By 2013, China will have the world's most comprehensive high- speed railway network, writes CLIFFORD COONAN
THE SLEEK, white high-speed train is zipping at 330km/h through these hazy hills and paddy fields, dotted with new blue-roofed factories and Ming dynasty villages, from the Chinese capital Beijing to the trading centre of Shanghai.
One hundred years ago, the trip from Beijing to Shanghai would take three weeks of hard and often hazardous travel. The train journey normally takes 10 hours, but by bullet train, our crossing through the painterly, verdant landscape of eastern China takes just four hours and 48 minutes.
Imagine Dublin to Cork in about 40 smooth, exhilarating minutes.
The high-speed rail is the high point to date of China’s push to become more than just a low-cost manufacturer, and is up there with the space programme and Olympic achievement in terms of national pride.
The 221 billion-yuan (€24 billion) service from Beijing’s Southern station to Shanghai’s Hongqiao station, a purpose-built terminus beside the city’s downtown airport, is the biggest star of the programme and it goes fully operational later this week.
Rail authorities say the 1,318km line will run 90 pairs of trains daily and could increase the capacity of the current line to 80 million passengers a year.
It reached the top speed of 330km/h on a segment of journey between Zaozhuang city in Shandong and Bengbu city in Anhui province.
Technically it can go faster but the government has reduced the speed, to about 300km/h for large stretches, as well as ticket prices for the national system following complaints it is too expensive and dangerously fast.
“The safety of China’s bullet train is guaranteed,” said He Huawu, China’s top rail engineer at the ministry of railways, in response to questions about safety.
In 1992, travelling in an overnight hard seat compartment, an elderly woman boarded and got underneath my seat, from where she proceeded to fire sunflower seed shells and refused to come out. Later, as night fell, she found great amusement in tickling my feet.
It’s hard to imagine anyone trying to tickle a foreigner’s feet on the high-speed train, especially in business class, where the seat reclines to a full bed, with a plug for your laptop, a reading light and eager attendants help you with your every whim.
We zip past construction sites building the factories and shopping centres to be served by the railway. At several points in Jiangsu province there are ghostly tower blocks under construction within sight of the track.
Tickets for the journey between China’s top two cities range from 410 yuan (€44) to 1,750 yuan (€187). A flight costs between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan and takes about two hours, and about 25 per cent of Chinese flights suffer delays.
Factor in the check-in times, though, the security checks and the fact that most airports tend to be located a long way out of town, and you can see why China is pushing the high-speed rail project in a major way.
The high-speed train was developed by China based on foreign technology from Japanese and German firms.
Chinese engineers readily admit that its bullet trains and rail lines have “absorbed” many ideas from the West. China, however, has been speedy in getting the technology to work and this success is what they hope will translate well abroad.
Chinese companies are building high-speed rail technology in Turkey, Iran and Venezuela, and are hoping to build in Britain and the US.
The high-speed rail network has been beset with corruption issues. The former railway minister Liu Zhijun was dismissed in February in a graft inquiry.
Stories abound of substandard building practices leading to delays in construction as sections of track are taken down and reinstalled.
In Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, local media reported that subsidence causing gaps of up to 40 centimetres between the ground and the track was found along the high-speed rail line linking Taiyuan and Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei, two years after construction was completed.
The bullet train running between Beijing and Shenyang, capital of the northeastern Liaoning province, had also suffered several malfunctions.
Among the complaints about Liu Zhijun’s administration in the local media were that he exaggerated the project’s performance, saying the train would reach a maximum speed of 380km/h and maintain a constant speed of 350km/h.
In December, a train on this route hit a record speed of 486km/h during a test run of the link, which the state-run Xinhua news agency said was the fastest speed recorded by an unmodified conventional commercial train.
By 2013, China will have the world’s most comprehensive high-speed railway network and 800 bullet trains.
The extension of this project is a planned Iron Silk Road, which will use this state-of-the-art technology to link Shanghai to Singapore via Rangoon, or Kunming in southwestern Yunnan province to New Delhi, Lahore and on to Tehran.
If all goes to plan, and if serious political negotiations are successful, in 2025 you could board at Harbin at China’s border with Russia in Heilongjiang province and embark on an epic voyage to eastern and southern Europe via Russia, eventually pitching up at Connolly station.