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Comment by rado | Hacker News Reader

Perspective: China has 45 000 km of high speed rail, while the UK is struggling to build 500.

Perspective: China is suffering terribly from the out of control debt used to build their high speed rail system and incidents are being systematically covered up rather than used to improve reliability of service. It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.

China has built the best and largest high-speed rail system in the world, at a fraction of the time and cost it's taken other developed countries to build tiny (in comparison) systems....BUT AT WHAT COST????

> It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.

Source?

Its fairly well known that China used these high speed rail developments to build itself out of the financial crisis, with dubious success of the resulting rail systems, and corresponding debt. This information is just a google away.

Still not a bad deal for China though.

There are some lines that were built for ideological/vanity project reasons, I dunno who tf thought it would be a good idea to build HSR to xinjiang, but the coastal lines are actually profitable [1] (take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though)

[1] https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/china-state-railway-end...

> take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though

Large enough to make them unprofitable?

Their foreign creditors presumably can't repossess the HSR lines and take them overseas, and the domestic creditors should be easy for the state to control. Maybe they'll pay back the money, maybe they won't. In the meantime and long after, the trains will run and generate real value for Chinese people and institutions.

This is totally fine if you want to destroy foreign and indeed domestic investment. The China Railway Corporation has $859 billion in debt, twice that of Evergrande, which was a disaster.

Wow. That is a shocking number. Do you have any interesting reading material on the indebtedness of Chinese railways?

Is the system unitary, e.g. the owner of the track also owns all the trains? Or is there a competition?

How is it suffering terribly?

and China has 9326410 sqkm of land while the UK is 243610 sqkm, i.e. the UK is 2.6% the size of China.

2.6% of 45000 is 1170.

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