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China To Connect Its High-Speed Rail To Europe
MikeChino sends in this excerpt from Inhabitat: "China already has the most advanced and extensive high-speed rail lines in the world, and soon that network will be connected all the way to Europe and the UK. With initial negotiations and surveys already complete, China is now making plans to connect its HSR line through 17 other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe in order to connect to the existing infrastructure in the EU. Additional rail lines will also be built into South East Asia as well as Russia, in what will likely become the largest infrastructure project in history." They hope to get it done within 10 years, with China providing the financing in exchange for raw materials, in some cases.
Through some of the most politically unstable regions of the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Even if it's high speed, I don't think that anyone will want to take the train from China to Europe. Maybe it's a bit of a vanity project. But you have to admit, it's pretty damn cool. I think it would make more sense if the rail connection were not high speed, since most of what's transported will be freight, and moving freight at 350k/h is a big waste of energy. But whatever, it's freaking cool!
I wonder how the track width across different countries is going to work. If I remember correctly, that was a similar problem when connecting the UK to Europe. On the other hand, if this becomes cheap enough for car travel (which it probably already is), Eurasia might become a unified economic powerhouse over the next half century while the US will become a third world country (unless the US decides to invest in itself).
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So China is building infrastructure that will let them transport goods throughout Asia and Europe very quickly and cheaply. Meanwhile, here in the US, people are fighting against the idea of building highspeed rail even between a handful of cities that are right next to each other.
If we don't turn it around, our economy is going down the tubes.
I suppose it would result in an endless Third World zerg rush on Europe. I'm sure that'll go down well.
Remember that highway networks were traditionally built to move armies around quickly.
This would be big, but in practice how efficiently can it run with stops in every country desired by the host country?. I think they could build this, and potentially there are a lot of benefits from doing so. Certainly the Chinese have done well with rail in China by many measures. Fundamentally, this story is more about navigating bureaucracy (a triumph of it's own right) than any particular technical challenge.
I think the bigger news would be if they started work on a railway from China to the US. That would only need to pass through Russia on the way to the US (with Canada if they want direct to the lower 48). The number of negotiations would be much lower, and the ability to safely send cargo through a rail tunnel under the sea would be worth untold billions. Tunneling under the Bering Straight is technically feasible, just look at the Chunnel and other such projects. It's slashdot, give us technical challenges, not bureaucratic ones!
I think it's more along the lines of "All aboard the Occident Express! Visit the exotic lands of the Far West! See quaint native peoples living their traditional lifestyles for your amusement and tourist yuan!"
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Sir (or Madam ?), it is virtually impossible to invade another country by train, a train being one of the most easily stoppable vehicles in the world. Captain J.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Hope the passengers don't mind getting blowed up by terrorists.
Death by snu-snu? I wouldn't mind being "blowed" by an attractive terrorist.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't forget that most of the countries they have to go through are a bit more lax with environmental regulations and building codes than Western Europe (or the US, for that matter). I'm not saying this to suggest that China's going to go cheap on this; it's far too strategically important for them to cut corners. However, when you're not having to spend a decade on environmental impact studies and archaeological surveys before you lay a single track-equivalent, you can get quite a bit done rather quickly.
It's the same reason FDR could use the WPA to build bridges immediately, while Obama can't.
Ignoring for the moment the differences in depth and geological stability between the Channel and the Straights.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
...and will move more people than many continent spanning lines do. Sometimes it's not the size but what you do with it that counts!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
"China already has the most advanced and extensive high-speed rail lines in the world."
No, it doesn't.
You can't run high-speed rail and freight on the same tracks. It's because of the weight of freight cars. They can physically bend the rail enough for you to see it happening. So, the track doesn't stay in sufficient calibration to use for high-speed rail. Indeed, the first thing you do, if you want high-speed rail, is build an exclusive track line.
To be used for freight a system like this would need four tracks at a minimum. Two for passenger and two for freight.
Bruce Perens.
There have been a number of proposals for doing telecom cables along rail lines across Asia, providing shorter alternatives to the undersea cables. They often get into trouble with either financing or right-of-way across South-West Asia, but if they're building a new railroad, it's easy to add conduits full of fiber at the same time. Earthquakes, landslides, and train wrecks do create risks, but shorter distance really helps latency, and it's usually a lot easier to patch fiber around a section of railroad track than undersea.
