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World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens In China
An anonymous reader writes "Today China continued rolling out the future of high speed rail by officially unveiling the world's longest high-speed rail line — a 2,298-kilometer (1,428-mile) stretch of railway that connects Beijing in the north to Guangzhou in the south. The first trains on the new route hit 300 kph (186 mph), cutting travel time between the two cities by more than half."
...the United States has the longest Slow Speed rail lines of the world.
For reference, that's about half the width of the U.S., or about the length of Japan.
I guess China has cemented their hold on the card for The Longest Road now...
While I'm here, does anyone care to trade wood for sheep?
This new train has an 8 to 10 hour scheduled travel time and covers 2100 km.
That means it averages 210km/h including stops along the way (it's not direct).
Rod Taylor
There's already a high speed rail connection from Guangzhou to Shenzhen North. The high speed rail connection through to Hong Kong is scheduled for completion in 2014, and will shorten travel time for that last link from 2 hours to 38 minutes. (Except that there's a border control point between Shentzen and Hong Kong that takes longer than the travel time.)
Another step has been taken in tying China more closely together. That's part of the political motivation. Traditionally, China's provinces were not closely connected. Each province was expected to be self-sufficient in food and other essentials. That continued through the Mao era, and it's not completely gone. There are still some inter-provincial trade restrictions.
Of course, the South still speaks Cantonese, while the North speaks Mandarin. This despite half a century of effort by the central government. "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".
So should we get rid of the interstates as well?
What about airports? Should they all be closed for the same reason?
I propose HSR not for any romantic notions, but because I have ridden it in Europe. I have been on the damn things and seen how well they work.
How about you name a method of travel that meets those goals so we can compare it to HSR.
Because their high-speed trains had an accident not so long ago and the goverment tried to cover up.
sigh.
There are hundreds of thousands of miles of train miles covered each day in Europe at speeds like these. Oh, and they have a pretty good safety record. There has been only one fatal crash on High speed lines in Europe and that was in Germany and wasn't down to a track defect.
The completion of the high speed line from London to Paris (including 36km under the Channel) has captured the majority of the passenger traffic between the two capital cities. Two hours and a bit for City-Centre to City-Centre makes most airline travel simply untennable.
Once you travel by high speed train you will be hooked. It is a far better way to travel than by air especially in Cattle Class.
I'm going to Madagascar next April. The Flight to Tana leaves from Paris. I won't be flying to Paris, I'll be taking the train right to the Airport in Paris from London. The wonders of a semi integrated transport system. Something that the USA has never really enjoyed. It is far too 'socialist/commie' for most of the Americans I know. (Oh, I spent three years living in N.H and working in taxacheusetts).
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Yeah I donno about that. "My time" for the train is like 15 minutes to get aboard and literally 5 minutes to cross the street on the NYC side. "My time" for the airplane is a half hour out to the airport in the middle of nowhere and parking, two hours sitting around for security theater playtime, you can't do what you want on a plane so thats about two hours lost during flight time, and finally a nice $50 hour long cab ride on the NYC side, so that's like 5 hours of "my time" if flying.
As for the restaurant, the amtrak food was "nice" sure not a $200 steak house but no worse than a family restaurant, and the cabin was comfortable enough to sleep in. I had a little sleeper cabin with desk, one entire wall is a giant window, and all that.
Booze? Oh god yes. Some day you should take an observation car out west where the obs car has a bar in the middle of the top floor (the observation area). The west coast trains are double decker two floor and much nicer than the east coast single floor dumpy-trains. None the less booze is booze... Nicotine addicts would have serious issues with Amtrak, but the alkies will be just fine, well lubricated, whatever. Also if you have a cabin unless they're peeking in the windows you can drink or eat whatever you can haul aboard...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Enjoy your slide into obsolesce. If you remove all the emotionalism from those proposing pure capitalism, your are left holding a big, empty, "I don't want to spend any more" motto. It is religious fanaticism.
Countries thrive when they invest, undertake massive projects, improve themselves. They slide into nothingness when the accountants take over as their infrastructure falls apart and all the bright people find themselves working abroad.
The ultimate failure of religious fantatics like the parent is that they think the race ends. That once you won, that is it. The race never ends. And China right now is winning by default because everyone else has stopped. You can smirk about North-Korea's rocket attempts but at least they are trying. In the west, people worry about the costs to much to do ANYTHING anymore. Great nations were not build by accountants.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The interstate highway system is paid for by the federal government. $425 billion. Apparently the largest public works system since the pyramids. Why exactly Americans think of this as "a brilliant economic success" and state funded medicine as "socialist" the FSM only knows.
Well actually we do know. Because that's how lobbyists chose to frame them.
