The Largest Infrastructure Project in History: Chinese High-Speed Rail to Europe
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
It's a perspective that no airplane ride will ever give you.
Chronicled in his books THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR and GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway
It essentially connects Vladivostok with Europe, going through countries like North Korea and China, making the railway even larger than the railway proposed in this article.
Your geography and politics are slightly incorrect :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Trans-Siberian_railway...
EDIT - wikipedia says it better than I:
The Trans-Siberian Railway is often associated with the main transcontinental Russian train that connects hundreds of large and small cities of the European and Asian parts of Russia. At 9,259 kilometres (5,753 miles),[1] spanning a record 7 time zones and taking eight days to complete the journey, it is the third-longest single continuous service in the world, after the Moscow–Pyongyang (10,267 km, 6,380 mi)[2] and the Kiev–Vladivostok (11,085 km, 6,888 mi)[3] services, both of which also follow the Trans-Siberian for much of their routes. The route was opened by Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovitch of Russia after his eastern journey ended.
http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/
Someone actually did the Moscow-Pyongyang trip. I have no idea how they bought the tickets though.
But it seems like it is no substitute for the real thing.
An item for the 'bucket list'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlantic...
Cost: $88 billion to $175 billion
Seriously, what is going on? Why is our country like this?? When is it going to change? Is it going to change?
Should I just move to china? Seriously. I've considered it. Or India. Or even south america. I continue to ask myself, why do I choose to live in the U.S.? Because I was born here? Is that a good enough reason?
A transatlantic tunnel would be 3500 miles, that's 350 times longer. Its completely unknown technology - no-one has ever submerged a vacuum tunnel, and no-one has build a mag-lev that actually goes 4000mph. And they're telling us it can be done for $50 mio/mile, less than a tenth of a regular bridge? I know it doesn't scale linearly, but I'd expect such a tunnel to be more, not less, expensive pr. mile. At the same mile-cost as a bridge, it'd cost $1942 bln.
I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation when this came out a while ago, that if all plane passengers from London to New York (can't remember the number now) were to switch to such a train, tickets would have to cost an average $10.000, one way, to cover 5% maintenance, interest and ROI.
Politically, it's basically impossible.
This project and this vision is another nail in the U.S. hegemony coffin.
17 nations with wildly different goals are unlikely to keep saying yes.
Do you think Romania would say no? Of course not. Saying yes opens up Romania to the world.
Similarly, this rail line opens up europe and asia to a market that will dwarf the west. If they don't say yes, they will be excluded from perhaps the most powerful coalition of countries ever before assembled.
It is definitely not in any country's best interest to say no to this project. Why would they say no?
It's not like politics or even economics are ruled by rational decision making, you know.
But in this case, their own people are going to be hurt by saying no. The powerful, rich, and elite as well as the common person. Imagine a country shutting down its airports.
Are there risks? Yes. People could die. Trains can crash. Terrorists can kill. But I prefer to make decisions for the upside. There's a lot of upside here. Overall, I think there is more upside than downside. Rails can be repaired if they are blown up. People can't undie, but we can't stop terrorism. We can't stop violence.
And yes, I agree. The U.S. does things that aren't in its best interests all the time. I haven't found much rationality in U.S. politics for over a decade now. Really kind of sad about it.
We can't even get high speed wireless here. I think we are bumping up against the limits of capitalism. Capitalism doesn't think long term. Loans must be repaid. Revenue must be made. But governments don't have time limits. China gets that. China builds huge dams and rail lines and roads up Mt. Everest.
The U.S. funds wars. Something has to change. Something has to change fast or we are going to be displaced and our quality of life is going to continue to deteriorate.
That said, if it gets built, I'll be rushing to ride it.
Regarding the politics, you know Russia, Iran, and China are friends right? Turkey needs to do more for their place in the EU. Germany wants a bigger market for its products. Poland can be bought and China will pay more to build the rail than the U.S. will pay to prevent it. Kazakhstan is still trying to shake the Borat image. They are poor and they want to increase their wealth. This is their ticket!
Besides, poland is in the north and they only need one way in so resistance is reduced through parallel resistors.
The U.S. can't even build a fence to keep out immigrants -- not that I think they should.
I wish there was something in the U.S. that was at all exciting. What are we doing?? We're blowing all our cash on guns and we are running out of butter!
High speed commuter rail, sure. Connecting Portland to Seattle? Absolutely.
But we have the most sophisticated flight network in the world. Why is that such a bad thing?
Sure, a good commuter rail system is good, but that wouldn't be high-speed rail.
Everything is short term, and a failure if not successful within a very tightly compressed timeframe.
There is no vision or ambition in the U.S. any more when it comes to infrastructural projects like this.
None of those projects could be done today, they require planning horizons of ten years or longer and even if the vision were there would become mired in petty politics and shortsighted penny-wise pound-foolishness.
