Trains reach record speed in Beijing-Zhangjiakou test run
chinadaily.com.cn
chinadaily.com.cn
After departure it doesn't take more than a handful minutes before the train reaches its desired speed of just over 300km/h and it remains consistent at this speed for the entire journey unless it has to stop at a station.
I wish Europe was so well connected via such an efficient and affordable train system. I think then we could easily raise the tax on airplanes to ridiculous premiums and happily expect people to entirely ditch short distance flights.
China is doing amazing things and they get way too little credit for all the innovative things they do. Unfortunately we only get to read the negatives, but I went back to China again and I really love how people live there in increasingly better conditions and not only outpacing other countries economically, but also making huge efforts in creating a fair, enjoyable and sociable environment for everyone.
Say what you want, but you'll never understand until you've been there yourself and experienced China first hand yourself. It's nothing what the media makes us believe!
Right now, I need a ticket for Germany, France and Spain to get to Barcelona. If any of the trains runs late and I miss a train, I'd have to buy a new ticket for the connecting train.
So a single booking agency with guaranteed connecting trains would be great.
http://www.railteam.eu/en/for-your-journey/network-map/
Unfortunately the network seems to be mostly Belgium, France German, the Netherlands, with egress into Italy, Spain and the UK.
Compare it with India and you will see the same number of stations/trains/bus routes all subsidized and dirt cheap (compared to Europe), but far below in any other standard (naturally because they are poorer).
The Chinese train in the article is thus literally 10x faster than an Indian express. There's finally some work happening on India's first bullet train, Mumbai to Ahmedabad, but even the most optimistic projections don't see it open before 2023.
...
> I saw no evidence of any such effort to create a fair system.
As fast as China is developing, it takes more than a few years of a snapshot expat life in a tier1-2 city to appreciate the scale of uplifting. The evidence is everywhere if are familiar with Chinese development goals and rate progress in context of the Chinese system where inequity and corruption are both intentional and deliberate development strategies.
Inequity: Deng wanted to direct development of coast regions first to rapidly cultivate an economic model (all the SEZs). The lessons learned would be used to improve the interior. The goal is to become a "moderately prosperous society" by 2021 with per capita GDP of $10,000 (current forecast is $12,000), followed by complete urbanization and poverty alleviation by 2030, followed by "China Dream" of per capita GDP of $40,000 by 2050. Some of the coastal cities are currently at $20,000 or $40,000 by PPP.
The system is working as intended, the big current efforts is to redirect coastal manufacturing and wealth into interior development which has "unfairly" languished, but as someone who spend a decade travelling between tier1 and county level (i.e too backwater to even be on the tier system) in the 90s, there's been improvements in aggregate everywhere. It may feel uneven depending on time and place but the trend is undeniable.
Corruption: to preserve the political narrative of "socialist economy", corruption was a mechanism used to transfer state resources to meritocratically selected local party officials that was still beholden to the goal of development and growth to ensure future promotions. This is why corruption has bad in India, Russia, Indonesia, Ukraine, etc but good in China. China is the only country where increased corruption is correlated to increased growth. This is posited by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director for China, Russia, and Former Soviet Union Republics. Power and connections only go so far (and sometimes too far), but most low tier bureaucratic arise through performance. They're welcome to gaft a little on the side but they better build X new residential units, Y infrastructure to meet Z urbanization goals.
E: It's not perfect, especially rule of law, but these institutions usually take a long time to build. Somethings can be rushed (construction), somethings can't (integration), but it's China, despite perceived "patience" of Chinese grand strategy, they'll try to rush things anyway (love them 5,10,15 year plans), frequently it's unethical, sometimes it'll backfire, but moving this fast is an unending series of trolley problems with 1.4 billion lives. Overall, IMO they're doing well. Prioritizing elimination of poverty at the expense of some corruption and inequity is the correct short-term moral calculus for me. And it's not like they're not trying to address the latter (anticorruption, HK etc).
Curious if you visited any Tibetan areas (Tibet proper or Amdo) and talked with the people there and how fair the system is for them.
Or Xinjiang, where most of the PRC's Uighur's live. This article shows some of them using the train system, too -- as they are led away blindfolded and in shackles: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/china-footage-...
Get the conductor on the delayed train to endorse your ticket proving the train ran late (or give you something saying so, if you have a digital ticket).
When the train arrives, if your next train is a "reservation only" service, you should go to the desk of the train operator, show them your ticket from the late-arriving train endorsed with the delay and your ticket for the outbound train that you've missed, and they'll give you a new ticket for the next train with availability.
If the next train isn't a "reservation only" service I usually just get on and sort it out with the conductor. I think technically you're not supposed to do this, but it saves time so can allow you to take an earlier train, and I've never had a problem doing it. YMMV!
I've done this probably 8 times, and never encountered someone who couldn't speak English well enough to understand the situation. In fact, very little communication is necessary since you're holding an endorsed ticket showing your incoming train was late, and a ticket showing your outbound train that you've missed – there's only really one thing you could be asking for!
Every time I go to China (to visit relatives) I expect to be in this sort of dystopic society like how everyone describes it, yet here I find probably the most integrated system of people and technology. Credit cards don't exist, everyone pays via QR code and phone. Tickets are on your phone, a simple monorail travels fast, with security, and the stations are actually clean (unlike NYC). In a certain sense you could say it's the future that you see in some movies. Too bad everything is blocked and you can feel yourself being watched all the time. But I guess that comes with the added benefit of safety in some regards.
The non-prototype record is set by the French TGV in 2007: 574.8 km/h
But even in China trains have been traveling at 486.1 km/h in 2010 (Beijing–Shanghai HSR).
Not to be outdone, an Amtrak train reached a record 38.5 hours late to Penn Station on the same day.
But of course the "top speed" without passenger is much much higher.
>The world record for a conventional wheeled passenger train is held by France's TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse), set in 2007 when it reached 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph) on a 140 km section of track.[1]
>Japan's experimental maglev train L0 Series achieved 603 km/h (375 mph) on a 42.8 km magnetic levitation track in 2015
I daresay it might be a record for China.
"Driving a Mercedes-Benz W125 Rekordwagen, essentially a W125 with streamlined bodywork and a larger engine, Caracciola set a new average speed of 432.7 kilometres per hour (268.9 mph) for the flying kilometre and 432.4 kilometres per hour (268.7 mph) for the flying mile..." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Caracciola
The last train wreck in China is still being talked about. Not because of the tragedy of the accident, but because of how it became emblematic of corruption and cover-ups and realities that are "unpatriotic" to say out loud. I guarantee any problems with this train line and you are sure to see someone bought up on "corruption charges".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision#Wang_Y...
It's fairly trivial to travel at 300km/h on a motorcycle with far more severe packaging constraints of fuel and powertrain, awful aerodynamics, and no rails to glide down.
I wonder what this will look like to the driver. I'm imagining the train displaying it's intended actions, but I wonder if the driver has to acknowledge anything at all?
...wasn't smth like "doing research on a live production system to get X% higher than designed output" what the Cernobil engineers were trying to do? Hope their sticking to trains with this mindset and not generalizing it to more dangerous industries :|
Anyway, at least electric trains are the kind of technology that will benefit everyone when it gets exported, so yey!
It’s not like this is new tech — they’re using trains built in a joint venture by Siemens (EDIT: apparently, they’re now building trains based on the same technology themselves), and the top speed China is trying to reach is 385km/h, unsurprisingly the top speed of the exact same model Siemens sells elsewhere.
They claim to have developed the technology further. The joint ventures were terminated after the technology transfer.