They’ll still qualify as high speed trains, but they’ll only travel at speeds up to 250kph instead of the 385kph they were designed to achieve. The problem is safety concerns:
The Chinese government has announced a significant lowering in the top speed its hallmark Beijing-to-Shanghai high-speed train will be allowed to run at when it opens later this month after a review of safety, shoddy workmanship and corruption.
The new service halving the 10-hour rail travel time between China’s political and business centres was meant to be the flagship project of a massive $400-billion program to give the country the most extensive bullet train network anywhere.
But the announcement last week by the Railway Ministry that trains on the new line will only be permitted to run at about 250 kilometres per hour instead of the projected 380 km/h has taken the bloom off the opening.
The restriction follows a review by officials stemming from the sacking in February of the railway minister, Liu Zhijun, and the deputy chief engineer of the department, Zhang Shuguang.
The concerns about safety are not at all unwarranted:
Contractors are said to have skimped on using expensive hardening agents when making the concrete for the rail bases. These ties are predicted to crumble within a few years. And there is said to have been a similar shortage of strengthening ingredients included in the concrete used to build bridges and their supporting columns.
A high speed train requires the right-of-way to be engineered to a much higher standard than ordinary passenger or freight rail lines. If too many corners have been cut in this construction, it would be insane to allow the trains to run at full speed until the entire line has been inspected, tested, and problems addressed. If there were even greater “economies” taken during construction, it might not be safe to run the trains at any speed.
And what’s a story like this without a bit of trash-talking from a rival high speed railway operator:
“The difference between China and Japan is that in Japan, if one passenger is injured or killed, the cost is prohibitively high,” he said. “It’s very serious. But China is a country where 10,000 passengers could die every year and no one would make a fuss.”
That’s a quote from the chairman of Central Japan Railway, which runs the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen service.
