The Chinese Are Coming

English: The Bering Strait, separating Siberia from Alaska in the North Pacific. NASA image, taken by MISR sattelite Deutsch: Die Beringstraße: sie trennt Ostsibirien von Alaska und verbindet den Pazifischen Ozean mit dem Polarmeer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Beijing to the US by train: China outlines plans to connect world by high speed rail network

The 'China to Russia plus the United States' line proposed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering would start in the north east of China, travel up through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska and down through Canada before reaching the contiguous US ..... a link to London via Paris, Berlin and Moscow, along with a second route to Europe following the silk road to reach as far as Germany via Iran and Turkey ...... A fourth Pan-Asian line, connecting China with Singapore via Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, is reportedly already under construction. Proposals for lines running from China to Africa are currently being drawn up ..... 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. .... China already has the technology in place as it will be used to connect the country to Taiwan by underwater high-speed train requiring a 150km long tunnel.

Related articles

• China Proposes The 'China-Russia-Canada-America Line' - An Intercontinental Railway Line
• Train from China to US
• Chinese experts 'in discussions' over building high-speed Beijing-US railway
• Chinese Digital Strategy: Baidu is only the Beginning
• China mulls high-speed train to US: report
• China to Build High-Speed Railway Line from Beijing to US?
• China 'in discussions' about high-speed rail lines to London, Germany - and the US
• China considers building a rail link to AMERICA: 8,000-mile journey would take less than two days and involve going through 125-mile undersea tunnel to Alaska
• Chinese experts 'in discussions' over building high-speed Beijing-US railway

Fast Is Fast

China is ahead of America on clean energy, and China is ahead of America on fast trains. These high speed trains seem to compete with air travel, and I mean in terms of time taken, airport time included. That's fascinating.

I don't see why land acquisition is a problem. The value of land on both sides of the track goes up. Does that not pay for the loss of land?

World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens in China

the world’s longest high-speed rail line, covering a distance in eight hours that is about equal to that from New York to Key West, Florida, or from London across Europe to Belgrade. .... 186 miles an hour ..... Guangzhou, the main metropolis in southeastern China. Older trains still in service on a parallel rail line take 21 hours; Amtrak trains from New York to Miami, a shorter distance, still take nearly 30 hours. ..... China has resumed rapid construction on one of the world’s largest and most ambitious infrastructure projects, a network of four north-south routes and four east-west routes that span the country. ..... the national network has helped reduce toxic air pollution in Chinese cities and curb demand for imported diesel fuel, by freeing up a lot of capacity on older rail lines for goods to be carried by freight trains instead of heavily polluting, costlier trucks ..... Debt to finance the construction has reached nearly 4 trillion renminbi, or $640 billion, making it one of the most visible reasons total debt has been surging as a share of economic output in China, and approaching levels in the West. ..... the high-speed lines, which haul only passengers ..... The high-speed trains are also considerably more expensive than the heavily subsidized older passenger trains. A second-class seat on the new bullet trains from Beijing to Guangzhou costs 865 renminbi, compared with 426 renminbi for the cheapest bunk on one of the older trains, which also have narrow, uncomfortable seats for as little as 251 renminbi. ....... The first line, from Beijing to Tianjin, opened a week before the 2008 Olympics; a little more than four years later, the country now has 9,349 kilometers, or 5,809 miles, of high-speed lines. ...... a country where four-fifths of new cars are sold to first-time buyers, often with scant driving experience ..... Flights between Beijing and Guangzhou take about three hours and 15 minutes. But air travelers in China need to arrive at least an hour before a flight, compared with 20 minutes for high-speed trains, and the airports tend to be farther from the centers of cities than the high-speed train stations.... Land acquisition is the toughest part of building high-speed rail lines in the West, because the tracks need to be almost perfectly straight ...... the 800-seat trains are often sold out as many as 10 trains in advance on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, even though the trains travel as often as every four minutes, and even lunchtime trains at midweek are often full as well.

Related articles

• China opens world's longest 2,300-km high-speed rail line
• China launches world's longest high-speed rail
• China launches world's longest high-speed rail
• China rail: high speed from Beijing to Guangzhou opens
• World's Longest Fast Train Line Opens
• World's longest fast train line opens in China
• China Unveils World's Longest Bullet Train Service
• World's longest high-speed rail line opens with speeds of 186mph
• World's longest fast train line opens in China - Khaleej Times
• China launches longest high-speed train line

I Am On Google Plus Now

Image via WikipediaLooks like somebody at Google read my blog post from earlier in the day.

The Facebook Skype Integration Is Huge

Now if only people from the Department Of Homeland Security started reading my blog, I would be all set.

Using Political Contacts To Beat The Immigration Beast
Subhash Chandra Bose

Hillary Clinton went to Beijing as First Lady to speak on women's rights. This was in 1995, I believe. In her hotel room she wondered if she might be able to read the Wall Street Journal. A copy mysteriously got delivered. That is when they realized the Chinese had bugged her room and were listening into her conversations.

So someone on her staff wondered aloud, I wonder if we could have pizza.

The pizza did not magically appear.

I am on, yo.

The Long March Of Democracy

During the recent Blogger outage, a whole bunch of my blog posts got lost. And then all of them came back except this one at my Barackface blog. Since it had already been cross published at Technorati, I still had a copy.

Just One More Missing Blog Post
Miracle: The Lost Blog Posts Are Back
Lost A Whole Bunch Of Blog Posts
And Blogger Is Back

The Long March Of Democracy

The military action in Libya has absolutely been the right move. And a limited military action in Syria might be called for soon enough, something that is a week max. But military action is not an option when the tide of democracy finally hits Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and China.