Dong Nai City, which hosts the airport, set out the arrangement in a document to the Ministry of Construction, the Ho Chi Minh City government, the Thang Long Project Management Board and the airport’s investor Airports Corporation of Vietnam.
The plan covers how the North-South high-speed railway and two metros would be threaded through the corridor leading to Terminal 1.
The high-speed line would run down the center of the rail corridor. The extension of the Ben Thanh-Suoi Tien metro, reaching from Ho Chi Minh City out to Dong Nai City’s administrative center and the airport, would sit on its left, while the Thu Thiem-Long Thanh metro would run on its right.
The Long Thanh airport construction site in Dong Nai City in December 2025. Photo by Read/Quynh Tran |
With the ground in front of Terminal 1 already crowded by access roads, viaducts, parking and other infrastructure, the city proposed offsetting the stations rather than lining them up on one axis.
The high-speed station would shift to the northeast as the cluster’s centerpiece. The two metro stations would shift to the southwest, set parallel to and mirrored across the high-speed line.
The catch, by the city’s own estimate, is that travelers would cover about 400 meters more between the rail platforms and the terminal than under a straight, single-axis design.
Each line would stay independent in structure, technology, signaling and operations, which the city said would cut the risk of systems clashing and let the projects be built on separate timelines.
Passengers would cross between the terminal and the three stations on pedestrian bridges, underground tunnels, or a mix of both, with exact station positions and depths to be fixed in the next design stage.
The stakes are large. Long Thanh is one of Southeast Asia’s biggest airport projects, finishing the first of several phases and due to begin operating late in 2026 with room for about 25 million passengers a year.
It is meant to grow into a regional hub that relieves the overloaded Tan Son Nhat airport in Ho Chi Minh City. Moving travelers to and from the site, about 40 km from the city center, has set off a race to build rail.
The Thu Thiem-Long Thanh line, the main link from Ho Chi Minh City to the airport, is expected to break ground in early July.
The government has also agreed in principle to extend the Ben Thanh-Suoi Tien metro out to the airport, a connection Dong Nai has said could cut the trip between the airport and central Ho Chi Minh City to about 30 minutes.
And Long Thanh is slated to become a stop on the North-South high-speed railway, the roughly 1,541-km, 350-kph line set to start construction late this year and run the length of the country by around 2035.
Comments are closed.