Done right infrastructure projects create far more economic value than they cost over their lifetime.
Can you give specific evidence of this?
On the one hand there is evidence of bridge failures, for example. But that's probably a result of poor initial design (i.e., many years ago) or incorrect monitoring and testing, rather than a failure to think long term.
On the other hand, I offer the insanely large (and continually growing) investment in education. That's a long-term view, although a poorly formed one.
And for a long time American corporations and people really didn't think in the longterm. Now that we've found out what the real cost of short term gains are there has been a resurgence in thinking local. For example, the locavore movement, popularity of hybrid and electric vehicles, and the healthcare debate can all be considered long term strategies.
Can you provide specific examples where we know that short-term goals prevailed over those of the long term? In particular, it should address the difference between making mistakes in expectations that resulted in poor long-term performance, as opposed to explicitly choosing to optimize for the short term, or explicitly choosing to ignore the long-term.
Tangentially, what is it about trains anyway? Seems to me they hit the natural sweet-spot of "comprehensible speed" or speed at a near-human scale: not so fast and distant as to be alien like jets, but fast enough to be interesting. Oh, and stress-free compared to driving.
Plus, they are more efficient. They are transportation of the future. The world is going to be going backwards in time as energy becomes more expensive. This means leaving planes and going to trains and wind powered ships. It's already happening.
Plus, it is a national recognition that long term thinking is beneficial. China in this case is a visionary example for the world. I hope the U.S. wakes up soon.
Is energy becoming more expensive? A quick search (ie http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1869.gif) shows no such long-term trend.
By my math, even at current consumption rates we have just about 30 years of oil left: oil reserves divided by daily consumption. That doesn't include the growth rate of consumption and China and India hardly use anything right now per capita compared to the west.
I think trains, due mainly to speed, have a sweet spot to fill, and a future without air travel is not in the cards. Also, as trains become more popular, they will eventually become subject to the same security hassles as air travel.
So I'm not directly contradicting you. Trains will always be more spacious and allow more freedom to move about and dine in comfort than planes. I think they have a definite role to fill (any trip between 100 miles and 600 miles in length assuming decent speeds of 150mph+). I'm just saying the future is going to be a heterogeneous mix of transportation options.
Of course, if someone builds a train that moves at jet speeds, all bets are off.
If trains were the same price and I could actually use them to get between places, I would never fly. When I was in SF, I couldn't even get from SF to L.A. without having to transfer via bus.
Not all trains. With Eurostar (Paris<->London) there's a security checkpoint with an x-ray and metal detector, along with passport control.
However, the eurostar is nicer compared to many airports. Airports are shopping centers, where they want people to stay and buy things. The longer you stay at airports the more you spend. That is an incentive to have you at airports longer. Whereas many train stations do not have that set-up (although that is changing!). The eurostar used to be easier, because the station at the london end did not have a long way to walk past lots of shops. Now, at the new station there are lots of shops to walk past before you can leave. Still quite nice though in comparison to flying out of gatwick on easy jet ;)
I love trains. Been on them from 30 hour trips across Australia, to the bullet trains in Japan, ones across Germany, France, the Netherlands, China and ones across the UK. Always wanted to do some long trips across china, russia and india... guess I better hurry up before those trains are replaced!
It will be great when the fast networks of europe are joined to the fast networks of asia.
There are very real political problems to this, and while some of them can be resolved easily, I'd like to remind people that the TGV rail system in France is frequently brought to a halt by protesting farmers who park a tractor on the track. And that's just one country (two if you ask the angry farmers - Paris and the 'real people').
I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria right now. There is a daily direct bus connection from here to Tehran. It does take 48 hours but it's safe, it's clean, and it gets me there.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, yes, there will be problems and setbacks, but more likely than not they will find a way eventually.
Can anyone say "IED derailment at 200kph+"?
This project will happen. It's inevitable. It's the only way people will be able to move between countries when planes are too expensive to fuel.
I am being a realist, there are terrorist attacks almost daily in some ME countries and Pakistan. A train packed with tourists and businesspeople is pretty much the same target value to a terrorist as a plane, except you can attack it from the outside much more easily. The prevalence of IEDs and people willing to use them, highly mobile suicide car bombs and the doctrine of certain radical Muslims which allows for moral permissibility of killing fellow Muslims who are "dealing with the enemy" (strains of Wahhabi and Qutbism thinking like Bin Laden's) would make such an attack inevitable.
This "negative" attitude of mine is part of the economic damage that is done to the moderate Muslims of these countries by the extremists. How many tourists have decided not to take a trip to many of these countries? How many businesses haven't been set up? How many skilled workers have fled? It's a massive economic damage these people are inflicting beyond the scope of their deplorable murders.
And a lot of the discourse in countries like Pakistan is not pure terrorism but actually the deeper struggles of any authoritarian regime.
