High Speed Rail in the UK or HS2 as it has now become known will connect London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds by 2032. This seems an awful long time, and for people living in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle, it may be even longer.
Planning permission, legal challenges, compensation, funding issues, delays, demolitions, buying people’s homes and relocating them all add up to time. Whereas in China, things are so much different.
The 1,318km Beijing-Shanghai high-speed route went from design to completion in only 39 months. The much longer 2,298 km Beijing to the southern city of Guangzhou line has opened on Boxing Day 2012. The Chinese trains cruise at a speed of 309 km/h… I should know, I’ve been on them. They still stop many times, but they slow down and speed up quicker, and passengers only get around 30 seconds to disembark and embark the train. They don’t mess around in China!
China have now overtook Japan as the world’s leading makers of High Speed Rail. They have built incredible bridges and tunnels to connect their huge country. They view high speed trains as a better mass transit alternative to the aeroplane. There is also a long held dream of being able to travel from London to Beijing by rail in less than 3 days. Whether or not that is possible who knows. But China is certainly doing their bit.
Forcing through such an ambitious project would be political suicide for a democratic Government. Prime Minister David Cameron said as much: "It's difficult to get things built in a modern industrial democracy like Britain - that's why we need to get going now."
And just to show how not everything goes to plan in communist China, there was this tale of a man who refused to allow his house to be knocked down when a new motorway was built through his town:
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