Brief history of time saved by China’s high-speed railways
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IN just a decade, China has established the world’s largest high-speed rail network, with over half of the world’s HSR tracks are in China.
The domestic network crosses 28 of the country’s 31 provincial regions, and it is showing no signs of slowing.
The nation’s first stretch of HSR, the Shanghai-Beijing route, was proposed in the 1990s but the long-term HSR development plan was not released until 2004.
China needed to prioritize railway construction, said transport expert Gu Zhongyuan, as “the old, creaking railway system was a bottleneck for economic development.”
Ding Sansan, chief technical expert at trainmaker CSR Corp, said an injection of capital from the government following the world financial crisis in 2008 was crucial to the speedy development of the nation’s HSR network.
Like everything new, HSR had teething issues. A fatal train collision in east China’s Zhejiang Province in 2011 raised doubts over safety and the pace of construction slowed for a while.
However, HSR rebounded thanks to efforts to improve quality and its high profile advocates, such as Premier Li Keqiang, who is now the de facto salesman for China’s high-speed railways.
Bullet trains have made the past experience of traveling on Chinese railways — cramped carriages stuffed with luggage, pungent odors and toilet queues — a distant memory.
“Thanks to high-speed railway, I can go back to my hometown in Guizhou Province many times a year to see my family,” said Pan Jinkui, a migrant worker in Foshan in south China’s Guangdong Province.
The railway Pan uses was launched late last month and connects Guiyang with Guangzhou, the capitals of Guizhou and Guangdong provinces. At a speed of 300 kilometers per hour, travel between the two cities has been cut to four hours from more than 20 on the old line.
More than 58 percent of passenger trains launched last year were high-speed trains that took 800 million passengers to their destinations.
HSR has changed perceptions of time and space for ordinary citizens, and the economic landscape has benefited from higher efficiency.
“As a country that boasts one fifth of the world’s population, China as an HSR society is an important subject, worthy of research,” said Zhang Qizuo, an economy researcher based at Chengdu University in southwest China.
HSR routes across China have been designed to suit its varying climate and geographical conditions.
The Harbin-Dalian HSR travels through areas where the temperature drops to as low as min us 40 degree Celsius, the Lanzhou-Xinjiang HSR passes through the savage Gobi Desert and the Hainan Island HSR can withstand a battering from typhoons.
“China has mastered HSR technology, with achievements in design and construction, system integration and operation management.” said Chen Juemin, director of the International Cooperation Department of China Railway Corp.
The train that runs on the Shanghai-Beijing route has been in service for 190 million kilometers, and has a failure rate below one incident for every 2 million kilometers traveled, significantly lower than the international standard of 2.6.
A new model currently on test boasts a Chinese designed electric drive system and network control system, two core HSR technologies.
“China’s HSR development has pooled resources from all quarters, breaking down barriers of departments, industry, enterprises and universities. It sets a good example for companies to not only innovate but also be successful,” said Kang Xiong, vice president of China Academy of Railway Sciences.
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