Will China Have to Rebuild An HSR Line?

[CHamilton]

Will China Have to Rebuild An HSR Line?

A report from China this week suggests that a new high speed rail route may have to be partially rebuilt due to problems with the way the tracks were laid.

The Harbin to Dalian high speed route, located in Manchuria, is facing problems with frost and deformation of the roadbed.

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

This is what happens when all your government officials are corrupt as heck. At least that what I hear from Chinese people. I'm glad that I don't live in China. I'd rather ride the Empire Builder than a poorly built CRH train on poorly built tracks.

 

[George Harris]

This is what happens when all your government officials are corrupt as heck. At least that what I hear from Chinese people. I'm glad that I don't live in China. I'd rather ride the Empire Builder than a poorly built CRH train on poorly built tracks.

I'd rather ride a China Railway train than a China internal airline flight. At least the trains don't have as far to fall when something goes wrong.

 

[mfastx]

This is what happens when all your government officials are corrupt as heck. At least that what I hear from Chinese people. I'm glad that I don't live in China. I'd rather ride the Empire Builder than a poorly built CRH train on poorly built tracks.

The irony is that those tracks that will have to be rebuilt are much better condition than the Empire Builder tracks.

 

[George Harris]

This is what happens when all your government officials are corrupt as heck. At least that what I hear from Chinese people. I'm glad that I don't live in China. I'd rather ride the Empire Builder than a poorly built CRH train on poorly built tracks.

The irony is that those tracks that will have to be rebuilt are much better condition than the Empire Builder tracks.

That is highly debatable.

 

[Paulus]

One instance of worse than built for ground freezing causing about 55 route kilometers to need rebuilding prior to line opening and suddenly everything is poorly built? Rather rich especially when the US is the bunch of idiots who came up with the Acela (which is crap by any reasonable international comparison). There are issues with Chinese HSR, but nonsense like this is just plain ridiculous.

 

[Gratt]

One instance of worse than built for ground freezing causing about 55 route kilometers to need rebuilding prior to line opening and suddenly everything is poorly built? Rather rich especially when the US is the bunch of idiots who came up with the Acela (which is crap by any reasonable international comparison). There are issues with Chinese HSR, but nonsense like this is just plain ridiculous.

How many examples can you cite where two HSR trains collided with each other? Let's be honest, the "issues" with China's HSR would absolutely horrify any safety engineer in the developed world.

 

[George Harris]

One instance of worse than built for ground freezing causing about 55 route kilometers to need rebuilding prior to line opening and suddenly everything is poorly built? Rather rich especially when the US is the bunch of idiots who came up with the Acela (which is crap by any reasonable international comparison). There are issues with Chinese HSR, but nonsense like this is just plain ridiculous.

How many examples can you cite where two HSR trains collided with each other? Let's be honest, the "issues" with China's HSR would absolutely horrify any safety engineer in the developed world.

Not in any way to justify Mr. Paulus's viewpoint and statement, but the line where the collision occured on the Chinese Railway sistem was not a dedicated high speed line. A new line, yes. Given some of the appearances of being a high speed line, yes, but a true high speed line no. If you find a picture of the Chinese Railway network with the lines designated by speeds, this segment is shown as being a new line, 200 to 250 km/h.

In fact, if you had looked at the pictures that could be found of the equipment at the accident, if you look at the side of trailing unit of the first train, which is what stayed on the track, you will see under the unit number (ZY 104600), the speed limit for the equipment, 200 km/h (=125 mph for those who do not want to do their own conversion) and the train length, 426.3 m. That would be 1,398.6 feet, which would be a 16 car train, including cab units in the count.) The second train rode up over the trailing end of the first train. The very nice aerodynamic ends of these train sets make this sort of action very easy to happen. Digging a little deeper you will find that the line has suffered a signal failure due to lightening strike and trains were being operated by manual block. The second train basically ran past the limit of his authority without reducing his speed to being able to stop within half the length he could see.

Check this: www.railwaygazette.com/nc/news/single-view/view/signal-failure-suspected-in-wenzhou-crash.html

That is in its own way even scarier than bad track as it shows a failure to follow the most basic of safety procedures. There will never be anything like an NTSB report available outside a very few in the Railway Ministry and government, so the cascade of events and failures leading up to accident will never be publically known.

There are also far more track and structural deficiencies than the "55 route kilometers" mentioned by Paulus.

Paulus: As for your "bunch of idiots" remark: Shut up until you can call us and show us how you have done better. There are far more things involved in this sort of stuff than you can possibly imagine.

