http://www.newsweek.com/242-billion-high-speed-beijing-moscow-rail-link-approved-301302
China still killing it in the high speed rail game #americaplease
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$242b Moscow-Beijing high speed rail approved
- Thread starter Polari
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http://www.newsweek.com/242-billion-high-speed-beijing-moscow-rail-link-approved-301302
China still killing it in the high speed rail game #americaplease
DonasaurusRex
Online Ho Champ
that is immense excited to see it work.
rail is great till you dont want it anymore.
rail is great till you dont want it anymore.
shinobi602
Member
A quarter of a trillion dollars!?
To be completed in 2050.
To be completed in 2050.
Ray Wonder
Founder of the Wounded Tagless Children
One metric butt load of money.
Vigilant Walrus
Member
I hope it will create some good work opportunities for a lot of people!
FalsettoVibe
Member
How fast is this thing?
Road traveling technology won't change in that time. I can imagine there will be addendums and revisions out the ass.
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
You edited, but I would love to have the whole world connected by rail.
Just thinking about those two numbers is driving me crazy. Christ, I'll be 60.
timetokill
Banned
Where are you seeing 2050? I'm probably just blind this morning.
A Chinese blog has claimed that the rail link will have multiple long term benefits, including improving the countrys food shortage problems as fertile soil can be easily imported from Russia. The site also said the link would provide an easy way for Chinese farmers to migrate to Russia where they would set up farms to supply food to both countries.
Soil imported from Russia?
Chinese farmers migrating to Russia?
Soil imported from Russia?
Chinese farmers migrating to Russia?
Stereogatari
Banned
Good for them. It'd be cool for countries like Russia and China to make the kind of close ties that Western countries have with each other. You could argue that the original railway networks helped Europe achieve the kind of inter-connectedness it has today.
Altay Mountains are beautiful.
User 73706
Banned
He's saying it's going to take an exponentially ludicrous amount of time to complete this thing, let alone blow through a quarter trillion dollars.
I was afraid that the idea was too dumb/impossible.
CrimzonSamurai
Member
Actually, some Siberian soil is super fertile because no nutrient-intensive plants have grown there for tens of thousands of years. Just smaller plants and animals decaying slowly on top of it. The more northward you travel, however, and it just starts being acidic because nothing has grown there in way too long.
Leave it to the Russians to export all the good stuff, though, and leave nothing for the people who actually need it back home.
timetokill
Banned
Oh. Meh. considering how fast China has been building their rail systems, I'd bet this is done before California's LA to SF boondoggle.
terrisus
Member
Not everything can be transported by air.
Ha, that's the last thing they want to do. There's 6000 miles worth of pockets getting greased here, and an equivalent amount of workers getting screwed and corners getting cut. Every dollar spent is another 20 cents in some bigwig's pocket.
WorriedCitizen
Member
I guess it's nice for people afraid of planes. Otherwise i don't see what the point is.
Like what?
you mean 18 million per mile?
timetokill
Banned
I'm pretty sure Moscow and Beijing are further than 13.5 miles apart.
Melon Husk
Member
Did you all calculate with a potato? You divide the cost by length to get $/mi - in this case $55 million per mile. That's very reasonable actually as far these projects go.
Wikipedia.Wikipedia said:
More prosperity to the far east can only be a good thing. Go infrastructure projects.
WeAreStarStuff
Member
It seems like a lof of money, but then I realize my country drops this on some new military programs. Good luck with the rail system.
Larger than an airplane... I doubt it would fit on a train.
This is fucking China we're talking about. 5-10 years (tops) is a more realistic estimate.
Love that countries are going this route but hasn't China had a ton of problems with corruption in public works/transportation projects like this one? I could've sworn some high ranking transit official was executed a couple months ago. Or maybe just sent to a gulag. I don't remember.
Well, high speed rail competes well with short haul flights. That's what it's great for, and it complements the transportation system by introducing a high capacity alternative for trips that are a bit too long to drive and too short to fly. It's suited for trips that are 150 - 900km long and when introduced it has usually taken the majority of the market share between cities that fall within that (Tokyo-Nagoya, Barcelona-Madrid, Paris-Brussels, Cologne-Frankfurt) practically eliminating air traffic between the cities, easing congestion at airports and freeing more space for long-haul travel.
This approved line however doesn't fit in that scheme however, it's just too long. People won't travel from Moscow to Beijing using the train most probably and it mostly serves communities between the cities like the trans-siberian railway does today. However I suspect we're talking about multi-purpose line, which allows high speed rail travel. Unlike the Japanese and French for example in Germany freight trains are allowed in high-speed lines if they meet certain requirements so we're not talking about long and lumbering freight trains going 80km/h here. And this is the idea here, it will have high speed link, but the main focus is to have a good quality and fast rail freight link.
The idea has been brewing for a while. The idea behind it that it serves a certain niche in the markets between shipping and air freight - cargo that needs to get somewhere faster than with a ship (or to a place a ship can't go) and is too big/expensive to haul by air. We're talking about medium sized and medium priced cargo on a high capacity system. That's what the point is.
Journalists just tend to see the high speed passenger rail part because for the public the point is how fast can they go.
teruterubozu
Member
It'll probably be finished before the California rail.
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