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.”
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.
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.