 

[Paulus]

One instance of worse than built for ground freezing causing about 55 route kilometers to need rebuilding prior to line opening and suddenly everything is poorly built? Rather rich especially when the US is the bunch of idiots who came up with the Acela (which is crap by any reasonable international comparison). There are issues with Chinese HSR, but nonsense like this is just plain ridiculous.

How many examples can you cite where two HSR trains collided with each other? Let's be honest, the "issues" with China's HSR would absolutely horrify any safety engineer in the developed world.

Halle train crash was on a line used by HSR trains, though not involving HSR train sets themselves. In both cases the issue was one of signaling issues and human error.

Paulus: As for your "bunch of idiots" remark: Shut up until you can call us and show us how you have done better. There are far more things involved in this sort of stuff than you can possibly imagine.

The Acela is the worst performing high speed train set for pretty much any standard of comparison you wish to use and I was including the absurd FRA overregulation that got dumped on it last minute in the "bunch of idiots." That aside, it's an overly harsh and uncharitable statement however and I do retract and apologize for it.

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

The problem is that Chinese railway officials all want money and don't care about safety. Everybody is corrupt and it's getting worse every day. I wouldn't be surprised if a honest, commited safety engineer checked China's HSR and has to totally replace it and all the train as well. Same with Chinese domestic airlines, bus companies, taxis, etc..

 

[Long Train Runnin']

The problem is that Chinese railway officials all want money and don't care about safety. Everybody is corrupt and it's getting worse every day. I wouldn't be surprised if a honest, commited safety engineer checked China's HSR and has to totally replace it and all the train as well. Same with Chinese domestic airlines, bus companies, taxis, etc..

I agree there is corruption there, but this seems a little extreme do you have anything to back this up?

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

The problem is that Chinese railway officials all want money and don't care about safety. Everybody is corrupt and it's getting worse every day. I wouldn't be surprised if a honest, commited safety engineer checked China's HSR and has to totally replace it and all the trains as well. Same with Chinese domestic airlines, bus companies, taxis, etc..

I agree there is corruption there, but this seems a little extreme do you have anything to back this up?

When I visited China, I talked to Chinese people on trains and everybody was like, "Oh we all know it. All the officials are corrupt."

I also know a Chinese locomotive engineer who complains of the same thing. Bus drivers are also known to be overworked even though they are afraid to admit it. Personally, I'm not Chinese so I don't know everything.

 

[jis]

The problem is that Chinese railway officials all want money and don't care about safety. Everybody is corrupt and it's getting worse every day. I wouldn't be surprised if a honest, commited safety engineer checked China's HSR and has to totally replace it and all the trains as well. Same with Chinese domestic airlines, bus companies, taxis, etc..

I agree there is corruption there, but this seems a little extreme do you have anything to back this up?

When I visited China, I talked to Chinese people on trains and everybody was like, "Oh we all know it. All the officials are corrupt."

I also know a Chinese locomotive engineer who complains of the same thing. Bus drivers are also known to be overworked even though they are afraid to admit it. Personally, I'm not Chinese so I don't know everything.

All of the above anecdote can be found to be true in the US too in certain cases. But in both cases it is perilous to judge an entire system based on a few comments from a few.

 

[Ozark Southern]

The problem is that Chinese railway officials all want money and don't care about safety. Everybody is corrupt and it's getting worse every day. I wouldn't be surprised if a honest, commited safety engineer checked China's HSR and has to totally replace it and all the trains as well. Same with Chinese domestic airlines, bus companies, taxis, etc..

I agree there is corruption there, but this seems a little extreme do you have anything to back this up?

When I visited China, I talked to Chinese people on trains and everybody was like, "Oh we all know it. All the officials are corrupt."

I also know a Chinese locomotive engineer who complains of the same thing. Bus drivers are also known to be overworked even though they are afraid to admit it. Personally, I'm not Chinese so I don't know everything.

All of the above anecdote can be found to be true in the US too in certain cases. But in both cases it is perilous to judge an entire system based on a few comments from a few.

Very true. And at the risk of making the same mistake, I'll chime in with an anecdote of my own. We have a friend who grew up in the States and now lives in China. She has told us she takes the train often in China, and has never once been on Amtrak. Now, I won't generalize based solely on her report, but you can take her statements for what they're worth: That she finds the Chinese railway system useful to get her where she needs to go, and that she does not find the Amtrak system to be useful for her purposes.