On the other hand, you do need signs saying "Hey, Bubba, Don't Dig Here" in many more languages....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm a French guy living in China. Reading that China has the "most advanced [...] high-speed rail lines in the world" makes me jump on my chair. The HSR trains are rarely going to the announced 240 km/h top speed, most of the time, they aren't even reaching 200. China is just building it's first Shanghai to Beijing in 3:30 thanks to the French technology (to be ready later this year). It still takes 40 hours to travel from Shanghai to Wulumuqi. Exactly where is the advance here? The most advanced country in the world for train is France, with over 6 lines at 320+ km/h all over the (small) country and extending to the rest of Europe (Spain, London, Amsterdam)!
China has the largest standing army in the world, using only 0.53 percent of its population in all of its armed forces. Also, I suspect the Chinese would use their forces more ruthlessly than the US. Even if someone is stupid enough to screw with China, the Chinese response should prevent any repetition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_total_troops
I really doubt that freight train cars would physically bend the tracks, and if they did, it would hardly be the reason why they don't run freight on high speed rail. Wikipedia states this:
Experience has shown however, that trains of significantly different speeds cause massive decreases of line capacity. As a result, mixed-traffic lines are usually reserved for high-speed passenger trains during the daytime, while freight trains go at night. In some cases, nighttime high-speed trains are even diverted to lower speed lines in favor of freight traffic.
In conclusion: it is the speed differences, not some kind of "track bending" that is the major reason they don't mix high speed train and freight trains.
As usual Slashdot is full of self proclaimed experts that exceeds at making up cool "facts" so they can me moderated +5 informative.
I disagree. Centralized planning really does lend itself to grand, long-term ambitions; the problem is, all too often the plans are misguided! Just as in our economy, where most new businesses fail after a short while, except without the economic mechanism to weed them out.
Look at Stalin's railway plans for Northern Siberia. Of course, the analogy with China's new plan fails unless you can equate Europe with Northern Siberia, but still there's no guarantee China's new East-to-West trade route will be economically viable given the alternatives already in place.
The US isn't all that bad.
These Asian folks think long term, unlike short-sighted Western politicians.
Rubbish. China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, and yet it's just now climbing out of a third world status that it's been in for centuries. They're human, fallible as anyone else. They have no more wisdom, insight, or patience than any of their competitors. Looking at their industrial pollution situation, and the race to catch up to the West, they may well have less. They slaughtered and starved hundreds of thousands of their own people... perhaps millions, considering their great famines... in their "Great Leap Forward". The Chinese are not any more wise or farsighted than anyone else. What they are, right now, is driven.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yes, because Saudi Arabia is an Oasis of secular humanism now. The very model of a modern enlightenment.
Saudi Arabia has lots of money, but it's not distributed very broadly or fairly. Only a few Saudis are actually wealthy.
So they don't really have either prosperity or equality or enlightenment in that part of the world.
Even though it's phrased trollishly, you've summed up some differences pretty well. In practice, people drive a heck of a lot in Europe too but the roads here are perhaps harder work to do long distances on. But the thing about planes being the fastest way to get around long distance points to another difference. In Europe in particular countries are closer together, as is the perception of a "long" trip. The time cost of travel to airport, waiting around for the plane, collecting bags at the other end, etc starts to dominate the journey pretty quickly and even for international trips it can quickly get to be more hassle than just hopping on a train. Plane travel between European countries is super cheap, though, so it's still often worth doing.
China is also extending the rail networks in Tibet, and possibly the most serious threat to China's internal stability came from the riots in Xinjiang province last year. Tensions in both Tibet and Xinjiang are still simmering, largely because the non-Han residents feel left out of the equation every time jobs and wealth opportunities appear in their areas.
There is also a credible threat (well, depending on who you choose to get your news from, but hey)from the resident Chinese Muslim population, many of whom live in Xinjiang province, and who identify more with Pakistan, Khazakhstan and Turkmenistan than they do with the Middle Kingdom.
I'm wondering if the routing of the railway line has something to do with this, to give idle hands some work and some access to cash in these areas, and to extend influence into neighbouring countries so that if something happens in the future, China has some real leveraging tools to get things going in the direction that they like. Hell, it could even be used as a reason for a pre-emptive invasion: " Well , we had to go in, it was clear for all to see that country X was not able to safeguard a vital international asset that all of Asia and Europe uses. But no need to thank us for the invasion, we were only doing what any country would have done."
china makes shit that everyone else in the world buys by the ton, likely because the rest of the world is incapable of making the same shit themselves for similar cost, and china would like to see it shipped to end customers faster.
