New railway to Tibet will help modernise the isolated Himalayan region and bind it to the rest of the country, state media said on Sunday after the first train reached the regional capital.

The first train to Lhasa arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning, 13 hours after Chinese President Hu Jintao watched it leave Golmud, the outpost in the far-western province of Qinghai that is the start of the new 1,142 km (710 mile) line.

The first train from Beijing was en route, due to arrive on Monday morning.

The railway, built at a total cost of $3.76 billion, will be much more than a conveyor of people and goods, according to a Sunday editorial in the People's Daily.

"The Qinghai-Tibet railway will be a route joining the hearts of Tibetan compatriots with the whole country's people of every ethnicity, and it will be a route for the modernising take-off of the snowy highlands," said the editorial.

According to the Xinhua news agency, the railway, which took five years to build, could double Tibet's tourist revenues by 2010 and cut transport costs into the region by 75 percent, lifting its 2.8 million people out of isolation.

Since the 1980s, China injected central government funds to spur Tibet's economy.  

For many Chinese, the railway and the flow of people will be for the good of Tibet.

"The Qinghai-Tibet railway will have a profound impact on Tibet's economic and social development, and will create the conditions for Tibetan society's advance towards modern civilisation," Wang Taifu of the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences told Xinhua.