33 years ago, in 1990, when the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe had just collapsed and the Soviet Union was about to collapse, I traveled to Europe and witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in Germany.
At that time, I went to France and took a TGV bullet train. I saw a speed of 250 kilometers per hour and felt very advanced. I thought to myself that our green train only has a speed of 50 kilometers per hour. When will our country have such a fast train?
Thirty-three years later, the world has changed.
On September 22, the nation’s first high-speed rail in Florida, USA, finally opened for operation. Florida decided to start building a high-speed rail as early as 1996, but it took 27 years to build part of it. This high-speed rail has a total length of 378 kilometers and runs between Miami and Orlando. But the speed of this high-speed train is not particularly exciting. Its top speed is only 200 kilometers per hour.
American high-speed rail is not high-speed. 200 kilometers per hour? In China, it is not called high-speed rail, it can only be called EMU. According to the definition of the Ministry of Railways of China: high-speed rail refers to railway lines with a speed of 300 kilometers per hour or above. Even according to the definition of the International Union of Railways (UIC), only trains with a speed of more than 250 kilometers per hour can be called high-speed rail. What the United States created is a fake high-speed rail.
High-speed rail in the United States is extremely expensive. The original budget of California’s high-speed rail was US$77 billion, which has now risen to US$113 billion. The entire 826-kilometer railway is now less than half built, with an average cost of US$137 million per kilometer, equivalent to nearly 1 billion yuan. However, the average cost per kilometer of China’s high-speed rail is already less than 100 million yuan, and it is a real high-speed rail.
High-speed rail fares in the United States are also expensive. The “high-speed rail” in the United States: a total length of 378 kilometers, the lowest second-class ticket price is 79 US dollars (569 yuan), and it takes 3 hours to arrive. Compare China’s Fuzhou to Xiamen high-speed rail: the total length is 277 kilometers, the second-class ticket price is 126 yuan, and it can be reached in 55 minutes. In terms of fare per kilometer, the fare of “high-speed rail” in the United States is 3.3 times that of China’s high-speed rail.
You can take a look at the Indonesian high-speed rail. On September 7, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway jointly built by China and Indonesia was officially opened. It has a total length of 142 kilometers, a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour, and a total investment of 7.3 billion US dollars. The average cost per kilometer converted into RMB is 370 million yuan, which is only one-third of the cost in the United States. One, since then, the time from Jakarta to Bandung has been shortened from 4 hours to 40 minutes, making Indonesia the first country in ASEAN to have a high-speed railway. Indonesia’s high-speed rail is far faster and more cost-effective than the United States.
When Indonesia surpassed the United States, the world changed, and behind it was the support of China’s manufacturing power.
In fact, the United States is aware of the gap between itself and China and will speak out when necessary. As early as 2021, U.S. President Biden gave a speech in which he hoped that all walks of life would support funding for rebuilding the U.S. manufacturing industry. He unexpectedly asked the American people a question, “Do you know the speed of China’s high-speed rail? The speed is about 480 kilometers per hour. “Although Biden exaggerated the speed of China’s high-speed trains, compared with ordinary American railway trains, the speed difference is five times.
In fact, a few years ago, the United States and China discussed China’s assistance in building high-speed rail in the United States. China Railway Corporation and Express West issued a statement in 2015, announcing that the two parties would cooperate to build a 370-kilometer long railway connecting Las Vegas. High-speed rail between Sri Lanka and Los Angeles. However, only one year later, the American company unilaterally announced the termination of this cooperation, apparently for political reasons. As a result, Americans watched in vain as Indonesians took the “real high-speed rail” that was much faster than them.
33 years ago, who would have thought that something like this would happen this year?
Lu Yongxiong
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2023-10-06 10:43:41
