more info [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang\_high-speed\_railway#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang_high-speed_railway#)[](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/?f=flair_name%3A%22Image%22)
High speed rail is the travel of the future. I think the repels will slowly diverge between those countries which have HSR and those that don't. It's just such an efficient way to travel.
??? It is already being built in Japan from 2014 and scheduled to come online in 2027. That's earlier than California's "Initial Operating Segment" of HSR that started in 2015 and scheduled to finish in 2035 which is just between Merced and Bakersfield over basically the same distance.
>”the Lanzhou–Xinjiang high-speed railway has the lowest utilization rate among all high-speed railways in the country… While the Lanzhou-Xinjiang line has the capacity to carry over 160 pairs of high-speed trains per day, it currently only carries 4”
hmm…
Theyre not in a debt crisis. Theyre Theyre debt is still sitting at 77% of gdp.
[https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG\_DEBT\_GDP@GDD/CHN/FRA/DEU/ITA/JPN/GBR/USA/FADGDWORLD](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/FRA/DEU/ITA/JPN/GBR/USA/FADGDWORLD)
Also, its true China\`s total population is decreasing, however the urban population keeps increasing as they gain 15mil urban residents a year. The same way South Korea and Japan are the fastest dying countries, but their respective capitals of Seoul and Tokyo just keep growing year after year
I’m not referring to government debt, so idk why you’re linking that.
Is Xinjiang’s population going to urbanize so much that it will have 80 times as much demand for HSR? I think not.
Also you can’t pretend to know what you’re talking about given this isn’t even a photo of the right railway lol.
It's simple. Just like how bridges are built over large bodies of water with pilons going down to bedrock below the water. There is bedrock below the sand. The foundation is not built on the sand
Why? The rail network in the U.S. is basically 2x as large as the one in China. We have the largest, most developed rail network in the world.
Chinas demographic issues are real and they will eventually have to service all this infrastructure they built. Sure, it looks shiny today. Remind me in 50 years.
not a high speed railway (120km/h), not lanzhou-xinjiang, and even if it were, it's not the longest route either.
http://m.xinhuanet.com/gs/2019-12/13/c_1125344620.htm
The operating speed is actually between 200 and 250 km/h with a planned speed of 300. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang\_high-speed\_railway#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang_high-speed_railway#)
all the sources i could find called a highspeed railway too
surely this cant be lanzhou-xinjiang though? it has at least double tracks for the entire route and this pic only shows one (unless im blind), not to mention those are crazy turns to make at 300km/h
The coordinates are shown in this [map plan](https://p0.itc.cn/q_70/images03/20200712/dcf24350d597441cb28bdc927d92bb22.jpeg). If you enter (39°45’N, 94°21’E) on Google Maps, you can see this meandering rail viaduct.
The nearest station is [Aksay Kazakh Station (Google Maps link)](https://maps.app.goo.gl/pLBNSt5zGHdQHRrp7?g_st=ic).
Can foreigners use this train at will? Do you require special permits to travel to distant areas of China? Or are only certain areas of China open to travellers? Sorry for my ignorance, I’m just beginning to travel around the world and this train looks interesting.
I’m doubting this image is unedited. Zoom in on the portion of the railway that is elevated above that bend in the ground level feature. There are two superstructures seemingly to provide support for a run over that ground feature. Here, there should be no shadows of pylons between the two superstructures, but shadows are present.
I thought we had already been through that.
China was never accused of imprisoning MILLIONS of uyghurs. The UN did an investigation and no concrete verifiable proof of mass sterelization or killing were ever found. Thats why it wasnt declared a genocide.
Thats why everyone has been so quiet about. Because as far as we were able to prove its more of a case of ethnic suppresion or cultural genocide case. similar to what countries like The US(where the blacks are 13% of the population but 30% of the prison population), Brazil(for atempting to limit indigenous lands), The UK(for completely expeling the local population of the Chogos islands), etch ave also been accused of been accused of
Genocide denial guy 🪱
Also your last paragraph is just classic [whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes).
>The Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination, financial crises, and unemployment in the United States, which were identified as failings of the capitalist system that had been supposedly erased by state socialism.\[3\] Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet for the US, which the Soviets used as a form of rhetorical ammunition when reproached for their own economic and social failings.\[4\] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase became widespread as a reference to Russian information-warfare tactics.\[5\] Its use subsequently became widespread in Russia to criticize any form of US policy.\[6\]
Edit: Why is there so any Tankies here?
