China Buys 80 Very High Speed Trains (236 mph) for $4 Billion

http://www.bombardier.com/en/corporate/media-centre/press-releases/details?docID=0901260d800acfd9

by MikeCapone • 17 years ago

16 33 17 years ago

ujjwalg2• 17 years ago

This is great for China. Hopefully, US will be working in implementing this soon too.

patio11• 17 years ago

I hope not. The shinkansen is lovely, don't get me wrong (+), but they estimate $40+ billion (which is likely about 40% of what it would actually cost given the persistent cost overruns in infrastructure projects) just to connect Sacramento through San Diego.

The only thing that would come close to making trains economical in the US is a massive firebombing campaign of every city you hope they're going to run through, and even that would be pushing it, since even with cheap right-of-ways you'd still have to string them across the country.

See, in general, http://green.venturebeat.com/2008/04/11/why-the-california-h...

+ If you priced US high speed rail like Japan prices the shinkansen, it would cost you about $250 for a round-trip ticket from New York to Boston. I do the Nagoya to Tokyo circuit every once in a while for work. The system is one of the wonders of the modern world but, holy cow, is it expensive. (Its expensive to ride, its expensive to subsidize, and HOLY COW was it expensive to build. Shinkansen-related debt hit nearly 30 trillion yen -- that's in the general vicinity of $300 billion, folks. And that is for a country that would fit in California, with room to spare.)

ardit33• 17 years ago

and the alternative is? to build more highways?

Is it any cheaper to raze down more buildings, to open more lanes. 101, and 280 in SF are already 5 lanes and full of traffic (101 is becoming like a parking lot, even in recession).

The Bay Bridge is already 5 lanes each way, and always chocked. It is pretty clear that the highway system is not scaling well. Spending billions of dollars for more lanes, just wont work.

And everytime me and you ride the highway, are are not paying for the full cost of it. Or gas taxes are just a mere fraction of the real cost.

Just saying. And the projection of the SF to LA ticket cost, are about $55-60.

Please no more FUD.

ujjwalg2• 17 years ago

I understand what you are trying to say, and not being an expert or possessing enough knowledge about it, all I can say is it works in Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:High_Speed_Railroad_Map_Eu...

I am also very biased towards a well developed rail system, because I hate flying/driving. Being from India, I have traveled in train system, a lot, even though its not a high speed rail system. I loved it. I have been to europe a lot and am a fan of it. I know its a huge investment, and probably wont be profitable any time soon, but IMO, it will benefit in a very long term.

jrockway• 17 years ago

I doubt the use case in the US is to link every major city. The air network does this far more efficiently. Places in the US are way too far apart.

High-speed trains would do well where conventional trains are too slow and regional jets are too expensive. (Example, Chicago-Madison).

I also see high-speed trains as being useful for city/airport links. Oslo has a high speed train between its central station and the airport, which effectively abstracts away the fact that the airport is in the Middle Of Fucking Nowhere. (Tokyo suffers from this problem, as well. While flying from HKG to NRT recently, the thought crossed my mind that landing in KIX and taking the train to downtown Tokyo might actually be faster...)

Even in cities like Chicago where the airport is close to downtown, conventional trains are too slow. (It takes me at least 45 minutes to get from Clark/Lake to O'Hare. A high-speed train could do that in 6 minutes! I would gladly pay a premium for this convenience.)

Finally, cost is not an issue as infrastructure is never profitable. The interstate system is not making money, the airlines are not making money, and conventional trains are not making money. Society needs the infrastructure regardless, which is why we pay taxes.

yuan• 17 years ago

> See, in general, http://green.venturebeat.com/2008/04/11/why-the-california-h....

Too much hot air. How about some real numbers from historical data?

From "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" by David McKay, p.121. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/Books.html

Energy consumption

(kWh per 100 p-km)

------------------

Car 68

Bus 19

Rail 6

Air 51

Sea 57

------------------

Table 20.8. Overall transport efficiencies of transport modes in Japan (1999).

_ck_• 17 years ago

Not trying to be funny, but I am kind of surprised they didn't just buy a few and make copies of them.

bliving3• 17 years ago

Construction will happen in China (Qingdao), with project management and components(?) split between China and Europe offices.

And not that funny; I know of heavy manufacturing companies that multiply their selling prices by 10 for equipment that is destined for China just for that reason.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Thereby giving the Chinese a great incentive to copy them, after all they're being ripped off.

That's pretty much analogous to people copying music because they've been ripped off for so long.

jfischer• 17 years ago

They tend to do that in a more subtle way:

Bombardier Transportation announced today that its Chinese joint venture, Bombardier Sifang (Qingdao) Transportation Ltd., has been selected by the Chinese Ministry of Railways ...

I imagine that the cars will be manufactured in China and the joint venture company will gain a lot of experience from the effort.

newacc• 17 years ago

i wont be surprised if 80 is "few" for China as they might be planning to have 800 trains in next 10 or 20 years (its a huge country - geographically ) ... who knows?

Nelson69• 17 years ago

Who's going to buy the copies though?

bilbo0s3• 17 years ago

If you can read Mandarin, one of the things you can see on the blogs in China is that these things are so cheap to manufacture that it costs more to steal them!