Call me a dreamer but I really do hope and think this will happen.
To overcome fear by rational thought is going against nature, and difficult at best. When confronted with violence, it takes almost zen-like concentration to purge the associated fear.
Our susceptibility to fear closely parallels that of hunger, sex, or advertising. The mind is hard-wired to have specific reactions to certain stimuli, and power comes from the ability to impose those stimuli. Terrorism is just one example.
I agree that the solution is to place rational thought above implicit emotional responses. However, the past has taught us that the public's reaction is almost always hysteria rather than logical analysis.
Between the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the work of intelligence services, we've been successful in keeping jihadist terrorism out of the west for five years now. But the safety we have within our borders here doesn't extend to a 10.000 mile railroad passing through a dozen countries, several of which are anything but politically stable.
I mean, would you take a ride in the countryside of any ME country in a bus with "I'm a rich American/European infidel" painted on the side? Then why do the same in a train?
We've been to both countries loads of times from the UK and have always felt perfectly safe. I've felt safer walking round Cairo than some American cities.
My point is that if trouble arises in either of those places (which isn't unlikely at all, considering a time-span of several decades), a travel advisory is sent out, and tourism to that area ceases temporarily. See Bangkok today, for an example. If that happens to any country on the route, the entire route shuts down.
Nonetheless, China says that other countries approached it for help and that is how the idea got started. “It was not China that pushed the idea to start with,” said Wang. “It was the other countries that came to us, especially India. These countries cannot fully implement the construction of a high-speed rail network and they hoped to draw on our experience and technology.”
Surely trains only make sense when they get you from A to B faster than driving to airport A, flying to airport B and then driving to B. You could be delayed at the airports for a full day and still fly from London to Beijing faster than this train.
Trains are probably better for moving freight, but they don't have to be high speed. Unless JET-A fuel becomes so scarce that aviation is completely uneconomic (highly unlikely with current progress in biofuels IMHO), trains just don't make sense for distances over about 1000kms.
Bring in the security issues, where a large rock is just as dangerous as an IED and it's a non-starter.
The exceptions are for short distances and when I actually want to take in the sights that a train affords.
Why all the positivity? It's a great project, but it's also a project faced by immense obstacles. If China wants to do this, good on them, and I wish them all the best.
Most of the suggested route go through political volatile areas, such as Iran. Say, they develop the nuclear bomb and NATO decides to bomb and/or invade. Now it's a war-zone and every foreign service in the world advises against travelling there. The link is unusable for 5-10-15 years. Russia frequently has fall-outs with their neighbours to the extend where they shut off gas in the middle of the winter.
But the biggest issue isn't what we know now - it's what we don't know. Such a rail road has a lifespan of decades, if not more. The Train-Siberian railroad is 100 years on. The combined expected volatility over a 100 year period of all the areas the route extends through is extremely high.
You wouldn't travel from China to Europe by train even with this, of course. I wonder what would the Russian response be, as they are quite expected to maintain their strong influence in this region, and this isn't exactly going to support that.
[1] This is already being done, in a rather small scale.
What is an American to think of this? Am I suppose to like it because I'm an American or despise it because it is holding up a better life for humanity?
It is a smart move to receive payment in the form of natural resources as some of the countries involved in the network are economically poor but resource rich. It is likely the countries participating will end up paying a lot more in resources than they would have in cash.
It's my opinion that people are mistaken when viewing the proposal in terms of personal transport. It's not. It's a system designed to fuel China's growing demand for resources, which cannot be transported via air. In the other direction will come a high speed flow of manufactured goods.
Also, you can't just take the minimum wage from China and multiply with the number of workers, there are many costs added to having that many people in different countries. Food and housing in Germany, for example, are expensive.
In the meantime, read how GM paid to destroy our mass transit system so people would buy more cars.
Also, connecting 1.5 billion to 700 million is a lot more lucrative than connecting, what, 150 million to 50 million? Nevermind the fact that there are existing high-speed networks to connect with in Europe and China. What a fucking bummer it would be to take a 6 hour train trip from NY to LA then a 6 hour bus from LA to SF.
This is exactly the type of route that trains will not take from planes any time soon. The fastest train in the world is China's maglev that does almost 270mph.
But a trip from LA to SF, or St. Louis to Chicago, or NY to DC, or between any major city in Texas and any other one... that is the kind of route that rail would excel at, provided we had the motivation to build it.
All that said, I don't see the motivation to take a two day train trip from China to London when you could fly it in much less time. I understand the comfort factors and all, but when you are talking that length of time, I think the customer demand is going to be very limited (unless it's significantly cheaper than airfare).
Even so, I doubt this will happen in 10 years.
"...China’s new goal is to continue on with a HSR revolution internationally in order to create two-day HSR trip times between Beijing and London."