Nothing can quite prepare you for the shock of China's high speed rail
Nothing can quite prepare you for the shock of China. Of course before I travelled there I knew the numbers: 48,000 kms of high speed rail already built, with plans for many more. I knew, too, that it was a huge country, with a population of 1.4 billion, and had developed at rates which meant more growth annually than western countries manage in a decade. But as I toured round the country by train and was driven round various towns and cities with motorway systems that make Spaghetti Junction look like a village crossroads, I kept on returning to the key issue: the scale, I mused, the sheer scale.
It is impossible to overstate how much China has changed and how out of kilter much of our western image of the nation now is. Pagoda-style buildings are as rare as women with bound feet. There are probably more 20-storey-plus buildings in Chinas than in the whole of the western world, many in strange ghost towns. Even in rural areas, people have been rehoused in stark, grey, high-rise apartment blocks that overlook the vast acres of brown fields their inhabitants still till. Small cities of have become large ones with five or more million people, while large ones are now megacities with ten, even twenty million, inhabitants. Having a minimum of ten metro lines (the same as London) is de rigueur for any city aspiring to be in the top tier and several cities have more. Anyone who suggests this is not going to be the Chinese century simply has watched too much American TV.
That is the context of the construction of the remarkable high speed rail network, overlaid on the country like a spider’s web covering a bush. The first line opened in 2008, which means that on average more than 7kms per day, every day, have been completed in the intervening period. To put that in perspective, the current length of China’s high speed network, built in less than two decades, is three times the size of Britain’s whole network, constructed painstakingly over the course of the 70 final years of the 19th century. It is tempting, if cruel, to remind ourselves that the 225km-long HS2 between London and Birmingham was initially launched in 2009 and may be completed by 2033, though no definite date has been announced. We can barely manage 7 metres per day.
China’s achievement of building what must now be considered the world’s greatest rail network has been made possible by having a government that decided on this strategy of building a high speed rail network and was never knocked off course by any objections or setbacks. And there was an accident early on in 2011 that could have derailed, as it were, the whole project as it was caused by a series of human and technical failures. But no, after a hiatus, the lessons were learnt and China’s high speed rail network continued to be built apace.
So can we learn anything from this? Let’s go from China to Wales, a big leap from the world’s second most populous nation to a very small one. However, there is a significant project to celebrate in Wales, the creation of the South Wales Metro, currently coming on stream and due to open fully next year. It involves the transformation of the underused and largely forgotten Welsh valley lines into a modern suburban rail system using a fleet of new tram trains This idea was first put forward by Mark Barry, a local businessman who had no transport expertise. Listen to my interview with him on my podcast Calling All Stations and you will get an idea of how one man with a big idea and a lot of nous can make a difference. He managed to persuade the Welsh, and then the British, government of the viability of this ambitious idea and it has now been funded to the tune of £1bn. It might not quite be a high speed network across a vast nation, but it is an inspirational story that shows the importance of vision, ambition, persistence --- and a modicum of luck.
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