When it comes to high-speed trains, no nation has it as good as China!
The network spreads thousands of miles all over the country!
However, one thing that continues to baffle American scientists is that, despite
the extensive network, the Chinese government is still expanding the network
and wants to double its current capacity in just 15 years!
Why is China laying the tracks for more and more high-speed train
networks, and how is the government managing to expand the rail at so fast a speed?
When it comes to high-speed rail networks, China means serious business!
As the world’s third-largest country by surface
area, China covers 6.3 percent of the planet, at
9.4 million square kilometers.
In terms of population, China comes first worldwide, with
nearly 1.5 million inhabitants, accounting for about 18.5 percent of the world’s
population!
China is not the most densely populated country in the world, hence, the
government tries to link as many parts as possible and reduce travel times.
Not long ago, in fact, at the turn of the 21st century, traveling from Shanghai to Beijing
was a test of travel patience and endurance.
However, the story is now different as the trip has become infinitesimally more convenient.
The difference is the high-speed trains, also known as bullet trains!
Since the first bullet train started operating in 2008, China has constructed about 38,000
kilometers or 23,500 miles of rapid rails linking the major cities, making it the largest
network on the earth!
In fact, more than two-thirds of the world’s high-speed network is
found in China!
Spain, the European leader in bullet trains, comes second place in the
global league table but has a ‘paltry’ 2,000 miles of dedicated lines built for high-speed
trains operating at over 250 kph.
In contrast, the UK currently has just 107 kilometers while the United States lags farther
behind, with only one rail route barely qualifying for high-speed status!
That is Amtrak's North East Corridor, where Acela trains currently
top out at 240 km per hour.
It even shares an existing line refurbished at an
exorbitant cost with commuter and freight trains.
What is mind-blowing about the Chinese rail is that half of the total capacity was
completed in the span of just five years!
The country even planned to add additional 3,700 kilometers in less than a year!
But that is not all, because, by 2035, there will be
70,000 km of high-speed rail in China!
How fast do these trains actually go?
Passengers can cruise at up to 350 km per hour
or 217 miles per hour on many lines!
This has transformed intercity travel and eaten into
the dominance of airlines on many of the busiest routes!
They have become more reliable than local flights on many routes!
By 2020, 75 percent of Chinese cities with a
population of 500,000 or more had a high-speed rail link.
So, why is China aggressively building fast-speed rail?
While the government wants to provide a fast means of travel, these trains
are a symbol of the new economic might wielded by the Asian powerhouse.
It represents the rapid modernization, growing technological prowess, and increasing prosperity
China is experiencing!
China’s Xi Jinping also sees another role for these rail networks!
It is also a powerful tool for social cohesion, political influence,
and the integration of disparate regions with distinct cultures into the mainstream.
China has created many megacities from scratch all around the country, like the
Xiong'an New Area in Hebei province.
What China is doing is linking these places together.
And it is only repeating railway history; many early railways in North America,
Europe, and the colonies of the European empires were built with similar goals!
Similarly, the development of railway networks in Russia, the most popular being the
Trans-Siberian Railway, Prussia, France, Italy, and the British Empire, among others,
were strongly influenced by political and military demands as well as economic
development.
However, the major difference is that China is compressing into a few years what took
other countries or empires decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries to achieve!
Moreso, China’s trains are much more modern and many orders of magnitude faster!
Also, China is transporting an impressive number of people per day, all with seat
reservations and even no need for paper tickets in most places!
You can board by simply scanning your ID card or passport at
the ticket gates!
The amount of logistics required to keep the operation running smoothly is simply out of
the world!
When China started building, it relied on imported technology, with engineers from
Europe and Japan working on the first rail lines.
Because of the huge markets and the highly ambitious plans of the government,
the top engineering firms were eager to participate.
But in so short a time, China was able to wean itself off foreign high-speed
trains.
Now, nobody can touch Chinese companies when it comes to developing bullet
trains!
This is one of the reasons the expansion has been so swift!
