news reports (here, here, and here ) on this project from December 2023.
Reportedly, a railway project named East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) is being built by the Chinese Communications Construction Company (logo is seen in the viral video) in Malaysia. This project started on 11 December 2023.
A video news report on this project published by AP features the same track-laying machine that is seen in the viral video. The logo of the China Communications Company, which is seen in the viral video, can also be seen on the track-laying machine in this video. This makes it clear that a video related to this project is being falsely shared as track-laying work done by the Indian Railways in India.
To sum up, a video of a Malaysian railway track laying work is falsely being attributed to India.