Chinese Trains, Indian Trains

[beijingwalker]

see what you fellow indians comment on the two countries

Chinese Trains, Indian Trains

We travelled from Beijing to Shanghai by the high-speed train days after it was introduced. A week later, on our return journey from a holiday in the land of dragons, we took a train from Ernakulam town in India's southern Kerala state to Coimbatore, across the border in Tamil Nadu. Both the journeys were completed in under five hours. Distance between Beijing and Shanghai: 1318 km; between Ernakulam and Coimbatore: 178 km.
The coaches of the sleek-nosed, gleaming, white Chinese train could match the cabin of a commercial airplane, constantly cleaned by uniformed women attendants on the lookout for any litter.
“Mom, the train is dirty,” said a little girl with a distinct American twang, holding her nose tight as we boarded the Indian train. Her NRI (non-resident Indian) mother and grandfather shushed the little one, lest some patriotic Indian consider her observation blasphemous.
“She is only telling the truth,” said my wife as the girl looked at the elders triumphantly. A ticket examiner said apologetically,” We can’t do anything as the cleaning has been handed over to a private party.”
The two trains are symbolic of the wide gap in the developmental graphs of the world’s two fastest growing economies and the way they are going about it, as your graph has projected.
Like the high-speed train that was introduced on June 30, eve of the 90th birthday of the Communist Party of China, hurtles from the clean Beijing South railway station to the snazzy Shanghai, the country’s financial hub at over 300 kmph, the country seems to be dizzyingly zooming towards its single-hearted pursuit of super power status.
“Why is that we are unable to do what the Chinese are doing?” my wife constantly asked as we took in the capital city with its impressive six-lane highways and eyes-pleasing landscaping, the Forbidden City and other tourist spots, kept spectacularly clean, despite the thousands who visit the sites every day.
I said China had a policy that controlled migration of rural people to the urban centres.
“What’s the population of Beijing,” she asked.
About 20 million, I said.
“That’s more than Delhi’s population. Still look at the difference,” my wife said pointedly.
If Beijing was a revelation, spanking Shanghai was a confirmation that we have decades to catch up with our neighbour.
No one was seen urinating or defecating on the roadsides or along the railway tracks, a ubiquitous part of Indian scenery. The reason was not difficult to find. The Chinese have built lavatories across these cities, helping the people maintain their personal dignity. And these public conveniences are kept spotlessly clean, mostly. Many of these were set up ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
The Chinese trains, however, have not been without their share of glitches. Hours after we arrived in Shanghai, heavy rains and lightning brought the entire Bullet train system on the sector to a halt. Local news reports said the passengers were stuck in the fully-sealed trains for over two hours and there was panic onboard.
A collision between two high-speed trains on July 23 near the city of Wenzhou that left over 35 people dead underlines the need for improving safety measures. The speed of the Beijing-Shanghai train, which was initially planned to run at 350 kmph, was reduced to 300 kmph and later to 250 kmph due to these concerns.
“We have accidents almost daily even when our trains run at bullock-cart speed,” my wife underlined the irony.
You just can’t win some arguments.

Chinese trains and railway stations
Beijing south railway station and China's railway development - SkyscraperCity

 

[Korean]

There is nothing to brag about China's bullet trains, especially after the Wenzhou crash and the Shanghai subway crash. It's always better to be late than to be dead.

 

[beijingwalker]

only 20 years ago,China's railway system was far behind India,Indian inherited from Britain a pretty well establish railway system,but now....

China speeds past India's slow train to Himalayas

Published on Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 10:30 | Source : Reuters

India's struggle to build a railway to troubled Kashmir has become a symbol of the infrastructure gap with neighbouring China, whose speed in building road and rail links is giving it a strategic edge on the mountainous frontier.

Nearly quarter of a century after work began on the project aimed at integrating the revolt-torn territory and bolstering the supply route for troops deployed there, barely a quarter of the 345-km (215-mile) Kashmir track has been laid.

Tunnels collapsed, funds dried up and, faced with the challenge of laying tracks over the 11,000 foot (3,352 metre) Pir Panjal range, railway officials and geologists bickered over the route, with some saying it was just too risky.

The proposed train, which will run not far from the heavily militarised border with Pakistan, has also faced threats from militants fighting Indian rule in the disputed region, with engineers kidnapped in the early days of the project.

