He made the remarks at a conference on railway construction, stressing the significance of railway development in China from 2016 to 2020.
"We should speed up the expansion of China's high-speed railway network, build more inter-city and city-suburb links, and work to complete a freight railway network," said the vice premier.
"We must accomplish the target of investing more than 800 billion yuan (about 123 billion U.S. dollars) in railway construction in 2016," said Ma.
China has some 121,000 kilometers of rail lines in operation. More than 19,000 kilometers of them are high-speed railways, accounting for over 60 percent of the total in the world.