The situation in America is a little bit different. In Europe you typically want to go to the center of a city. In Paris once you are in Gare du Nord, you are quickly anywhere you want provided you are not already where you want to go. And it is pretty much like that for every major city. Also, despite having a good HSR trian system, all trip that do not go toward or away from paris are a nightmare (try a Lyon-Bordeaux or Lyon-Strasbourg for instance).
In the US, you typically do not care about being downtown. I have been living in Columbus, OH (ok not the biggest city) for 4 years and I only went downtown 5 times (once to visit downtown, once to go to a museum, once to drop somebody at a justice court, once to go to social security administration and once for july 4th celebration). There is no point going downtown in the US for most city I believe. And since the cities are so spread out, you'll have to rent a car to go anywhere. So you'll end up needing to drive to and from the train station. So you don't save the overhead of going to/from the airport. That makes the train much less interesting. It would pretty much be a slower plane. And it will not be cheap. Actually if you aim at cheap, you have a bus system that connects major cities. It is much slower than a high speed train. But it is also much cheaper.
So a train would end up being a compromise between the slow/cheap bus and the fast/expensive plane. It is not clear there is a real market.
The interstate highway system is paid for by the federal government. $425 billion. Apparently the largest public works system since the pyramids. Why exactly Americans think of this as "a brilliant economic success" and state funded medicine as "socialist" the FSM only knows.
Well actually we do know. Because that's how lobbyists chose to frame them.
I bet some of the same people going out and making a stink about the evils of the health care reform bill or teachers unions still call up to complain when there is a pothole on their street.
Everything is wasteful, unless it's for you.
The GP insists, first and foremost, that it not be subsidized by Government money (tax payers).
That immediately sets an impossibly high barrier. One that can't be met by any transportation system, water system, sewer system, or communication system.
Ignorance of the proper place for government expenditures is an unfortunate trait of ultra-conservative types. When any government involvement with societal life other than national defense is arbitrarily off the table, you have an impossible situation and a recipe for an agrarian society.
Roads, and railroads, necessarily require government money and government powers. If one stubborn farmer can stand in the way of a road or railroad (as would be the case in a purely private development) it would be legally impossible to build anything, not just cost prohibitive.
I suspect the GP never thinks about that while driving to work on that government road, or flushing his toilet to that government sewer while surfing the web on that government bandwidth.
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You could have hit the airport and been there in far less time. Leaving you time to eat at a nice restaurant and sleep in a hotel.
Do they even have booze on Amtrack?
Yes they do, and they also have a pretty good restaurant, and the hotel rooms, while small, are quite nice.
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For the initial units, yes. The railway and cars were then duplicated, including the processes and tools needed. At least that's what they did on the Shanghai-Nanjing leg (which I've ridden way too many times).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This new train has an 8 to 10 hour scheduled travel time and covers 2100 km.
That means it averages 210km/h including stops along the way (it's not direct).
If there are any stops along the way you will need much greater speeds than 210km/h.
I suggest the route is undoable in 10 hours if there is even a few stops unless the train spends a great deal of time at 300km/h.
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Hmm where have I heard this somewhere before, oh yeah a bit further down on the page where Lockheed was crying that SpaceX couldn't possibly be doing anything this much cheaper and better than them without compromising safety. Sure, if you go look at the crap they deliver to Wal-Mart your idea of Chinese quality might be low but they also do rocket science putting men in space and probes orbiting the moon and I'm pretty sure they do brain surgery too. That they often ignore emissions is not the same as being ignorant of them, unless it's say the Olympics in Beijing where they make a huge temporary clean-up effort. They might be more willing to trample the individual's rights than in other countries but the progress they make is very much real. Real income has more than tripled for over a billion people in the last decade:
GDP per capita measured in purchasing power terms more than tripled from $2,800 in 2002 to a forecast $9,100 in 2012 according to the International Monetary Fund.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They artificially manipulate their currency and sell goods at below market value which hinders the world's economy. I wonde how safe this train really is!
Manipulating currency is not the problem, it is when USA and other countries sold to China (it was not stolen) the industrial capability to build things. See "Winner Take All" by Richard Elkus http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Competitiveness-Nations/dp/B002KAOSPG
Anyway, argue what everyone is doing on this forum, China is building HSR instead PPT like rest of us.
mfwright@batnet.com
I wonder why we don't make these kinds of railway advances in the US
Really? You actually wonder about this?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/california-high-speed-rail-lawsuit_n_2150455.html
Since this should be self evident, I'll keep the explanation simple.
China is run by authoritarians that are hell bent on prosperity. They do not indulge: environmentalists, humans rights, property rights or special interests that aren't immediately aligned with said goal. The rail line goes here and you step aside quietly or spend years of your life making Walmart SKUs in a labor camp.