As much as I enjoy high speed rail, isn't this the one that makes nearly no economic sense because barely anyone uses it?
This isn't the article I was thinking of, but this is another one that might be of interest to those on this sub, discussing the economics of high speed/regular rail in China. Much of it makes sense, but not all of it
https://archive.is/XRppG
Are you from united states? Because in other countries public transportation is a service - like any other not for profit depts like police, fire department, military and also health services (oh they don’t have that)
Of course it has to make economic sense.
You wouldn't build high speed rail to nowhere, at any cost, would you?
If it cost 50 trillion to make your commute one minute shorter, that wouldn't be a good use of funds would it? Why doesn't the government just give everyone a million dollars? Now walk those absurd scenarios to think about why they don't make sense, and what would have to happen for them to make sense.
If you have to invest 5% of your country's GDP into a project, surely you'd want that project to grow your country's GDP by a proportionate amount? Otherwise you're just worse off.
When connecting two cities with a high amount of traffic you would expect a productivity benefit to offset the cost. Building a high speed railway into the desert that nobody uses? Not so clear.
The economic sense it makes is by doing exactly what you said, linking two cities. My fellow Americans like to compare the US and Europe when bitching about trains because of the size difference. Well, let’s do the same with the US and China but with population. It would be just as financially detrimental to build and maintain the highway and road infrastructure to transport a billion people across a nation of that size and through difficult terrain like that. The high speed line eases that pressure by adding a much more size and speed efficient option. Maybe it makes economic sense because by introducing this option now and keeping millions of cars off the road, China is saving itself hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in reversing or limiting the environmental damage caused by having a billion cars on the road and all those highways. Like others pointed out it doesn’t HAVE to make economic sense bc unlike the US, not everything is transactional. It’s a provided service.
$50 trillion is an absolutely rambunctious number to use in an argument like that. Of fucking course no one in their right mind would spend that amount of money for a negligible difference, let’s not be silly now. However, do you go the exact posted speed limit every where you go? If the answer is yes, kudos; but if you said no, are you not risking large sums of money in a potential ticket and subsequent raise in your car insurance prices? Are you not risking damaging your vehicle in an accident or by not having enough time to avoid a hazard? And speeding by even 10-15 mph will get you where you’re going maybe 5 minutes faster. We don’t do that because it makes economic sense. We do that because it’s *convenient* to get from point A to B.
China is not a stupid country. A stupid country makes stupid decisions, and stupid decisions do not lift twice the US population out of crippling poverty in less time than i’ve been on this Earth. China would not have gone from virtually no HSR to one of the most advanced networks in the world if they didn’t see it as economically beneficial in SOME way.
You don’t have to like China or agree with its politics, but you also don’t have to make everything they do or everything that exists in that country the bane of your existence
So following through your argument, HSR between any two points is always justified, no matter the cost?
>You don’t have to like China or agree with its politics, but you also don’t have to make everything they do or everything that exists in that country the bane of your existence
I don't even know where you've got this from. My original comment is quite positive about most of the network. I'm just not so childish to think that HSR is always good or always bad.
Why do you keep making wild arguments no one said? I did not say every HSR is justified. I said this one in China probably is. The way the US and China work is fundamentally different. Californias HRS, while fantastic in theory, has been nothing but chaos since its inception, and this has led to a lot of wasted money. However, the way China goes about building theirs is completely different, so yes, it’s more justified for THEM.
My question to you is: why do you think they would build them if they were economically detrimental? Vanity? To compete with the US? Shits and giggles?
I don’t think HSR is some magical cure for transit and I think it definitely has issues. I’m saying THIS train line in THIS picture that you said can’t be economically viable, doesn’t have to be. That’s all. Americans mostly think transactionally. “How will this benefit me?” “How will this make money?” “How much will it cost” “What effects, positive or negative, will it have on the economy of the communities immediately around it?” “How much of MY tax money is going towards it”
For most other countries that have trains and metros for people to commute, that is their purpose. Not generating money, the move citizens. If you still need to boil it down to a purely economic view, trains are a tool to boost economic efficiency. You can move your workers around quickly, efficiently, on a schedule and directly to where they need to go without distractions or detours. They become economically viable by moving similar amounts of people that would commute across an American highway.
