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China Debuts the World's Fastest Train
An anonymous reader writes "China unveiled their new high speed train that clocks in at an average of 217 mph. China's new rail service travels through 20 cities along its route, connecting central China and less developed regions to the larger and more industrial Pearl River Delhi. Seimens, Bombardier and Alstom worked together to design and build this feat of modern transportation, which topped out at a whopping 245mph (394km/h) during trial runs earlier in December."
Delhi is in India.
Siemens, not Seimens...
Yes, but the maximum speed is largely irrelevant. What matters to the travelling public is the average speed -- and this train is faster than the TGV in that regard.
Here's a better version of the story. This is a big deal. They're running 56 trains a day on that route. They're also the longest high speed trains running. So this is a high-volume people mover. Plans call for another 11,000 Km of high speed rail by 2012. That's only two years away.
Some of this is a consequence of the financial troubles and low interest rates in the US. The government of China had been putting excess cash into U.S. Treasury bills, but about a year ago they stopped buying more US debt and started spending on infrastructure and resources. China has been buying up mines and farms around the world to secure supplies of raw materials and food, while beefing up their infrastructure at home.
Yes, it's not SF to LA via Sacramento. It's two branches from Fresno to SF and Sacramento. You can see the proposed map here.
Amtrak has the problem that it leases the use of many of the rails it uses. As a result, passenger trains have to yield to the trains of the owners of the rail - usually slow, long freight trains. Even worse, the freight trains aren't a fixed schedule, so Amtrak can't schedule around the delays.
One fix would be to install new (standard speed0 rails alongside the existing ones. It would be fairly cheap (as compared to high speed rail) and would allow Amtrak to travel at high speeds for more of their routes.
Of course, even better would be a nationwide network of high speed rail, but I don't believe that there's enough pressure from airline-fed-up consumers and environmentalists yet to encourage the politicians to do anything.
Uh, 90%+ of their population are dirt farmers. Have you ever been to China? In a vast majority of the country it's literally like stepping back in time to the dark ages.
Or they use this amazing concept known as express and local trains. The express train stops in only a few places which you use the much slower local train to get to.
The problem with Kelo was that private property was taken for the benefit of developers. The decision flew in the face of the takings clause of the 5th amendment.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Someone in my family works for Siemens as a senior member of the China High-Speed Rail project (not to be confused with the China Maglev project, for which Siemens is also a partner). We've talked about it quite often - and fairly extensively yesterday. Here are a few details:
The technologies of all four major high-speed rail system in the world - Germany's ICE, Japan's Sinkansen, France's TGV and Canada's Bombardier (in order of overall technological advancement) - have come together in China, though rather reluctantly. When the Chinese started the project years ago, they did something very clever: Instead of picking one of the four systems (which is what people normally do), they gave all four a pilot contract each. The one showing the best result in its pilot would then be chosen as the main partner, they said, making all four competing like crazy - routinely investing more resources than they've originally planed. The Chinese are not concerned about significant waste due to incompatibility between the pilot products, since all four are building to the specs written by the Chinese.
Now, years later, the Canadians and the French are practically washed out, even though some of their technologies have contributed to the new Chinese system. The Germans and the Japanese remain - as initially expected - the main competitors - or, reluctant partners for the Chinese. The vast majority of heavy lifting on the technological front is done by the Germans (which was also expected, since even the Japanese system was originally based on German designs), but the Japanese have the advantage that their pilot has started earlier (the Chinese intentionally delayed the German pilot in order to ransom a below-value price).
The record speed, for example, was achieved using two joined trains - of four sections each - built by Siemens in Germany and put together in China. Those are the only two German trains current available for this route. All the other trains are Japanese, and they're what people see on most new footages. But the top speed the Japanese trains (on the same route) can reach are significantly lower - about 350 km/h, or >10% less than the German record. Plus, while the German rains got to 395 km/h in standard configuration - with two tracking (active) and two tracked (passive) sections in each train - the Japanese had to cheat - using three tracking and only one tracked section in each train - in order to reach their 350 km/h.
As someone has mentioned above, there exist a TGV speed record that's much higher still, but that's a record nobody in the industry takes seriously, because it was achieved with a totally crazy, not nearly practical configuration of train sections. It's a fake number, period.
The bottom line is, for the original cost of one project, China has managed to get more than twice the amount worth of know-how (all legally via proper technology transfer contracts), and is now itself among the leading players of the industry. For the upcoming US high-speed rail system, the Chinese has offered a bid with a price tag 1/3 lower than anybody else...