This is of course nothing new: original plans were initiated in 2006 by China’s Ministry of Railways with 2008 seeing the opening of the dedicated high speed link from Beijing (北京) to Tianjin (天津). In December 2009 the link from Guangzhou (广东广州) in the south began whizzing passengers to Wuhan (湖北武汉) and back at average speeds of 312km/h – currently the fastest long distance rail line in the world.

In fact, several similar high speed lines are now in operation with more coming, in addition to many semi-high speed (250km/h) railways. Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the China high speed rail situation.

What caught my eyes are the ambitious plans to extend high speed rail travel to Europe: at just over 8,100km that comes to a little over 24 hours, though of course straight line is not possible. It’s a hugely ambitious plan, not least because of differences in track gauge (both S.E. Asia below China & Russia / Far-Eastern Europe to the West are on different gauges), but financing, planning permission, and operation logistics are all issues to be resolved. And then there’s visa’s.

China is already in discussion with 17 nations regarding this very issue, having reportedly already reaching basic agreements with Myanmar and Russia, the former to be funded by China in exchange for vital resources. There’s much debate over the imperialistic tendencies of China here with its ever-increasing dominance in Asia – but there’s no arguing that such a railway connection would provide a huge boost in logistic capability for all involved.

I’m more interested to see how this pans out in Europe. Just yesterday the UK Government announced a high speed link from London to Birmingham, stretching eventually to Manchester and Leeds. With construction slated to begin in 2017 and considering that it took eight years to obtain planning permission for Heathrow’s T5, that’s a huge contrast to China which is aiming for 10,000km of track by 2015. I can’t condone forced evictions nor balk at due process, but sometimes it takes a powerful government to think big and actually achieve something.

I hope China pushes hard with this. It won’t be easy.