Rail key to China's drive for faster, greener economy (Feature)

By Bill Smith Sep 16, 2008, 8:34 GMT

Beijing - China set one of its many records in railway construction with the opening of a literally breathtaking line over the 5,000-metre Tangu-la Pass on the Tibetan Plateau in 2006.

Some 2,500 kilometres away from Tibet on the eastern coast, it reached another milestone last month with inaugurating its fastest line for high-speed 'bullet' trains.

Engineers said trains were capable of reaching up to 350 kilometres per hour on the 115-kilometre run from Beijing to Tianjin, shortening the journey time from 70 minutes to 30 minutes.

'In China the transportation problems cannot be solved by cars and planes alone,' said Yang Xinmiao, a professor at the transportation engineering institute of Beijing's prestigious Qinghua University.

'Mostly, you should rely on trains,' Yang told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

China's railway network already stretches to 63,000 kilometres and crosses four time zones, with about 40 per cent electrified and the rest relying on diesel locomotives.

About 6,000 kilometres of track has been upgraded to take trains travelling up to 200 kph. The government aims to double this to 12,000 kilometres by 2020, adding 16 new express passenger lines.

Chinese railways carried 3.13 billion tons of freight last year, a rise of 8.6 per cent from 2006. Some 1.36 billion passengers - equivalent to the entire Chinese population - travelled by Chinese trains last year, according to the Ministry of Railways.

The ministry said freight and passenger volume continued to rise in the first half of this year, by 6.8 per cent and 12.6 per cent, respectively.

Already the rail network has links to Europe via Central Asia and Russia. Two lines through Siberia also carry vital oil to China from Russia, with textiles and other manufactured goods moving in the opposite direction.

Government policies to expand the network seem to be the main driver of growth in railway usage.

But rising global oil prices, which are being partially passed on to Chinese motorists and air passengers, also appear to have played a part.

'Research shows that after the oil price rises, more people are inclined to take mass transportation like the metro and buses,' Yang said.

'I think it must also have some influence on the railway system,' he said.

The ruling Communist Party has highlighted construction of inter-city and urban railways as an important part of its drive for more sustainable, environmentally friendly economic development.

The biggest project under construction is a 1,318-kilometre, 21-billion-dollar line from Beijing to Shanghai, a journey that many business people currently make by air.

The railway ministry has designed the new Beijing-Shanghai line to double the passenger capacity between the two cities to 160 million annually when it opens in 2013.

The Beijing-Shanghai line will be important for China's development of its own advanced railway technology systems, with 70 per cent of its technology made in China, He Huawu, the railway ministry's chief engineer, told state media.

'The principle is to introduce up-to-date foreign technologies, (and) tap into them by carrying out joint design and manufacturing and cultivating a local brand name,' He was quoted as saying.

Despite the huge publicity attached to bullet trains and other showpiece projects like the railway to Tibet and the world's first commercial magnetic levitation - or maglev - railway in Shanghai, Yang believes China must continue to rely on imported technology for upgrading the system.

'China has a good basic infrastructure for the railway system,' he said. 'But for the hi-tech equipment there are some problems.'

'Now we have a very big market in high-speed railways, so German, French and Japanese companies all want to sell technology to us,' Yang said.

Speculation has mounted in recent months that Germany's Transrapid consortium, which is led by Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, will eventually sell its maglev technology to China.

Transrapid still hopes that China will extend the 30-kilometre, 1-billion-dollar Shanghai airport link that the German group completed in 2003.

The government has repeatedly delayed the 170-kilometre extension to the eastern city of Hangzhou, blaming protests by Shanghai residents and doubts over maglev's cost efficiency, but last month it said it planned to start building the line in 2010.

The railway ministry is seen as one of the main obstacles to maglev, and most railway construction in China is contracted to state-run firms under the ministry or its regional branches.

Yang said that the ministry's bureaucratic workings also make genuine privatization of rail transport in China extremely unlikely in the near future.

'I once visited a train station along the (old) high-speed railway from Beijing to Shanghai,' Yang said.

'It was really terrible with a design concept from the former Soviet Union,' he said.

'If you get off at the train station, you have to walk at least 1 kilometre with your heavy luggage to the bus station. Who would do that?'