That doesn’t mean laying out high-speed rail is a walk in the park for China because
it has had to deal with many problems when it
comes to the engineering involved.
The sheer size of China and its tremendous variations
in terrain, geology, and climate have presented the country's railway engineers
with incredible challenges.
For instance, the tracks run from the sometimes frozen Harbin in the far north to the
near-tropical humidity of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis, to the 1,776-km Lanzhou-
Urumqi line traversing the Gobi Desert.
China's engineers have quickly developed extensive expertise in driving railways over,
under, and through whatever terrain lies in their path.
It took only five years to complete the construction of the 815-kilometer Zhengzhou
East-Wangzhou line, costing 13.5 billion dollars!
The new 180-kilometer Xuzhou- Lianyungang line completed a continuous 3,490-kilometer
high-speed rail connection between Jiangsu province and Urumqi, in the
Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
Passengers can now cover the 1,700-kilometer Beijing-Harbin journey in just five hours
at a dizzying average speed of 340 km per hour!
By late-2020, China National Railways was running more than 9,600 high-speed trains
per day, including the world's only high-speed overnight sleeper services on selected
longer-distance routes.
On some routes, more than 80 percent of the track is raised above the ground, soaring
above densely packed cities and valuable agricultural land on endless concrete
viaducts.
Engineers constructed more than 100 tunnels, each not less than 10
kilometers, in addition to spectacular long-span bridges thrown over natural obstacles
such as the Yangtze River.
The trains themselves are full of modern tech and other features.
For example, the driverless bullet trains connecting Beijing
and Zhangjiakou in northern Hebei province are capable of hitting speeds up to 350 km
per hour, making them the world's fastest autonomous trains.
The new route, opened in December 2019 as part of preparations for the Beijing 2022
Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, has reduced travel time for the 174-kilometer
journey from three hours to less than 60 minutes!
The track took only four years to build and includes the world's deepest high-speed
railway station, situated 102 meters or 335 feet underground!
The coaches come with extra storage space for winter sports equipment.
Passengers also get 5G touchscreen control panels, intelligent
lighting, thousands of safety sensors, and removable seats for passengers in wheelchairs.
Facial-recognition technology and robots assist travelers with navigation, luggage,
and check-in at the stations.
Enormous new stations serving the major cities on the high-speed network resemble
airport terminals, with acres of spotless polished marble and glass, enormous
information screens, and lounges where passengers wait until their train is called.
No loitering on cold and windy platforms here!
But China wants its train to go even faster, as it is investing billions of dollars in
Maglev trains, which will enable speed up to 620
km per hour!
That rapid growth has not been without its problems though; while centralized state
funding, planning, and approval allows China to avoid the endless legal wrangles that
have bedeviled projects in Europe and the United States for decades, the flip side is
that new lines pay little heed to existing communities along their route.
There have also been some tragedies as China's high-speed trains grew.
For example, there was the tragic Wenzhou collision in
July 2011, when two trains collided on a viaduct and derailed.
It sent four coaches flying off-track, to crash on the floor below.
It killed 40 passengers and injured almost 200
more!
To restore public confidence in the trains, the authorities implemented a blanket
speed reduction and suspended construction work on new lines pending an
official investigation.
However, no major incidents have been reported in the decade
since and passenger numbers have risen exponentially as the network has expanded.
However, China has made traveling on bullet trains as cheap as possible so that many
people can use them.
Fares start from as little as 13 dollars.
Interestingly, China is already expanding its rail into other countries.
There is the Laos- China Railway project, at the cost of 5.3
billion dollars.
This is not actually a high-speed railway, but it is connected to China’s
own network and improves the link between Southern China and the capital of Laos, Vientiane.
There is also a railway to Bangkok in Thailand and Singapore.
China’s railway company is also shipping railway vehicles and technologies to the rest
of the world, and the market is expected to grow by billions of dollars each year.
Let’s hear what you think of China’s high-speed trains in the comment section below