Posts from an Australian lost in the Middle Kingdom
In a previous post, we took a dive into the development of China’s High Speed Railway (HSR) and running concurrently with that was the development of the EMU’s (electric multiple unit) being the Harmony model trains and the latest Fuxing model, aka China’s bullet trains.
On August 1, 2008, China opened its first true high speed railway, the 120 km long Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway. By the end of 2019, around 11 years later, the operating mileage of China’s railways will reach more than 139,000 kilometers, of which 35,000 kilometers are high-speed rail, making it the largest rail network, and largest high speed rail network in the world.
China’s train network is extensive to say the least, with nearly every city and town connected via over 90,000 km or tracks. The size is set to grown with the Chinas continuing domestic growth, plus proposals for inter-continental lines that could extend from China into Russia, Germany and even to London and from China through south east Asia as far as Malaysia.