China's rail system has been plagued by scandal. A bullet train crash in July killed 40 people and triggered a freeze on new rail project approvals, but the country managed to build the 1,140-km (710-mile) Qinghai-Tibet line, which crosses permanently frozen ground and climbs to more than 5,000 metres above sea level, in five years flat.

It has also built bitumen roads throughout its side of the frontier, making it easier for Chinese troops to move around -- and mass there, if confrontation ever escalates.

Indians have long fretted about the economic advantages that China gains from its infrastructure expertise. But the tale of India's hardships in building the railway line also shows how China's mastery of infrastructure could matter in the territorial disputes that still dog relations.

Both train networks, China's running far to the north and India's hundreds of miles away in the southern reaches of the Himalayas, reflect the desire to tighten political and economic links with their two restive regions - the Tibet Autonomous region in China's case and Kashmir for India.

But they would also form a key element of military plans to move men and armour in the forbidding region in a time of conflict.

Should India-China relations ever deteriorate to the verge of military confrontation and if riots in Tibet erupt, the People's Liberation Army's mountain brigades can rapidly deploy to the region. Railway and road construction have been China's Himalayan strategy for decades.

"China outstrips India in at least three respects: the ability to execute large and complex projects; rapid implementation; and - importantly - the foresight to embark upon these projects for economic and strategic purposes," said Shashank Joshi, at London's Royal United Services Institute, who has written extensively on India-China ties.

He also said China was also more proficient at concealing its failures because of its closed political system and excellent information management.

On the other hand, India hasn't yet determined its priorities in the region, which shares borders with both Pakistan and China.

"India has to decide what it wants to be. If integrating Kashmir is a top national priority, then the project should have moved on a war footing long ago," said one visibly exasperated military commander in Kashmir.

Signs of struggle

In the lower stretch of the line, workers are struggling to build tunnels through soft mountains to bring the track from the railhead in Udhampur, 25 km (15 miles) away.

Of the seven they built over the past four years, one has collapsed and the other is seeping water. Now engineers have gone back to the drawing board to figure out an alternative route.

"That is the way the project has been undertaken. You tunnel and then you find it is not holding. You then try and skirt around it like a bypass surgery," said Chehat Ram, chief administrative officer of Northern Railway.

This is only the first of the tough stretches of the network that will run through some of the world's most spectacular mountains and gorges, offering an alternative to the single highway that connects Kashmir and is vulnerable to bad weather.

Bigger challenges lie further down the track, including building the world's tallest single-span bridge over the river Chenab at an elevation of 387 metres (1,270 feet), higher than the Eiffel Tower at 324 metres.

Across the valley floor are signs of the struggle to build a network that even the country's former British rulers gave up on after briefly considering it in 1898 because of the forbidding and often uninhabitable terrain.

A tunnel built into a cliff edge has been abandoned near Tikri in the lower section, at another place work has been stopped after workers found that the section in the hills they had blasted and drilled through had become waterlogged.

The train station built at Katra in anticipation of the line is looking worn out, with paint peeling off and moss growing on the building, two years after it was completed.

Local herdsmen leave their ponies to graze in the grounds around the eerily empty building.

"People have lost their land, there are no jobs and there is no train," said Lal Chand, a herdsman.

The deadline for completion of the project was August 2007, but it has been pushed back to 2017, and even that is seen as an optimistic assessment. Cost estimates have jumped, from Rs 4550 crore (USD 1.0 billion) in 2002 to Rs 1956o crore today.

China, meanwhile, began work last year to build a rail spur that will connect the Tibetan capital of Lhasa with Shigatse, the monastery town that is the seat of the Panchen Lama, the second-most powerful figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

Joshi said China was in a position to bring far greater resources to public sector investment than India. For instance, Indian investment in railways in 2010 was about USD 9-10 billion. In China, it was USD 118 billion.

"If the Chinese had to build the Kashmir track, they'd do it faster and better than the Indians - but it might still fail, and they'd plough much more into it.

Running on the roof of the world，Qinghai–Tibet railway
Running on the roof of the world，Qinghai–Tibet railway - SkyscraperCity

 

[beijingwalker]

There is nothing to brag about China's bullet trains, especially after the Wenzhou crash and the Shanghai subway crash. It's always better to be late than to be dead.

