How China Built a Train in 9 Hours?!

While some of us were probably sitting at our desks yawning into a coffee and blinking at our emails, over in China a huge group of workers were busy creating the railway for a new train station - being so efficient at their job that it only took them 9 hours. Even Elon Musk tweets and praised the high efficiency of the railway project.

The construction involves connecting three railways, the Ganlong Railway, Ganruilong Railway and Zhanglong Railway, to the newly constructed Nanlong Railway in Longyan, China's Fujian province. You’ll be surprised to hear that the project was initiated at 6 P.M and was completed at 2:20 am the next day with thousands of construction machinery and 1,500 railway staff. The project's purpose was to connect Longyan and Nanping two cities in southeast China. According to Xinhua News, the Longyan-Nanping railway was upgraded to over 250 kilometers with a design allowing trains to run at a speed of 200 km per hour, reducing travel time between the two cities from 7 hours to 90 minutes.

According to Shan Daosong, a deputy manager of China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group, 7 trains and 23 diggers were employed, and the employees were divided into seven groups to work on different jobs equally so that the project could be completed fast. China's Incredible High-Speed Rail (HSR) network China has the largest and most extensively used of high-speed railway network in the world. Lines cross the nation in excess of 40,000 km by the end of 2021, accounts for two-thirds of the world's total high-speed railway networks. Half of that amount has been built in the previous 7 years.

By 2035, the network is planned to boom and set to reach 70,000 km. The HSR network encompasses newly built rail lines with a design speed of 200–350 km/h and 75% of Chinese cities with populations of 500,000 or more will have a HSR system by 2022. In 2021, China National Railways was operating over 9,600 high-speed trains on a daily basis. This included the world’s only high-speed overnight sleeper services on certain chosen longer-distance routes. More than 100 tunnels, each over 10 kilometers long, were also built as part of this network. Several long-span bridges were built over natural obstacles like the Yangtze River. There were several innovations that were incorporated to suit the unique demands of China’s varied terrain and climate. Chinese companies introduced autonomous driverless train operations and advanced signaling and control technology. An example, the driverless “bullet trains” connecting Beijing and Zhangjiakou in northern Hebei province are able to hit speeds up to 350 km/h, making them the world’s quickest autonomous trains. The brand-new route opened in December 2019 and was deployed for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic games, has lowered travel time for the 174-kilometer journey from 2 hours to 45 minutes. “The bullet train” is running at a speed of 350 km/h with fully automated driving.

Meanwhile the train is also integrated with 5G and 4K technologies fitted with the world’s first 5G ultra-HD mobile studio on a high-speed rail. In terms of energy-saving technologies, this train adopts a large number of environmentally friendly and degradable materials, so the recovery rate of the inner decorations can reach more than 75%. The train also has a streamlined locomotive which can reduce the overall energy consumption by more than 10%, which means it could save 1.8 million kilo watts hours of electricity a year.

China is aiming to make high-speed rail the preferred mode of transportation choice for domestic long-distance travel. High-speed railways and China made MU Trains are shinning advertisement for China. With the spread of the HSR, comes an opportunity for China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping, to use it for social cohesion, expanding political influence, and the consolidation of faraway regions with varied cultures into the mainstream.

Does China have any special ministries or agencies responsible for the layout and development of transportation networks? The Ministry of Transport is in charge of it. they are now responsible for the overall planning of the transportation networks. But in the past, different types of transportation were constructed accordingly.

Pros and Cons for China: The HSR projects are supported by investment funds and loans. They are strengthening China’s position as the regional superpower in Asia, while also pulling in developing nations by proposing to build such rail lines there. These nations will probably rely on the rail networks built by China, further increasing their economic dependence on Beijing. Some studies show the new transport infrastructure could stimulate real estate business and attract foreign investment to central and western China. They can also increase the local government’s tax revenues. Researchers studying the economic impact of HSR found that in eastern China, one such rail station boosted the economy by nearly 9 percent within a range of 4km. In central China, this increase was found to be 3.6 percent, while in the north-east it was 4.4 percent. However, researchers also noted that on average, each high-speed rail station in western China corresponded to a more than 1.5 percent fall in the intensity of local economic activity there.

A study published in the journal China Industrial Economics in September showed that the construction of HSR lines has accelerated a “brain drain” from western regions as people from there moved to the eastern region. Whatever the balance between the benefits and disadvantages of this system, China is keen on building even faster trains and extending the network across its national borders.