The Mag-Lev from Pudong Airport cost what ... 1.5 Billion. It only goes about 20 miles into Shanghai. They are getting 80 of these trains for 4 Billion.

Stealing a new fangled industrial adhesive might be profitable, and useful in your construction projects. But if you are going to build it the regular way . . .

it just doesn't pay to steal a nail.

jrwoodruff• 17 years ago

This reminds me of an article I read awhile ago (in wired?) that said something to the effect that China could very well leap-frog petroleum and go straight to a 'green' transportation model. Seems dictators don't have to wage petty battles over who-gets-what-when-where-why-and-how.

Given the number of dedicated, high speed rail lines in the U.S. (uhm, 0? as far as I know...), it looks like China could beat us.

Note: Not advocating communism or anything here, it just makes me angry that rail transit is so crappy in this country. It's a great way to travel, at least in Europe.

holdenc• 17 years ago

Totalitarianism has its efficiencies.

LostInTheWoods• 17 years ago

Totalitarianism is very efficient until the people realize material wealth without political freedom is hollow.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

That's the standard line, but I'm not sure that it's as inevitable as that. It might well be that an efficient and well-run dictatorship or monarchy can compete with Western-style democracy (though I'm not sure China is "well-run" enough in this sense to be a good test case).

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Political freedom as in the freedom to vote for a third party who will never make it to power ?

pg• 17 years ago

It may actually break down well before that. There is probably something akin to the Laffer curve for the power of the central government. I.e. at a certain point, making the government more powerful will make the country poorer.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Boy would I like to believe that. What is the evidence from China that this is true? Perhaps their history of paternalism meshes well with tolerating the yoke.

We'll see what happens when there is a real hiccup in the system. They've enjoyed huge growth for so many years.

Note that I'm saying you're wrong, and people will tolerate political oppression while they have increasing material wealth. When things go bad, they might go really bad.

bokonist• 17 years ago

China is not a totalitarian country (or at least not anymore so than post-New Deal U.S.). Authoritarian!=Totalitarian.

bilbo0s3• 17 years ago

Point of fact . . .

It is actually Authoritarianism.

That said . . .

Yes, it is very efficient.

jerf• 17 years ago

Let's get excited about the efficiencies when the product is delivered on schedule, on budget, and with good quality. Governments the world over announce wondrous things like this all the time, but none of them have a lock on going over budget, over schedule, and with distinctly less quality than was promised.

(I'm not saying all government projects are failures; if you thought I said that, read more carefully please.)

borism• 17 years ago

oh, private companies and individuals do this all the time just as well :)

ATB• 17 years ago

High-speed train competition is a fascinating topic (if you're a.. uh.. trainspotter :))

For about a decade, Germany has been trying to sell the 'Transrapid' mag-lev trains and tech to China. Transrapid was sponsored by various German governments (both federal and state) for well over two decades, with the occasional state PM or federal minister turning it into their pet project (e.g. to link an airport to a city, or to link two big cities), etc. The Transrapid patent is from 1934 and the first test track was completed in Germany in 1987, almost twenty years after planning first started.

Unfortunately (for the Transrapid guys), 'normal' train technology started catching up, and the technological hurdles to implementing long-distance mag-lev trains remain prohibitively expensive, despite vast sums being sunk into it by the German government (not only is the actual technology quite sensitive, but the tranches that need to be built tend to be elevated and very straight - which doesn't work well in densely populated areas like Europe).

In the late 90s and early 00s, the only way forward seemed to be selling it to a place needing fast trains and having no scruples about building the tranches wherever they damn well please. Enter China. A few years ago, a German-Chinese joint venture built a single 19-mile track to connect Shanghai to its airport.

The real kicker? The German companies behind Transrapid continue to allege that the Chinese are stealing the technology and implementation details from the German side of the joint-venture so they can build their own -- much cheaper. Or as China Daily reported, the State Council is 'encouraging engineers to "learn and absorb foreign advanced technologies while making further innovations."'

The cost for the aforementioned 19-mile Transrapid track was $1.4 billion dollars. The cost of 80 high-speed Bombardier trains (running on presumably standard rail lines)? $4 billion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

It might please you then to know that in dutch 'ATB' stands for 'automatische trein beveiliging', loosely translated to 'automatic train protection'.

AndrewJ• 17 years ago

American here, I think it'd be amazing if we'd increase our infrastructure by taking oh, say, two billion and helping to cost down someone building these in the US.

I admit I haven't researched this more, but someone just mentioned that there's talks about a cross country high speed rail being built; it would go through MI and that's how I came into contact with the topic. I'd love to see something like that happen...stop building 2/10 bombs and build a few trains/bridges :)

garnet7• 17 years ago

Love riding the train. Such efficient transportation. So much more relaxing than driving the car. Personally though, I like the old technology. Steel wheels on steel rails still goes plenty fast, feels smooth, is cheap, and is so terribly simple that it's hard (but of course not impossible) for things to go wrong.

China Buys 80 Very High Speed Trains (236 mph) for $4 Billion

Related Stories