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China aims for fastest bullet train

— Photo: Xinhua

Hi-tech marvel: A bullet train named “Hexie" or “harmony" seen in this file photo.

Beijing: Clearly not ready to let go of the Olympic motto — higher, faster, stronger — even after the end of the 2008 Games, Chinese state media has announced the country’s plans for developing the world’s fastest bullet train. The new train would link China’s political capital Beijing to its commercial centre Shanghai and would run at a speed of 380 km per hour, or 30 km per hour more than the current generation of bullet train, making it the fastest the world has ever seen.

Monday’s announcement merely upped the antennae of China’s ambitions. The project to have a high-speed connection between the two cities by 2012 was already in the pipelines, with work having begun in April this year. However, the original speed of the new train had been expected to be 350 km per hour. The train would cut down travel time between Beijing and Shanghai to four hours, from the 10-12 hours it currently takes to cross the 1,318-km distance.

This latest announcement comes barely a month after China’s first bullet train began operating in July between Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, reducing the journey time to just half an hour. While the Tianjin route uses trains relying on technology imported from the German engineering heavyweight Siemens, China says it would soon be able to produce similar, even faster trains, domestically.

“We have mastered core technologies in terms of manufacturing high-speed trains and made innovative achievements in the process,” the official China Daily newspaper quoted Zhang Shuguang, the Ministry of Railways’ deputy chief engineer, as saying.

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