China Sets Sights On Rail Record 360
An anonymous reader writes "China is aiming to produce the world's fastest operating conventional train for its new high speed rail link between Shanghai and Beijing, achieving speeds up to 380 km/h and cutting the travel time between the two cities from the current ten hours to under five. The new rail link is scheduled to be completed within four years. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Railways' Deputy Chief Engineer has announced that China will be able to manufacture the new trains within two years."
Where's the fire? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:2, Insightful)
Amtrak (Score:4, Insightful)
...achieving speeds up to 380 km/h and cutting the travel time between the two cities from the current ten hours to under five...
I wonder whether officials at United States' AMTRAK are reading this. I saddens me that plans for high speed commuting on AMTRAK's rails was shelved a few years ago. REsult? Top speed on AMTRAK's rails is 180 KM/hr and only on some routes.
These officials (at AMTRAK) are more interested in their allowances and benefits instead of doing what is for the common good. In the meantime, AMTRAK's technology is still stuck in the seventies as the Asians led by the Chinese "overtake" us.
No wonder that we in these United States will cease to be of any consequence on world matters as internet traffic heads to Europe and more relevant innovation comes from Asia. I am really afraid for the generation that will come after ours.
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:5, Insightful)
The project would grind to a standstill under the weight of lawsuits be environmentalists, the not in my back yard crowd, and gad flys. If it progressed it would grind to a standstill under the weight of poor project management. If it progressed it would grind to a standstill under the weight of poor engineering decisions. If it progressed it would be plagued with cost over runs. If it was finished it would cost $2,430 dollars a ticket one way and no one would use it.
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the drive to do great things in the USA has been undermined by the mindless cynicism of people like "FooGoo" who see only problems.
Guess what folks, we can (and we should) overcome every engineering, environmental and NIMBY objection if put our minds to it.
I don't care if it is a cliche, but we put a fucking man on the moon almost half a CENTURY ago and have been content to rest on our laurels ever since.
Re:Amtrak (Score:4, Insightful)
...or there's no profit to be made in something thats more expensive and longer than driving?
From Indianapolis to Chicago, it'd cost me anywhere from $10-20 to take the train. I'd also have to be on the train at 5:30 in the morning. The train takes _at least_ 4 hours.
Or I can drive to Chicago, which takes at least an hour less, for only $10 more (185 miles at 25 miles per gallon, at roughly $4/gallon) and I can leave at my leisure.
Amtrak simply does not have the infrastructure for such an endeavor. A good chunk of Amtrak's routes are owned by freight companies; Amtrak simply pays to use them. So unless you're willing to assume that cost as the passenger to lay thousands of miles of private track, that's not going to happen since that cost would probably make ticket prices compete with airline prices, but to what benefit? Flying would still be faster. The only thing you would save is the hassle of airline security (which is a good enough reason for me, to be honest).
I disagree about some things. (Score:3, Insightful)
The rails lines could be run along current easements.
The only thing holding up rail is the public's attachment to the automobile: status symbol, complete freedom of where to go, perceived fears of others who ride the train, the fact that we're all spread out in suburbs, etc...
See. This is the perfect use for rail. (Score:3, Insightful)
Non stop between cities.
If you start adding stops in between the two end points, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference what the top speed is, the average speed will suck badly.
US has plans to do something similar... (Score:5, Insightful)
Between Las Vegas and Disneyland. [slashdot.org]
It is kinda scary to think that while "Oh_so_EVIL_communist_China" builds an express line between its capitol and its financial center, US is building what is essentially a carnival ride between the Pleasure Island [wikipedia.org] and Sin City.
Airlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose this train actually achieves the stated 236 miles per hour. Without making any stops at all, you're still looking at about 13 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. With five or six stops (that's not even one per state), it would approach 20 hours. This is a 6-hour flight. Anywhere farther than 600 miles is going to be faster by air.
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
Those are best-case scenarios. In reality, the Acela takes 8 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC -- a flight I've made in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Cost: Anyone with $50 or $100 million can start their own airline, leasing a few planes and plying low-volume routes to make money for expansion.
Good luck getting a high-speed rail built for less than $50 billion. With that kind of money, you could outright buy 40 or 50 brand-new airliners and hire people to fly them. That lets you provide service to a lot more than just two cities.
Capacity: It would take over a decade and untold billions of dollars to build a track. That's ignoring all the right-of-way and environmental headaches. Once built, the track can't exactly be picked up and moved if peoples' travel habits change. Air routes change all the time, based on passenger demand.
Airspace is already there, and it's free. The only real limit on capacity is landing slots, and big airports like LAX can land over a thousand flights a day.
Security: In flight, the only external threat to an airliner would be from ground-to-air missiles. Those aren't exactly easy to come by. You can't make one in your tool shed. Airliners are very delicate, but they're also very hard to reach, six miles above ground and moving along at mach 0.8..
High-speed rails travel a fixed route at predictable times. You could destroy one pretty easily using an IED. Even a small fuel-fertilizer bomb would be sufficient -- moving at hundreds of miles per hour, anything which gets the train slightly off-kilter is going to cause massive casualties. Patrolling thousands and thousands of miles of rail, 24 hours a day, is impractical and expensive.
