https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/04/23/chinas-l...

The probably is that a journalist that doesn't understand how China works stumbled onto a construction zone and didn't understand what they saw. Chinese build housing for half a million people at once fairly regularly. I've gone past multiple constructions sites like this.

They also build whole cities (which the ghost cities story was about) and they fill up. A bunch of people pre-buy and once they get a minimum buy-in they start construction. Once the city is mostly finished it still takes a while for everything else to be done inside BUT in China, they don't fence of construction sites at this stage while in developed countries they do. You can just walk in and look around. There are no squatters laws so people cannot just take your property and there are fewer liability issues so they don't really care.

(This is called reductio ad absurdum. The cause of the ghost cities, and these empty trains, are both more complex and more interesting from it. In the case of Ottawa, they were having issues getting the trains running properly on it, whether due to issues with the rails or the electrical lines or the railcars. It should be running publicly in a few weeks)