China's high-speed train system is about to complete, it will be the world's largest, fastest, and most technologically sophisticated train in the world.
The high-speed rail line that will eventually connect Beijing with Shanghai is expected to cut travel time from 10 hours to four when the line opens in a couple of years. The top speed on trains that will run from Beijing to Shanghai will approach 220 miles an hour.
Creating a rail system in a country of 1.3 billion people guarantees that the scale will be gargantuan. Almost 16,000 miles of new track will have been laid when the build-out is done in 2020. China will consume about 117 million tons of concrete just to construct the buttresses on which the tracks will be carried.
The total amount of rolled steel on the Beijing-to-Shanghai line alone would be enough to construct 120 copies of the "Bird's Nest" -- the iconic Olympic stadium in Beijing. The top speed on trains that will run from Beijing to Shanghai will approach 220 miles an hour. Last year passengers in China made 1.4 billion rail journeys, and Chinese railroad officials expect that in a nation whose major cities are already choked with traffic, the figure could easily double over the next decade.
But this project symbolizes even more than that. This monumental infrastructure build-out has become the centerpiece of China's effort to navigate the global financial crisis and the ensuing recession.
Source: cnn.com
