Beijing to Shanghai in four hours. Why not? The fast trains between Beijing and Tianjin have cut what was once a two-hour journey to 30 mins, reaching speeds of 240 km/h on scheduled runs and faster in tests. Running high-speed trains to Shanghai, the Ministry of Railways’ deputy chief engineer Zhang Shuguang reckons, could more than halve the current 10-hour trip.
A 1,318 km high speed line is scheduled to be ready within three years, part of the high-speed rail plans baked into the current five-year plan on which the ministry has been giving a progress report. It will be capable of running trains at 380 km/h. That would be faster than the new Shinkansen in Japan which will be able to run at 360 km/h. The current Shinkansen dawdles along at 300 km/h, the same as Siemens’s ICE train.
The ministry says it can have China’s first long-distance bullet trains ready within two years. They would still be slower than the maglev trains used on Shanghai’s airport connection, which can do 400 km/h. That is currently has the world’s only commercial maglev service. One in the U.K. shut down in 1995 after 11 years of operation because of reliability issues. However, the planned extension of the Shanhai maglev has already incurred extensive cost overruns and maglev trains would be prohibitively expensive to use for long-distance travel — plus the technology is German.
The current 1,463km Beijing-Shanghai line is the busiest in China and increasingly a bottleneck. It carries 10% of the country’s passengers and 7% of its freight. If it works, the new line, which has been in planning since the 1990s and was original scheduled to start operation in 2010 at a cost of $12 billion, will be the template for future high-speed network across the country by 2020.
1 Comment
October 16, 2008 at 11:53 am
[...] ones so they can carry faster trains, including the new high-speed bullet trains (see: “Bullet Trains Will Cut Beijing-Shanghai Run To Four Hours“). The goal is to expand the network to 100,000 kilometers by 2020. Another goal is to raise [...]