Beijing to the Washington DC by Train: China Plans to Connect the World by High Speed Rail Network

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Beijing to the Washington DC by Train: China Plans to Connect the World by High Speed Rail Network
China’s roll-out of high-speed rail is set to usher in one of the most profound changes to travel patterns in human history. For those astonished by the pace of Chinese development over the past two decades, the coming decade will see even faster change, as most of the country becomes integrated through convenient rail travel. China is not the first to embrace rail. But what Europe and Japan accomplished over 40 years, China has effectively quadrupled in little more than a decade. Perhaps the Chinese rail program will do for fast ground travel what the US space project did for satellite communications

Recently, China has outlined its plan to connect the world by high-speed rail, including an underwater link to the US running a total 13,000km. The ‘China to Russia plus the United States’ line proposed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering would begin in north-east China and run up through Siberia, pass through a tunnel underneath the Pacific Ocean then cut through Alaska and Canada to reach the continental US, according to a report in the state-run Beijing Times newspaper. Crossing the Bering Strait in between Russia and Alaska would require about 200km (125 miles) of undersea tunnel, the paper said, citing Wang Mengshu, a railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering. “Right now we’re already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years,” Wang said. The project nicknamed the “China-Russia-Canada-America” line would run for 13,000km (8,079mi) of track, with 200km (124mi) running through an underwater tunnel beneath the Bering Strait – that's a hair under four times the length of the Channel Tunnel. If the train could manage to average 350km (220mph) per hour, the trip would take less than two days. The China Daily reports that the technology for the tunnel has been developed, and will be used to build a high-speed rail tunnel between the Southern province of Fujian, on China's southeast coast, to Taiwan. "The project will be funded and constructed by China," it said. "The details of this project are yet to be finalized."


The most structurally ambitious of the proposals is the US-China link, which would require around 200km of tunnels to cross the gap between Russia and Alaska - four times the length of the Channel Tunnel. If completed it would become the world's longest underwater tunnel and take an unprecedented feat of engineering.
Other planned lines - construction of which has reportedly began in China - are a link to London via Paris, Berlin and Moscow, along with a second route to Europe following the silk road via Iran and Turkey. The international legs of the lines are currently under negotiation, the paper said.
The Beijing Times listed the China-US line as one of the four international high-speed rail projects currently in the works.
The first is a line that would run from London via Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev and Moscow, where it would split into two routes, one of which would run to China through Kazakhstan and the other through eastern Siberia. The second line would begin in the far-western Chinese city of Urumqi and then run through Silk Road to reach as far as Germany via Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey.The third would begin in the south-western city of Kunming and end in Singapore. The routes are under various stages of planning and development and aimed for completion by 2019, with expansions planned into Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia in the years to come, the state ran paper said.
Passengers could soon travel from London to Beijing in a little over a day on trains travelling almost as fast as airplanes. China is in negotiations to build a 2000 mile high-speed rail network to India, Pakistan and Europe with trains capable of travelling at over 200mph within the next ten years.


The international rail network will boost the exchange of trade and promote China's newly acquired high-speed railway technology, likely the next brand of "Made in China" comparable to world competitors, experts say.

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