Beijing to the US by train
China outlines plans to connect world by high speed rail network
China has outlined its plan to connect the world by high-speed rail, including an underwater link to the US running 13,000km.
The ‘China to Russia plus the United States’ line proposed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering would start in the north east of China, travel up through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska and down through Canada before reaching the contiguous US, The Beijing Times reports.
Other planned lines – construction of which has already reportedly began in China – are a link to London via Paris, Berlin and Moscow, along with a second route to Europe following the silk road to reach as far as Germany via Iran and Turkey. The international legs of the lines are currently under negotiation, the state ran paper said.
World Train System will cross Bearing Strait, from Russia to Alaska.
A fourth Pan-Asian line, connecting China with Singapore via Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, is reportedly already under construction. Proposals for lines running from China to Africa are currently being drawn up, the paper added.
The most structurally ambitious of the proposals is the US-China link, which would require around 200km of tunnels to cross the gap between Russia and Alaska – four times the length of the Channel Tunnel. If completed it would become the world’s longest underwater tunnel and take an unprecedented feat of engineering.
“Right now we’re already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years,” Wang Meng-shu, a railway expert from the Chinese Academy of Engineering said. The train would travel at 220mph with the entire trip taking two days.
Reporting on the plans, the state owned English language paper China Daily claimed that China already has the technology in place as it will be used to connect the country to Taiwan by underwater high-speed train requiring a 150km long tunnel. Details of this project are also yet to be finalised however.
Source: Tomas Jivanda / The Independent
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China is reportedly thinking about building a bullet train that reaches America
China already has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. And the country aims to more than double the amount of high-speed railway by 2015 from the existing 10,000 km (6,000 miles) to 19,000 km—and eventually 25,000km by 2020. Officials want to build everything from an undersea railway tunnel from the Chinese shore to Taiwan—twice the length of the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain—to 1,776 km of high-speed rail through isolated deserts in the west of the country.
China Bullet Train (credit: Reuters/China Daily)
In that context, it almost seems feasible that China would be considering a recently discussed project—13,000 km of high-speed railway that crosses from China to Russia and North America that includes a 200-km tunnel under the Bering strait. A railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering told the Beijing Times that officials are having discussions about the project.
China’s proposed high-speed rail network for 2020 (including current lines.) | Wikipedia Commons
A railway from China to the US might bring the two countries closer, at least geographically, but it would be an absurd project. China is already spending an estimated $32 billion on an underwater tunnel that measures just 123 km long. And officials estimate that 1,776 km of railway being built from Lanzhou in the western province of Gansu to Xinjiang will cost about $24 billion, which is cheap compared to China’s previous high-speed rail projects.
If those costs are any comparison, the so-called “China-Russia-Canada-America” line could cost north of $200 billion—$52 billion to construct an undersea tunnel to cross the Bering strait and $172 billion for the rest of the railway across land. That would account for well over half of China’s already massive high-speed rail budget of $300 billion. China may be one of the best examples of countries that love mega-infrastructure projects, but even this may be too much.
Source: Lily Kuo / Quartz
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World High Speed Rail Congress – China