The rest of the world is "incapable of making the same shit for similar cost" because the rest of the world has gotten accustomed to cushy social and medical services, as well to a fairly clean environment. So, instead of living with less security and destroying their own environments, Europe and America have the work done in China. I have no idea whether this is good or bad in the long run (and neither does anybody else). But it's happening because both Western and Chinese politicians want it to happen. The US and Europe could stop this in an instant if they wanted to, no matter what China says or wants.
politician is a politician, doesn't matter where, when, or under what circumstances, they all act the same.
How is it then, that Asia and Europe have high-speed rail all over the place, France has the best health care in the world, and my city (Vancouver) is very liveable? Some politicians seem able to "get things done," others bicker over Janet Jackson's nipple...
China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, and yet it's just now climbing out of a third world status that it's been in for centuries.
China likes to present and view itself that way but that's a fiction, starting with the notion that something like a continuous Chinese civilization has even existed over the past two millennia. Generally, the societies and civilizations that have existed in the area of modern China have been significantly behind Europe and far behind the Middle Eastern civilizations on major developments (bronze, iron, writing, etc.), and in many ways even behind the Maya. For example, the Middle East had writing 2000 years before China had even a rudimentary writing system. The oldest writing systems still in use today are Greek and Latin, predating (in the case of Greek) the development of the current Chinese writing system by more than 1500 years. Entire civilizations came, flourished for millennia, and perished in the Mediterranean before China even appeared on the scene.
It's probably best to view Chinese civilization as analogous to Northern Europe, in both age and history, really taking off only during the first millennium. And it remains to be seen how much of Chinese civilization developed independently and how much was derivative from the Middle East.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_by_country
Country Total network length (km) and Average speed of fastest scheduled train
China 6552 km and 313 km/h ;)
Japan 2459 km and 256 km/h
i wish i could stop
"Trains are safer than ships on the open ocean."
Sorry, had to do it...all trains are unsafe on the open ocean while ships are at least built for it.
capitalism requires that there be supply and demand. The value of sometthing is related to both. If the supply exceeds the demand, the price falls to zero. This means that for capitalism to function, the demand *must* exceed the supply.
This means you must never build enough houses. You must never grow enough food. You must never make enough clothes, cars, whatever(wealth). This also means there *must* always be poor there *must* always be starving *must* always be unemployment to ensure demand.
We have just seen an example of the supply exceeding demand. It is called a crash. The supply of houses exceeded the demand for them and now, they're literally knocking them down in order to reduce the supply and increase the value of the ones remaining. It's an insane situation.
This is something Silvio Gesell pointed out around 100 years ago. In order to change this, the nature of money itself must be changed.
Deleted
At approximately 250-500 miles, city-centre to city-centre train travel beats out both car and plane in terms of convenience. And that's not even with high speed rail, just regular intercity services.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
Which raw resources? We don't have any. Europe has been importing all its stuff for decades.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Nope. Bruce Perens is right.
You can't mix really high-speed (i.e. 500km/h) and freight trains. In your article 'high-speed' means "sub 200km/h".
Russia got the same exact problem on Moscow-Saint-Petersburg line, for example.
1) high speed rail: lack of demand in the US
2) French health care: heh. go try it. and don't forget the accompanying taxes.
3) Vancouver: I found Chicago pretty damn liveable too, back when I lievd in the US
4) JJ's nipple: meh. muslim head scarf bans in france. minaret bans in Switzerland. so on and so forth.
My brother works in Indian Railways as a Permanent Way Engineer. He says that his job of track(railroad) maintenance becomes really tough if goods (freight) trains share the same line along with passenger trains. Goods train wagons when loaded are a lot more heavier than passenger wagons causing frequent wear and tear of tracks. They are planning to separate freight lines from passenger lines in the coming years, for faster transit as well as easier maintenance.
French health care: heh. go try it. and don't forget the accompanying taxes.
Huh? The WHO ranks French healthcare as the best in the world. The US spends almost twice per capita of public funds on health care than France does.
cite:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/08/11/frances_model_healthcare_system/
Plus, the arguement is specious anyway - The USA will have huge taxes, the nation-state has just decided to download those taxes onto your children, grand-children and great grandchildren. In the USA, the next generations are expected to fund today's spending...