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China on Thursday rolled off the production line a prototype magnetic-levitation train with a designed top speed of 600 km per hour in the eastern city of Qingdao.
The debut of China's first high-speed maglev train testing prototype marks a major breakthrough for the country in the high-speed maglev transit system.
The testing prototype, which has one car only, can check and optimize the key technologies and core system components of the high-speed maglev system and lay a technological basis for the forthcoming engineering prototype, said Ding Sansan, head of the train's research and development team and deputy chief engineer of CRRC Qingdao Sifang Co., the train builder.
China is the third-largest country in the world by area. If they successfully implement a high-speed rail network, will American objections to scale finally be overcome?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:29AM (1 child)
It can hardly have a role if it does not exist. The reason it costs so much is the legal and environmental battles it must go through, and I'm told in the case of the Californian rail the corruption around it; not the physical works. Those battles are due entirely to the American attitude towards rail.
Extensive "high speed" road systems, which have far greater environmental impact, are accepted without a murmur though. Same in the UK; I recently went back to an area I have not seen for 30 years and was shocked at how much road building had been done in the meantime, taking up broad swathes of land, much of it with even broader cuttings, embankments, and sprawling flyover junctions, all paid with public money. In one place a naturally wooded hill in an otherwise flattish area had been almost entirely removed - looks like the engineers made a bee-line for it as it is cheaper to buy natural land than agricultural land. These new roads were not even particularly busy. Yet I never see any national (let alone international, like right here now) controversy or anti- campaigns against these new roads such as the new HS2 rail line in the UK is getting.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:33PM
On the first sentence, that is a No True Scotsman argument. Passenger rail exists in the US, it just doesn't have a prominent role like it does in other parts of the world.
Nor is American "attitude" towards rail somehow responsible for the variety of standard legal and environmental-based obstructions to any sort of big project in the developed world.
What is in large part responsible for the corruption of the project is its relative uselessness. There's already multiple transportation systems that service the region and do the job that the high speed rail would do. Thus, there is little reason for any of the participants to deliver on the project in a timely and cost effective manner. It's just a status signaling project from the start and much of the desired goals of the project were completed with the announcement of the project. Thus, there's little interest among any of the involved parties to avoid massive corruption and inefficiency.
They serve a need and don't cost 400 million pounds per mile [independent.co.uk] (which happens to be a snap shot on a cost escalation upwards).