China HSR - Here and Now - Wall Street Journal

Today's Wall Street Journal has a 'feature" article regarding China Railway High-Speed's service between Wuhan and Guangzhou.

Subscription site - may or may not be able to access:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 31096.html

Brief passage:

• Where it is: It's strange to say the fastest passenger train on earth is off the beaten track, but for most travelers it will be an effort to get to. Operated by China Railway High-Speed, a unit of state-owned China Railways, the line was opened in December. It features train speeds of 217 miles per hour—faster than the train à grande vitesse (TGV) in France or the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train. It connects southern China's factory megalopolis, Guangzhou, and the industrial Yangtze River city of Wuhan. The latter is known as one of the "furnaces" of China, thanks to its searing summer heat. Wuhan has a pleasing waterfront, vibrant night-time street life and colonial-era buildings, some of which are falling into disrepair while others have been converted into trendy nightclubs

Tom Friedman's Wednesdat column in The Times also noted this new service in a "not exactly" flattering way to any ostensible existing "HSR" over here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opini ... edman.html

Brief passage:

• For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin. It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work. From there, you drive to the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center, a building so gigantic and well appointed that if it were in Washington, D.C., it would be a tourist site. Your hosts inform you: “It was built in nine months.”
  
  I know, I know. With enough cheap currency, labor and capital — and authoritarianism — you can build anything in nine months. Still, it gets your attention. Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.

If passenger rail, HSR and otherwise, is any measurement as to the relevance of a society in the 21st century, then it is time for Edward Gibbon to rise from the grave and write a new "Decline and Fall of....." best seller. About who?.....guess.

Given my experiences with Chinese passenger trains and big-city stations in 1995 and 2005, I cannot imagine what the HSR terminals look like on a busy weekday. For it to look like Europe, the Chinese will have had to add enough capacity to at least come close to meeting the demand. I gather that's possible...

Anybody remember this thread?

http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopi ... ld+is+flat

It ran to 9 pages, 113 posts, played out over about 6 weeks, and ended up on another forum; it stoked a lot of pasions, yet proved that most of us here could express our strongest feelings in a respectful manner.

This thread began when Thomas Friedman's work The World is Flatwas drawing a lot of attention It would be another six months bebefore the markets melted down, the better part of a year before what was viewed as a major change would take effect within the Beltway,

But the price of a gallon of regular across the NS Reading Lne tracks from where I was living was about $3.20, or about $.60 more than at present.

Mr Friedman is correct in identifying the factors spurring our rivals on, and not far off in identifying some of the thinking of too many of us caught in the current stagnation. But he also bought in (wholesale) to the climate change/global warming controversy (not, IMHO, totally discredited, but in need of careful re-evaluation), and he seems to be a little to eager to resort to a call for more centralization of authority for my taste.

And in reviewing the changes in attitudes among some other people I've come t know a little better at sites concerned primarily wth the necessity of earning a living, I believe we've moving, however slowly, from a position of denial to one of acceptance.

And this will, hopefuly, carry over into how we make the necessary adjustments to our entire transport infrastucture .... slowly, deliberately, guided primarily by the workings of supply and demand ..... but with a recognition that that infrstructure, developed over nearly two centuries now by a gently-regiulated interplay of both public and oprivate capital, seldom needs sudden and/or drastic change. The rail network that got us here can adapt, but attempts to respond quickly to the whims of functionaries usually backfire.

Demagogues in many societies have cited supposed innovation as a basis for trampling some of their subjects.It's time to change the role of HSR from a "poster child" to that of a sibling with special talents .. and needs .. and limitatios.