Invest News DetailWorld News - Six international companies are scheduled to compete today in a tender to procure cars for an undersea railway tunnel across the Istanbul Strait that would link the Asian and the European halves of Istanbul. South Korean ROTEM, French ALSTOM, Italian Ansaldobreda SPA, Spanish CAF, Bombardier (Canadian)- Siemens (German)-Nurol (Turkish) consortium are set to present proposals for a total 440 cars which are expected to cost some 750 million euros. The railway system is set to go operational in 2011, reducing the travel time to four minutes between the two banks of one of the largest cities in Europe. The project, publicly known as the Marmaray, is expected to carry 70 thousand passengers per hour through a 1,387-meter-long tube submerged in 11 parts, each of which weighs 15 thousand tons. When finished, the Marmaray tunnel will be the deepest of its kind in the world with the tube lying some 60 meters below the surface.