World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens In China 322
An anonymous reader writes "Today China continued rolling out the future of high speed rail by officially unveiling the world's longest high-speed rail line — a 2,298-kilometer (1,428-mile) stretch of railway that connects Beijing in the north to Guangzhou in the south. The first trains on the new route hit 300 kph (186 mph), cutting travel time between the two cities by more than half."
Train Wreck (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Therewhile ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Our freight system is the best in the World, though. And if high speed passenger rail made sense, trust me, the railroads would be on it.
You're assuming they're still in the passenger business. They aren't. And you're also assuming that nobody is being an impediement to them.
They are.
If we had the population density to warrant such a passenger system to make it worth while, folks would be jumping on it.
I'm all for rail and efficient transportation. Just because it is so in other areas doesn't mean it's appropriate for another. In other words, a high speed rail system in the US - for except maybe the Northeast - just doesn't make financial or environmental sense. It's a lose/lose proposition.
Let's be smart about it.
And then you see that during the 20's and 30's, we had over a billion rail-passengers a year, when the population was a lot less dense in most areas.
You may think that rail makes no sense except in limited areas, but then you take a look at one of those Earth at night maps and see lots of shining lights. Are there places where rail makes no sense in the US? Absolutely.
But there's a lot more places where we could use it. But we don't have it. Why isn't it being built? Is it a combination of opposition to government, greed on the part of automobile, highway and fuel companies, or what?
Heck, just ask Florida. They voted in a high-speed rail. Then somebody lead a campaign to do what? End it. Why? Do you believe he was really concerned about the fiscal interests, or was he thinking of his own?
Re:Therewhile ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The US also has the worst on-time stats (train) of any developed country. It is still faster to travel long distances in the US by air. Flying from Boston to Los Angeles is 3,000 miles by road (twice the China rail length). It's 2604 miles by air and only takes 6 hours 21 minutes (413mph avg). The same trip by China's train would take 14 hours assuming that it ran 186mph the entire trip. Unfortunately now the US you are equally likely to be groped by a TSA agent by air or rail.
It seems disingenuous to compare a non-stop air flight to a mode of travel designed to provide transportation to many points in between the two end points. How long would you think it would take if there were twenty stops on each flight between Boston and LA? Try sticking with Apples to Apples when doing comparisons.
The on time record is abysmal. But it is that way by law. The law that established Amtrak was changed at the last minute to give freight the right of way.
Amtrak is working pretty much as designed. The design was severely flawed. It was, after all, a creation of Congress.
And, for the record, I've never seen a TSA agent on an Amtrak train or at an Amtrak station. Not saying they don't show up, more as a muscle flexing exercise and trial balloon, but is is extremely unusual. Pretty hard to hijack a train and take down a sky scraper with it.
Re:A Detractor (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm where have I heard this somewhere before, oh yeah a bit further down on the page where Lockheed was crying that SpaceX couldn't possibly be doing anything this much cheaper and better than them without compromising safety. Sure, if you go look at the crap they deliver to Wal-Mart your idea of Chinese quality might be low but they also do rocket science putting men in space and probes orbiting the moon and I'm pretty sure they do brain surgery too. That they often ignore emissions is not the same as being ignorant of them, unless it's say the Olympics in Beijing where they make a huge temporary clean-up effort. They might be more willing to trample the individual's rights than in other countries but the progress they make is very much real. Real income has more than tripled for over a billion people in the last decade:
GDP per capita measured in purchasing power terms more than tripled from $2,800 in 2002 to a forecast $9,100 in 2012 according to the International Monetary Fund.
Re:Therewhile ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I ride trains when I am in Europe. In the USA it is not just that you have to be not in a hurry, but you have to be retired or independently wealthy. I just checked to visit my brother in TX, would take one overnight train to Chicago, a long layover, and another overnight train onward. So I am supposed to pay more than airplane tickets, and take two days?
I ride the trains when in Europe too and it's not much difference. It's a day quicker and hundreds of dollars cheaper to fly from Rome to Berlin than to take the train which is about the same distance. Sure, it may take a day longer in the US but even in Europe it's quicker and easier to fly instead (even with the TSA) at that distance even between large hubs. Add in that nobody rides the train in the US unless they are scared of flying and I'm sort of surprised that passenger trains even exist in the US.