High-speed in China

Fast track 30 years forward: at the end of this month, China is also opening its high speed railway line between the country’s two largest cities, namely Shanghai and Beijing. There will be 90 trains daily, of which 63 will be running at 300 km per hour while the rest will keep a 250 km/h speed. The fastest trains will complete the 1,318 km trip in less than five hours, cutting by half the current time it takes with the “old” train. Long awaited information about ticket prices was released last Monday, prices will range from 410 (40 EUR) to 1,750 RMB, with the top prices still 1,000 RMB cheaper than the flight equivalents. That makes the train a real competitor to the plane, especially as domestic flights’ punctuality is notoriously bad. Five hours is actually what several of my colleagues on a road trip in China last week had to wait in the plane before take-off to Beijing. Luckily, it is not always that bad.

But the Beijing - Shanghai line is not the first one for China as the Paris – Lyon was for France. China has today the world’s longest network with 8,400 km of routes, that’s four times more than France which obviously makes sense because of the country’s size. As always with China, figures can make you feel dizzy: there is almost 1 million people on the railroads everyday…. The grand master plan is to introduce additional 17,000 km of high speed rail so that there will be 25,000 km by the end of 2020. Besides strongly reduced travel times, this has significant implications on the social and economic development of the Chinese regions, as well as impact on company level as new markets open up for instance for property developers, retailers, tourist sites. It also means that distance between cities are reduced, hereby promoting business which I could easily notice recently, comfortably sitting on the 7 am train to Nanjing in a wagon full of daily commuters. 

Chinese high-speed rail is entirely financed and managed by the government. Total investments for the whole program are estimated to be as much as 300 billion USD. Actually the pace of investments accelerated starting from 2008 in the overall effort by the government to offset effects of the global recession that was affecting other parts of the economy.

But what is striking me the most in the development of the high-speed railways is … its high-speed.  You might need to reconsider everything I wrote here, because the first railway line was not open to the public in 1981 like in France but in 2007! And the Shanghai – Beijing line’s construction only began in April 2008 and was completed one year earlier than initially planned. As the excited CFO of a Chinese company manufacturing railway-signaling systems explained to me, China has been able in 4 years to build a domestic network almost as large as the current world high-speed rail capacity and the Chinese also now start exporting their capability to neighboring countries. One understands why this company’s CFO gets excited….

Anyway I am already looking forward to my first train trip to Beijing and in case I do not have any good book to read I think I will do some counting: 244 bridges and 22 tunnels on the line would keep myself busy….