Really, both China and the US need to focus their infrastructure budget on what benefits their own people most. I am convinced that urban transit and interurban rail are the most economically and environmentally beneficial forms of transportation, so I celebrate good investments in these types of infrastructure. China's system may not be perfect, but ours isn't either, and we shouldn't demonize an entire country for the corruption of their government, especially when said government is building things that actually will benefit the Chinese people.

 

[George Harris]

The problem is that Chinese railway officials all want money and don't care about safety. Everybody is corrupt and it's getting worse every day. I wouldn't be surprised if a honest, commited safety engineer checked China's HSR and has to totally replace it and all the trains as well. Same with Chinese domestic airlines, bus companies, taxis, etc..

I agree there is corruption there, but this seems a little extreme do you have anything to back this up?

When I visited China, I talked to Chinese people on trains and everybody was like, "Oh we all know it. All the officials are corrupt."

I also know a Chinese locomotive engineer who complains of the same thing. Bus drivers are also known to be overworked even though they are afraid to admit it. Personally, I'm not Chinese so I don't know everything.

All of the above anecdote can be found to be true in the US too in certain cases. But in both cases it is perilous to judge an entire system based on a few comments from a few.

Very true. And at the risk of making the same mistake, I'll chime in with an anecdote of my own. We have a friend who grew up in the States and now lives in China. She has told us she takes the train often in China, and has never once been on Amtrak. Now, I won't generalize based solely on her report, but you can take her statements for what they're worth: That she finds the Chinese railway system useful to get her where she needs to go, and that she does not find the Amtrak system to be useful for her purposes.

Really, both China and the US need to focus their infrastructure budget on what benefits their own people most. I am convinced that urban transit and interurban rail are the most economically and environmentally beneficial forms of transportation, so I celebrate good investments in these types of infrastructure. China's system may not be perfect, but ours isn't either, and we shouldn't demonize an entire country for the corruption of their government, especially when said government is building things that actually will benefit the Chinese people.

Having worked in east Asia for quite a few years, I will say that my first choice for travel in a country is train. Air, depends on the country. For China, only if no other method is practical. For some others, no hesitation, but there are those that make China look good. For middling distances, I go for the regularly scheduled bus services. In many places there may be two, three, or more levels of bus service by amentities, so you can be on anything from rather luxurious to open windows with chickens and other miscellaneous animals. I tend to trust the drivers of these things more than the tourist buses. Remember the guy driving the scheduled bus knows the road because he does in regularly. A lot of times the charter tour buses have much worse accident rates.

 

[CHamilton]

From The New Yorker:LETTER FROM CHINA

BOSS RAIL

The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom.

In 2003, China’s Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, took charge of plans to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway—more than could be found in the rest of the world combined. ...With a total investment of more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars, the undertaking was to be the world’s most expensive public-works project since President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, in the nineteen-fifties. To complete the first route by 2008, Minister Liu, whose ambition and flamboyance earned him the nickname Great Leap Liu, drove his crews and engineers to work in shifts around the clock, laying track, revising blueprints, and boring tunnels....
That autumn, to help ward off the global recession, Chinese leaders more than doubled spending on high-speed rail and upped the target to ten thousand miles of track by 2020, the equivalent of building America’s first transcontinental route five times over. China prepared to export its railway technology to Iran, Venezuela, and Turkey. It charted a freight line through the mountains of Colombia that would challenge the Panama Canal, and it signed on to build the “pilgrim express,” carrying the faithful between Medina and Mecca. In January, 2011, President Obama cited China’s railway boom in his State of the Union address as evidence that “our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped.” The next month, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, blocked construction of America’s first high-speed train, by rejecting federal funds. Amtrak had unveiled a plan to reach speeds comparable to China’s by 2040.

 

[CHamilton]

Inside China’s High-Speed Rail Triumph

China’s rail sector had been under a cloud since a fatal high-speed train accident in July 2011 killed 40 people and raised questions about whether the headlong rush into high-speed rail development allowed for adequate safety testing. The Railways Ministry ordered a safety review of all projects under construction, and train speeds were slowed from 350kmh to 300kmh—a regulation that remains in force. Pending projects also were suspended during the post-crash period, and the opening of the Beijing-Guangzhou line was delayed by a year. Earlier that year, in February 2011, Railways Minister Liu Zhijun had been purged in a major corruption probe, tarnishing his ministry and the high-speed rail campaign that had been his pet project. He was expelled from the party in May 2012.
Now, with the successful opening of the Beijing-Guangzhou line, the high-speed campaign is back on track.