“We have accidents almost daily even when our trains run at bullock-cart speed,” my wife underlined the irony.
You just can’t win some arguments.

haha,the bullet train derailment in Japan and Germany killed more people.that rare anyway.bullcok cart is safe?depends..ha

 

[oct605032048]

Trains in South Korea will never be able to run that fast. Once you start to accelerate, Ops, you run into another country.

 

[beijingwalker]

lol whats so great about stupid fu*****g trains anyway its not rocket science.

haha,stay cool,keep your shirt on..

 

[beijingwalker]

high speed train derailments happened sometimes ,air crash also happens.but very rare and wont stop the technology advancement,Chinese high speed train system for years safely and quickly moved thousands of millions of people,the world biggest human movement,that's the achievement the country accomplished

The Amagasaki rail crash occurred on 25 April 2005 at 09:19 local time (00:19 UTC), just after the local rush hour. The Rapid Service (a seven-car commuter train) came off the tracks on the West Japan Railway Company (JR West) Fukuchiyama Line (JR Takarazuka Line) in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture, near Osaka, just before Amagasaki Station on its way for Dōshisha-mae via the JR Tōzai Line and the Gakkentoshi Line, and the front two carriages rammed into an apartment building. The first carriage slid into the first floor parking garage and as a result took days to remove. Of the roughly 700 passengers (initial estimate was 580 passengers) on board at the time of the crash, 106 passengers, in addition to the driver, were killed and 555 others injured. Most passengers and bystanders have said that the train appeared to have been travelling too fast. The incident was Japan's most serious since the 1963 Yokohama rail crash in which two passenger trains collided with a derailed freight train, killing 162 people

Eschede train disaster
The Eschede train disaster was the world's deadliest high-speed train accident. It occurred on 3 June 1998, near the village of Eschede in the Celle district of Lower Saxony, Germany. The toll of 101 people dead and 88 (estimated) injured surpassed the 1971 Dahlerau train disaster as the deadliest accident in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was caused by a single fatigue crack in one wheel which, when it finally failed, caused the train to derail at a switch.

 

[Korean]

Trains in South Korea will never be able to run that fast.

??? Korean and Chinese bullet trains both run at same top speed of 300 km/hr. Chinese railway ministry permanently reduced top speed of all Chinese trains to 300 km/hr after the Wenzhou crash.

On the other hand, Korean high speed railway will increase its top speed to 370 km/hr on the Honam HSR going online in 2015, and 350 km/hr on existing main corridor with the arrival of HEMU-400X.

---------- Post added at 04:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:58 PM ----------

Meet the world's fastest steel-wheel bullet train; the HEMU-400X(Certified speed of 430 km/hr, revenue service speed of 370 km/hr).

 

[oct605032048]

It's your story and What a big "will" or if.

---------- Post added at 08:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:02 PM ----------

And once you lied, you'll always be a liar. Just as what you did with this post.
http://www.defence.pk/forums/world-affairs/138872-chinas-xinhua-reveals-pics-kim-jong-euns-wife-much-sought-cia.html#post2258403

 

[Frank Martin]

Its actually a sad part..cant disagree with this, but we do have some better trains and journey by train is cost effective too

 

[Korean]

[/COLOR]And once you lied, you'll always be a liar.

So Xinhua, China's official news agency, is a perpetual liar.

But we all knew that.

 

[Nelson]

Since this is Indian railways vs Chinese railways....


I heard that China had aided some railway stuff to pakistan but it was of low quality and of no use, then pakistan had to request Indian railways for help
enough said..

 

[illusion8]

{I heard that China had aided some railway stuff to pakistan but it was of no use, then pakistan had to request India for help in railways..

enough said..}


please elaborate, i need a hearty laugh.

 

[Nelson]

{I heard that China had aided some railway stuff to pakistan but it was of no use, then pakistan had to request India for help in railways..

enough said..}


please elaborate, i need a hearty laugh.

Sure. Pakistan got 150 engines from China for 8 billion rupees but those were substandards and disaster, therefore pakistan requested India for help. It would give you the idea of comparison that this thread is actually about.

read this.

Will India agree to give 50 engines to Pak railways as Chinese imports flop : Pakistan: News India Today

 

[Korean]

The train in the left is known as Siemens Velaro, the right one is Kawasaki Shinkansen E2.