The US is run by statists and the comfortable electorate they've purchased with bennies. Prosperity is something we have far too much of so we spend our time squabbling in court, creating whole new forms of legal jeapody and liability as we go. This precludes large scale, capital intensive ventures such as continental scale rail systems. The lead times to get through the legislatures, courts, etc. is just too damn long. Capital won't tolerate this and seeks better venues, most of which are in Asia.
Enjoy your decline.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The Acela cost ~$2B and generates $500M/year in revenue. Its been running since 1999 and is successful because it has downtown terminals in Boston, New York and Washington. Also because it runs on existing right-of-way with some track upgrades. Business class New York to Boston is $107 and takes 4 hours which is about the same time as air travel + 2 airport shuttles + groping. So if you choose the right location, it works. However, nothing I've seen about the California plan suggests they are choosing the right location.
If it is anything like the Japanese HSR system these trains are in station for less than 2 minutes, usually around 90 seconds. There isn't a baggage car, no baggage offloading. You keep your bags with you at all times and when you get near your stop they announce it and you stand up and head to the doors. When the train stops you just get out (the platforms are level with the doors, so no hopping down awkwardness, its very quick. Then the train is off again. Since these are all EMU train sets that means they do not have a single engine, but powered bogies along the entire train. They can accelerate and decelerate very quickly.
I think I read 35 stops on the route, if a train stops at every stop then that is roughly 70 minutes in station at 2 minutes a stop. So out of the 8 hour trip, thats 6 hours and 50 minutes you are moving, which means that the trains are going somewhere over 300km/h (336km/h to be exact). I doubt this is the actual speed, I am guess that the 8 hour trip is for express trains, which will skip some of the stops on the way, only stopping at major stations, while other trains will stop at all or more stations (this is how it works in Japan). That'd put the speed at around 280-300km/h which is about what Japanese systems run at.
It is a success, because it works, and tons of goods and millions of people use it everyday.
The same argument can be used in Europe and Asia. You never refuted the grandparent's claim which is that the interstate highway was funded by government money, not by user money which you used against HSR.
HSR, will be not be, because it is simply too limited.
Europe and most of Asia would disagree.
I can take my car to from Sacramento to LA in about 6 hours, at a cost of (Gas Guzzler) less than $150 in petrol, taking my family (four additional people) as a bonus.
Yet in your entire analysis, you only account for the cost of gasoline. You didn't account for the cost of the roads you would use (they are not free and cost money to maintain or in your words LOSE money). You didn't account for the cost of the vehicle depreciation, license, registration, and maintenance. You also can't sleep and drive at the same time. You're not supposed to eat and drive at the same time. And you're definitely not supposed to drink and drive at the same time.
Meanwhile an elementary school child in Japan can travel at will as long as he has enough money to pay for the fare. The traveling business man can still drag himself onto the train despite having a bit too much to drink. Most of all, each household is perfectly happy with one car, while here in California each adult or older teenager needs their own vehicle.
AND once I get there, I would still need to rent a car.
HSR itself isn't enough, I'll give you that. Intra-city rail and adequate public transit would be necessary. We would also need to improve public transit in major metro areas. LA is already on its way with Measure R.
And further trips, I would simply just take a plane.
So you admit that cars aren't a solution, yet planes aren't a solution either. By that I would argue that the more modes of passenger transportation we have, the better off we are. In Japan the airlines compete with HSR. This directly benefits the traveler--because of the additional competition, fares become cheaper.
HSR is romantic notion for idiots. IT never pans out like the proponents claim.
In Japan, the rail companies are private entities just like airplanes and car manufacturers. They turn a profit. Why? I'll give you a few reasons:
Now in Japan people want to live near a train station because it means convenience. Property prices generally increase the closer they are to a train station--and decrease as you get further from a train station. And people are free to own cars, and drive as much as they would like, yet people choose the trains? Keep in mind that Japan especially during t
No, because state funded medicine means I have to pay for someone else's bad lifestyle choices, such as not exercising and eating crap.
You have to do so with private insurance as well. And? The difference being that single-payer systems are vastly less expensive.
Meanwhile in China and a lot of other places that doesn't apply, just as rail used to be competitive in the USA before rail company owners showed how much money they could squeeze out of the taxpayer after buying a few Senators.
There are two kinds of authoritarians. Stupid ones who get the priorities comprehensively fucked up and build a choking mountain of red tape (U.S.), and those who have actual working critical faculties and rational priorities (China).
Sure, the details of China's priorities are arguable, and adjustments are made over time. But one thing they are not is stupid and irrational. In the U.S. the priorities are blatantly stupid, utterly irrational, and no one is allowed to argue them.
This is a completely separate discussion from human rights.