China's 245mph train service is the world's fastest

If only we could have this kind of tech in the UK :(

I could travel to Newcastle faster than it usually takes me to travel 3 miles or so to work heheh
 
I wonder how much they spent on this. Considering that the estimated cost of the olympic games was $30-40bn, I think its safe to say we'd struggle to pay for this.

Let's just get the European standard 300km/h (186mph) running up and down the east and west coast main lines and that should suffice. We don't live in a large country.

Of course this is when the government has money again (or if it can somehow convince private investors to pay for it), so next decade perhaps.
 
yes but being mass produced chinese goods it will probably fall apart as soon as it goes out of warranty, causing a black hole which destroys the universe...
 
Zogger said:
yes but being mass produced chinese goods it will probably fall apart as soon as it goes out of warranty, causing a black hole which destroys the universe...
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Siemens, Bombardier and Alstom

All produce trains for many countries around the world.

As for the tracks, possibly. And as Caged mentions, you wonder if working conditions were any better than the Great Wall.
 
It will have cost the Chinese a small fortune, and to do the same here would cost substantially more. We have higher wages, more stringent construction requirements and safety requirements etc. I imagine if your house was in the way of where they wanted to put the track, they'd be bulldozing it with you still inside.
 
I'm not surprised it was completed in 4 years. They don't have red tape like us, house or company in the way, bulldoze it, farmer wanting 10k a week for access to the track, send the bulldozers in. Due to that I doubt they have the curves that we have in the track.
A project like that in England would be so expensive compared to over there.
 
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Easy to be done when:

a) You have unlimited funds - the government would not have had to purchase any of the land, pay high rates to any of the workforce, etc etc. Just 'make it so'.

b) You have literally THOUSANDS of workers

We could probably build a similar route in less than 4 years if the government forced 10,000 of us to work on it and simply knocked down everything in the way.
 
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Kenai said:
Japan haven't gone from nothing to everything in 4 years though, it has been a much longer gradual process.
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And China invented everything themselves?

The ability to build stuff quickly isn't impressive. Just need the resources.

What's impressive is the technology to travel at 245mph for safe regular service.

Chinese GDP per capita will take a very long time to overtake the US. And thats if its viable to maintain such rapid economic growth. Just look at Japan and see how growth tapered off as it grew rapidly.
 
I wonder how much slave labour, no wait, cheap labour they used and how many people died during the construction of the railway. ;)
 
ghost101 said:
And China invented everything themselves?

The ability to build stuff quickly isn't impressive. Just need the resources.

What's impressive is the technology to travel at 245mph for safe regular service.

Chinese GDP per capita will take a very long time to overtake the US. And thats if its viable to maintain such rapid economic growth. Just look at Japan and see how growth tapered off as it grew rapidly.
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They'll start dieing off from breathing heavily polluted air before they get to that point I would have thought.
 
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