Depressing (Score:5, Insightful)
-Grey [silverclipboard.com]
Re:the fire is in war (Score:3, Insightful)
Somehow I don't think it's cost effective (leaving out the whole humanitarian costs like thousands of dead people):
Iraq War: $550 billion [wikipedia.org]
NSF Budget for same period: $28.6 Billion [nsf.gov]
Which do you think is the better investment?
Re:Airlines (Score:4, Insightful)
Speed: There is a very narrow range of trip lengths for which high-speed rail makes sense.
Depends on where you live:
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there.
If you already have local rail infrastructure, or parking in the city is difficult, then rail is a big win. To pick an extreme example, you suggest that it's easier to go by car for journeys less than 250 miles. It's 211 miles from London to Paris. In Europe, where towns are smaller, more crowded, parking is difficult, and public transport infrastructure exists, it's worth going by train.
As for cheaper, well, that's a problem. The problem is that the roads receive massive subsidies, so they're free to use. Not much way around that, except to give comparable subsidies to rail too. ...cost...
Yeah, it's expensive. Sufficiently so that only a government is large enough to finiance something the size of a rail or road network.
Security: In flight, the only external threat to an airliner would be from ground-to-air missiles. Those aren't exactly easy to come by. You can't make one in your tool shed. Airliners are very delicate, but they're also very hard to reach, six miles above ground and moving along at mach 0.8.. High-speed rails travel a fixed route at predictable times. You could destroy one pretty easily using an IED. Even a small fuel-fertilizer bomb would be sufficient -- moving at hundreds of miles per hour, anything which gets the train slightly off-kilter is going to cause massive casualties. Patrolling thousands and thousands of miles of rail, 24 hours a day, is impractical and expensive.
Well, no. Firstly, airliners are suprising resilliant, they've survided anti-aircraft missile hits. Secondly, there have been accidents involving high speed trains. They look like a real mess, but the number of deaths is usually very low. Besides, if they were such an easy target, then why have they not been targeted already?
Re:the fire is in war (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree....war is an investment. The technology developed though war throughout human history has benefited all of us.
Not quite sure I agree with you there. There's only a technological race when you're at war with an enemy who is at or near your technological level. Somehow I don't see UAV's and IED-proof light armored vehicles benefiting mankind as a whole. The "advances" and "research" in the current war(s) seem to be very directed at surveillance, self defense and killing people remotely.
There's also the idea of diminishing returns. Before the world wars science was just about ready to explode all on its own anyway. Huge fields of potential knowledge were on the brink of being discovered - from biology and antibiotics, which allowed surgeons (together with their new-found anesthetics) to become bolder and bolder in experimental techniques to advance the field of medicine, to the whole plastics industry, to the need for sophisticated computing devices to crack enemy codes or do the tedious math required to predict the results of nuclear fission reactions.
Nowadays we are full of plastics, we have supercomputers, and our rate of advance has slowed somewhat as we explore entirely new fields - molecular biology, nanotechnology, etc. Yes we will probably make another "quantum leap" in terms of knowledge in these fields, and our current fields of knowledge will advance incrementally, but it's not necessarily war that will trigger it this time. There's no pressing need to build a "more efficient transistor before the enemy gets one".
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I disagree about some things. (Score:3, Insightful)
I know most environmental groups are theoretically for building railroads for mass transit. The problem is that most of them are against the inevitable side effects of actually building railroads for mass transit. They want their cake and to eat it too.
That's four things, not one thing, and not all connected to automobiles either. Typical muddy think.
Re:the fire is in war (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:4, Insightful)
Building it in the median of a freeway puts it away from access by people who might walk or throw things on the tracks. It also lets people sit in their gas guzzlers and watch others pass them at 380 KPH.
Re:Why troll? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jane told the truth. Why mod her -1 Troll? Are you American moderators really that stupid?
Are you foreign posters really that limited in scope? Do you really feel the need to justify everything in military terms? Get a grip. Truth is, if we were on a quest to build an empire and needed lots of guns and tanks and bombs and things, our economy would be booming. Unemployment would be nil. As it happens, we dramatically reduced our force levels since the ending of the Cold War (too far, I'd say.)
America has some serious issues, but economic progress (or otherwise) is dependent upon a myriad of factors having nothing to do with Iraq. I assume that is what Jane Q. is referring, since I'm unaware of any other nations currently being bombed for profit (of course, a good carpet-bombing or two might improve the quality of posts here on Slashdot.)
If we want to start improving our economic outlook there are, at a minimum, going to have to be some serious changes to the patent system and our schools. Proper incentives will have to be made to encourage investment. We'll need real broadband and major telecommunications upgrades. Lots of stuff.
None of which has anything to do with bombing anyone.
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I disagree about some things. (Score:5, Insightful)
Real environmentalists work behind the scenes with government and especially industry, helping them find ways to make industrial processes more efficient, less environmentally harmful, and in a surprising number of cases more profitable. Such people may be outsiders who devote their lives to making all of our lives better, they may be in-house scientists and engineers who tirelessly promote a better way to their bosses, they may be enlightened bureaucrats who work to find some balance between environmental concerns, and the needs of We the People.
