The five-year transportation blueprint will see the country build more high-speed railways, including four east-west lines and four north-south lines by 2015.
China is to build more high-speed railways, reported the Xinhua news agency Tuesday. The five-year transportation blueprint will see the country build more high-speed railways, including four east-west lines and four north-south lines by 2015.
This will increase the country’s high-speed rail track mileage from its current 6,894 km to 18,000 km upon completion. Railway expert Wang Mengshu told the news agency that the development of the new high-speed trains in China is to “address its transportation bottleneck.” He added: “It will be very dangerous if we continue to raise the speed of conventional lines. Therefore, we must build new dedicated passenger lines.”
China’s plans to invest in more high-speed trains come in the wake of the Wenzhou high-speed railway collision in July 2011 which left 40 persons dead, attributed largely to a result of congested railway lines, management failure and faulty signalling equipment. Since the accident, local railway bureaus and stations have been ordered to improve train scheduling and management, as well as conduct more intensive work in safety training. According to the daily, a railway ministry report released in July revealed that signalling and lightning diffusion equipment were checked and reinforced at more than 1,000 railway stations across the country. “With technical solutions and disciplined operation, China’s high-speed railways will be safer,” Huang Qiang, chief researcher at the China Academy of Railway Sciences told Xinhua.
According to a report by World Bank earlier this year, China’s railway system not only carries the largest and fastest-growing volume of traffic of any major railway in the world, it also is by far the busiest. For instance, some 52.6 million passengers traveled on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway line in its first year of operation in June this year, with an average 144,000 passengers traveling on the line daily. Xinhua news agency also reported on Wednesday that China’s railway trains carried a record 9.14 million passengers on the first day of the eight-day Golden Week holiday period which started on September 30.
With such high usage rates, the new high-speed train lines are expected to ease China’s burgeoning traffic volumes, not least in terms of travel time. Last week, a new high-speed railway connecting the capital cities of Henan and Hubei provinces was launched, reducing the travel time between the two cities by more than half to two hours, down from four and a half hours.
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InnoTrans 2012 -Berlin
International Trade Fair for Transport Technology
Was held September 18-21, 2012
Video: News and trends from the rail industry
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Video: China Railway
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Video: China CRH
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Dilemma X 
October 5, 2012
International