Building the Future: The Construction Boom of China's High-Speed Rail Network

What's staggering is the sheer amount of civil engineering prowess on display. A lot of the terrain crossed by these lines is not simple, there's so many bridges over gorges, tunnels through mountains, and construction through seismically active zones and China seems to have conquered both finding the engineering solutions to these problems and the logistics of such building in difficult construction sites. In a fact a big part of the B&R Initiative seems to simply be exporting China's extraordinary construction industry since they have more capacity then they know what do with and don't want to downscale. Of course it's not all rosy, but damn is it impressive.

Honestly, for a country as big as China the HSR being on the red is no big deal, the overall economic growth it creates more than pays for it

Yet UK 6th richest country is letting its once excellent rail coverage shrink and decline , The rail industry (and all other private services ) are more a cash cow for investors than actual interest in railways .(or other services )

Not sure if you've covered this topic before, but a video covering slab tracks and other ballastless tracks would be interesting as it's relevant to the subject of High Speed Rail. Side Note: My favourite type of track gotta be embedded rails as it's smooth and flushed with the surface and is more aesthetically pleasing compare to other ballastless tracks in my eyes.

Wow I like Chinese High-Speed Rail.

Really great video and highly appreciate your research and quality of work 😊😊 Keep up the work 😊👍

yeah but America has Greyhound buses ...

Great video. It's amazing how quickly the Chinese HSR network has grown in such a short space of time. I would love to travel on it. Keep it up👍

the government subudises the cost because its a public good, kind of like how in the USA the military is just used for creating jobs, in china rail does the same.

I'm humbly asking about when you will make videos about metro system from various countries, thank you, great video anyway

Love them used fast train a few times on China now... Amazing fast and comfortable... The Best

The Grand Finale will be the Taiwan strait train tunnel, a 30minute train travel. With 3x lengths euro channel is still very possible due to ocean floor is even and hard, they got geo lucky.

I honestly don't think that the joint venture thing is about offloading debt. I think the real reason for the joint venture thing is to make local governments have more ownership over the specific sections of their lines and have them train and maintain local crews to service and maintain the lines which frees up CRRC staff to be more focused on their mission of constructing HSR lines.

Hey RE! A high but realistic number for fuel pr plane is 100 metric tonnes. With that, you are about a factor 10 off in fuel usage for flights. 1.1million flights = 100 million tonnes of jet fuel.

Can you make a video on rrts system being implemented on Delhi Meerut corridor and gonna begin operation in 2023 partially.😊

I'm sure all the "white elephant" people will be coming out soon, so I'd like to share my own analysis on why this is in fact, a great decision. 1. Long-term costs. China's population is aging, the number of people willing to work in construction is plummeting, and salaries are rising. Not only that, although the Chinese government can force the people to get out of the way, they nonetheless Do need to compensate the people. The longer they wait the more expensive buildings would have been built there in the meantime. In other words, if they wait too long, labor costs would double, land prices would triple and headaches would quadruple in the meantime. This isn't theory, just look at how hard it is to push ahead the California rail. Even if a few lines turn out to be useless later on, the overall savings by building them early would still be worth it. 2. Effect of inflation. When I was living in Beijing, within a few years the price of a standard public transportation fare suddenly rose from RMB 0.1 (about 1 cent) to RMB 2 (about 20 cents)! What the heck, a x20 price increase, this is highway robbery! Once I calmed down I realized that the fares were still pretty cheap. You see, in the US, the transcontinental railroad cost USD 60 million and forever changed the development of the US. The fixed costs of the HSR in China will eventually be a distant memory thanks to inflation, but the ticket costs can always be increased later once living standards have improved. 3. Social impact. Every year, during the Spring festival, China is home to the world's largest human migration: migrant workers returning home for the holidays. You see, to develop, China encouraged poor inland workers to work in the big coastal cities. It is upon the backs of these migrant workers that the Chinese economy was built. These people work far away from their homes for most of the year, and only return to see their relatives back in the countryside once a year during the Spring Festival. Long ago, I've seen one of these migrant workers try to log into the website to book a ticket home. Because of high traffic, she had to repeatedly try until she managed to get into the system only to find that the tickets had already been sold out. Can you imagine the heartache? China owes these people its current prosperity, the least it could do is make it a bit easier for them to go home. 4. Urban planning. As this point it is obvious that house prices in large coastal cities are not coming down, and you can't stuff a billion+ Chinese into just the few big coastal cities. I think the Chinese government chose the extremely smart option to instead build up alternatives. China now has over 100 cities with over a million inhabitants. Salaries are lower in these cities, but houses are much cheaper and life is less stressful. The thing is, for a city to be viable, it needs to be connected via infrastructure to other cities, hence the HSR among others. 5. Pollution. HSR is powered by electricity. Right now most energy in China is coal-generated, but China is working hard to develop alternatives. Once that's taken care of you have a massive reduction in pollution, made better when considering... 6. Energy independence. If you're not traveling by train then you're traveling by plane or by car. Electric cars are still sort of in their infancy, especially for long-range travel, so now we're talking petroleum. Petroleum is one of the world's most critical resources, and China is a net importer. This makes it vulnerable to all sorts of geopolitical issues that could occur in say, Russia and the Middle-East, not to mention a lot of oil is imported via the hotly contested South China seas. The less dependent it is on petroleum for something as critical as transportation, the better. 7. Technology independence and security. The US decided not to export chips to China. What next, planes? What if the EU follows suit? Well then China would Really be in trouble. Better not be Too dependent on planes, right? Total independence is not possible, but mitigating the damage is always good. Even if we don't consider this, money from buying foreign planes is going into someone else's pockets, while HSR money is benefiting domestic workers. 8. Long-term economic benefits. The HSR is infrastructure, just like schools it is not supposed to make money by itself, its benefits are much more far-ranging. For example, China's domestic tourism is already over half a trillion dollars per year, and growing fast. HSR also facilitates business interactions. Not only that, the positive effects should be especially salient in the less developed interior regions. 9. Economies of scale + export. This is what China does best. The more it builds something the cheaper it is to build, and then they can even export the technology! 10. But what about slow/freight rail? With HSR, slower lines can be converted to freight. What's more, the HSR is actually used for express freight. That said, slower freight lines don't have all the constraints of HSR: it doesn't need to be in a straight line, it probably can avoid expensive populated lands, etc. So there is less urgency to build them compared to HSR.

We need a video about Italian HSR

I found it quite funny with those computer-generated stock videos... especially the plane with British Airways tail with a giant Chinese flag on it... To be honest it subtracted from the video, making it feel less fact based. 5:10 And a clip of Shinkansen mixed in doesn't help. 5:51 - 6:01 The Chinese (with exception of HongKong) drive on the right side of the road like American and EU... not on the left. The trains are ran on the left side because the Chinese used a version of the European train control system. Their traditional railway run on the right side, Shanghai subway also run on the right side instead of left.

It is no exaggeration to say that no country has public transportation comparable to China, and you can even take buses (not long-distance buses) and subways to communicate and travel the city💤

hey can you make a video about new railway construction of KRG ?