Those are the people I respect, unfortunately you never see their faces on the tube, so they don't really get credit for their work. I couldn't care less about the media hounds.
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm betting the Chinese aren't doing an environmental impact study.
And that's why the Chinese are progressing so much faster than us: they don't worry about idiocy like that.
It's not that environmentalism is a bad thing; it isn't. However, only a complete moron would ever question the environmental impact of a train versus highways or airlines. Trains are more efficient than any other form of transportation for moving goods and people between two points. Of course, arguments can be made about transporting things between lots of different points (the argument for trucking vs. railroads), but we're talking about transport between two very large cities here. While planes are certainly faster, trains are cheaper (except in the USA) and far more fuel-efficient, which obviously means it's better for the environment.
There: in 5 minutes, I've done what American government would have spent 6 months and millions of dollars doing a study on. That's part of why we're failing.
As for displacing peoples' homes, we do that here all the time too. Except here, instead of just doing it for government projects (highways, etc.), we do it for private businesses who want some land but don't want to pay market rate for it. This even went to the Supreme Court, and they said it was OK. Tell me again how China is worse for civil rights (or more accurately, property rights).
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens when you want to upgrade to four tracks, or add a station, or a branch? Far better to put it at the side of the freeway, with a decent gap in case there's an accident (you don't want an accident on the freeway to force the railway to close). People will still see the train whizz past.
Re:I disagree about some things. (Score:3, Insightful)
So technically you're correct, but in practice we're pushing it. Really pushing it.
Who's "we"? "We" don't own any refineries. Oil companies do. They're private companies, and running them "hard", 24/7/365, is most profitable for them. If they built more refineries, then it would cost them a huge amount of capital to build them, which takes away from their bottom line. Why would they want to do this? Instead, they can keep using their crappy old refineries to the limit, save money by not investing in new infrastructure, and if this makes fuel cost more, that's not their problem, it's their customers' (us). Remember, they sell all the fuel they make, as demand is high and supply is constrained. This is not a situation in which you want to invest a lot of money in infrastructure.
There's a very good reason we don't have any new refineries: profit. That's not about to change any time soon.
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the point. It's not that anyone isn't sure that as far as energy use and carbon emissions goes the train will be better, the point of the environmental impact study is to determine if their are any especially environmentally sensitive areas that should be routed around.
Great, but maintenance will be EXPENSIVE. (Score:3, Insightful)
While this sounds like a great idea in practice, the cost of maintaining the overhead wiring, steel rails and rolling stock for such a high-speed train will border on exorbitant.
Remember, above 300 km/h, there are serious engineering issues of physical wear from the contacts of the overhead wiring with the pantographs on the train and the steel wheels and steel rail. Unless the Chinese government spends the type of money needed to properly maintain these equipment, it could end up being a serious maintenance nightmare (I can imagine how much SNCF is spending to maintain the TGV system).
Re:Depressing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the fire is in war (Score:2, Insightful)
No no no, you got it all wrong ! (Score:3, Insightful)
I use this example from time to time as most people who live in the US have no idea how backward the US can be in certain areas.
You've got that all wrong! You need to listen to more prop^H^H^H^Hcommercials. Repeat after me:
Cars good! (Nevermind the traffic jams and all the other problems LALALALALA!!)
Planes good! (Only if you're not on THE LIST, citizen!)
Trains bad! Only communists and poor people use trains! You don't want to be a communist or a poor person, do you?!
Re:Airlines (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the Acela is crap compared to European high-speed rail. But that flight time is completely misleading. I do a comparable flight sometimes. I live near downtown Melbourne, Australia, and fly up for work in downtown Sydney, Australia. The flight is one hour, 30 minutes. Even without checked baggage, it takes four hours door-to-door.
Re:Where's the fire? (Score:2, Insightful)
No smugness there at all. There is this lingering perception that nobody uses Amtrak when in fact they're carrying so many passengers that the limiting factor (for the past few years) is literally the number of passenger cars and locomotives owned by the carrier. Yeah, the sensible thing to do when you have that situation is buy more of both. But it's difficult to invest in fleet expansion when for the past thirty years you literally didn't know if you're going to be around the following year. That was Amtrak's existence since its creation, despite Congress generally being in favor of keeping it around.
No passenger rail network makes a profit. Even during the "golden years" when the freight railroads ran the services [wikipedia.org]. It was mostly a loss leader, but freight railroads were able to shoulder the burden until the combination of federal (over) regulation (pre-Staggers [wikipedia.org]and the nascent trucking industry (aided by of the federally subsidized interstate highway system) and the overall decline in freight business during the latter half of the 20th century brought many of them to the brink of bankrupcy (Witness Penn Central [wikipedia.org], which never made so much as one cent of profit during it's entire eight-year existence). Some passenger networks come close to covering their operating expenses out-of-pocket, but add in capital expenditures necessary to keep the network going, and they all come out in the red.
As for other modes, the airline industry is no stranger to red ink [nytimes.com], and nobody in their right mind expects the interstate system to pay for its own upkeep, let alone turn a profit.
---PCJ