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LEFT TO RIGHT: By 2030 China’s high- speed rail network will look like this; and airline- style seating in a premium class carriage of a high- speed train
ot long after the gleaming high-speed train departs from smog-smothered Urumqi, China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang spills out into an empty, alien landscape. Martian red earth stretches for miles to the distant flaming mountains, interrupted only by flocks of white wind turbines with swan-like blades that turn gracefully.
This is a far-f lung corner of China that, despite being
rich in key resources such as oil and natural gas, has for decades been notoriously difficult to access by land. In 2014, however, the groundbreaking Lanzhou to
Xinjiang high-speed rail (HSR) line linked this remote region to China’s ever-growing high-speed rail network, which now has tentacles from Harbin in the northeast to Kunming in the southwest. The 2,000-kilometre journey from Urumqi to
Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, now takes just nine hours (slashed from nearly 20) and covers some amazing scenery. Add to that the spotless Western-style toilets,
comfortable seats and crystal-clear windows, and it speaks volumes about the money China is pumping into its rail network – RMB801 billion (US$117 billion) last year alone, with an equally generous budget for 2018. Train travel in China – even in sleeper class on
regular overnight trains – has been turned into a highly palatable experience and is quite possibly the country’s best-kept secret.
LEADING THE WAY Then again, in 21st-century China, fast journeys on plush trains are nothing to write home about. China has held the record for the fastest commercial
electric train in the world since 2004, with the Shanghai Maglev (short for “magnetic levitation”) able to run at a
top speed of 431km/h, surpassing Japan which famously pioneered the world’s first bullet train – the Shinkansen – in October 1964 for the Tokyo Olympic Games. The new “wheels-on” high-speed rail network in
China offers some of the fastest high-speed trains in the world, typically operating at around 300km/h. It is also the longest HSR network in the world, measuring 25,000km at the end of 2017, and accounting for an incredible 66 per cent of total high-speed rail track globally. According to the China Daily, this network transported around 1.7 billion people in 2017 – almost half of the world’s quota for HSR passengers. What is perhaps most impressive, however, is the sheer speed of its transformation.
According to the latest Five-Year Plan, by 2020 China’s rail network will have 30,000km of high-speed rail track
“China’s rise to become a high-speed rail power
has occurred just in the last decade or so; the speed of development has been phenomenal,” says Dr Gerald Chan, an expert on Chinese international relations and author of Understanding China’s New Diplomacy: Silk Roads and Bullet Trains. It’s true that China’s first high-speed rail service
(capable of running at more than 300km/h) wasn’t built until 2008 and, like Japan, can be traced back to Olympic grandstanding, with the first service from the newly Bird Nested-capital to Tianjin opening a week before the Beijing Olympic Games. In 2012, I took that line into the capital, impressed as an LED ticker at the end of the carriage constantly relayed the train’s current speed to passengers, lest they forget its marvellous momentum. Since then, things have gone into overdrive. Many
provincial capitals can now be reached from Beijing within eight hours, and that’s set to improve. According to the latest Five-Year Plan, by 2020 China’s rail network will have 30,000km of HSR track, (and 150,000km of total rail) covering 80 per cent of the major cities. This will be achieved via an “upgrade of the so-called
‘4 horizontal 4 vertical’ network, covering the whole country, to an ‘8 horizontal 8 vertical’ network,” explains Chan. The plan proposes dividing China into a grid of
railway lines, with eight trunk routes running east to west and another eight north to south. Among the eight verticals are two new lines connecting Beijing to Hong Kong and Kunming, while the eight running horizontally include a Shanghai to Chengdu route, and Xiamen to Chongqing line. Future ambitions are even more sci-fi: a new project
sees China and Japan collaborating to create an “albatross- inspired” train dubbed the Aero Train, which is
SEP T E M B ER 2 0 18 bus ine s s tr a v el ler .c om
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