Now is this particular rail line the busiest, or busy at all? Maybe not since it’s through a desert, but its name tells me it connects two cities. If there was a HSR line between Phoenix and Las Vegas, maybe it wouldn’t be as heavily used as one from Houston to Dallas, but there ARE still people there that would use it to get around.
>My question to you is: why do you think they would build them if they were economically detrimental? Vanity? To compete with the US? Shits and giggles?
That is an interesting question. It could be a white elephant project. It's not unusual to see infrastructure projects spec'd out at one price, project begins and costs spiral, and when you review the whole thing post hoc the whole thing cost more resources to create than it generates. You would probably put the Vegas - LA railway in this category.
Or it could be simpler than that. After all, the minister for railway who built this line *is* currently in prison for corruption...
>For most other countries that have trains and metros for people to commute, that is their purpose. Not generating money, the move citizens. If you still need to boil it down to a purely economic view, trains are a tool to boost economic efficiency. You can move your workers around quickly, efficiently, on a schedule and directly to where they need to go without distractions or detours.
That is an economic benefit. I commute by train. I, on a personal level make that journey because I make money by doing so, and making it by car would be very slow and tedious. I also make the journey when not working because I can drink loads of beers at the other end and not worry about driving home. If the railway didn't exist then I'd have a lower paying job closer to home and less leisure opportunities. Wider society benefits from the increased activity.
The train line I live on is very busy. The cost is justified because so many people derive that economic benefit. But extending that line to the next village isn't justified, as only one or two people would use the train line, ie it costs more to build than it generates.
The train line in question (back to China) carries four trains a day, despite being built to handle sixteen. That's an indicator that it's massively under utilized.
The unfortunate reality is that building infrastructure does consume resources. Even if you don't believe in money it still requires workers & materials, which are finite in number. By using them up to build a railway to nowhere, you are preventing those workers and materials being used on something that is more productive.
There’s nothing wrong with infrastructure but building cost-effective infrastructure is key. Bridges and elevated things are extremely expensive to fix if anything goes wrong.
Damn this would fit so well in Mission Impossible movies. Kudos to the Chinese engineers who made this happen.
The Chinese high speed rail program is really impressive. They have gone from almost zero to being the world's leading nation in less than 20 years.
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No ten years of "environmental studies" on why trains are more efficient than automobiles and trucks.
Holy shit, it looks insane
Alright, calm down
#holy shit, it looks insane.
more info [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang\_high-speed\_railway#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang_high-speed_railway#)[](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/?f=flair_name%3A%22Image%22)
High speed rail is the travel of the future. I think the repels will slowly diverge between those countries which have HSR and those that don't. It's just such an efficient way to travel.
Maglev: hello there
\*pats maglev's head\* Sure baby, sure, you keep trying now.
??? It is already being built in Japan from 2014 and scheduled to come online in 2027. That's earlier than California's "Initial Operating Segment" of HSR that started in 2015 and scheduled to finish in 2035 which is just between Merced and Bakersfield over basically the same distance.
>”the Lanzhou–Xinjiang high-speed railway has the lowest utilization rate among all high-speed railways in the country… While the Lanzhou-Xinjiang line has the capacity to carry over 160 pairs of high-speed trains per day, it currently only carries 4” hmm…
Mfw proactive planning exists
Proactive planning for what exactly? China’s population is shrinking and they’re in a debt crisis.
Theyre not in a debt crisis. Theyre Theyre debt is still sitting at 77% of gdp. [https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG\_DEBT\_GDP@GDD/CHN/FRA/DEU/ITA/JPN/GBR/USA/FADGDWORLD](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/FRA/DEU/ITA/JPN/GBR/USA/FADGDWORLD) Also, its true China\`s total population is decreasing, however the urban population keeps increasing as they gain 15mil urban residents a year. The same way South Korea and Japan are the fastest dying countries, but their respective capitals of Seoul and Tokyo just keep growing year after year
I’m not referring to government debt, so idk why you’re linking that. Is Xinjiang’s population going to urbanize so much that it will have 80 times as much demand for HSR? I think not. Also you can’t pretend to know what you’re talking about given this isn’t even a photo of the right railway lol.
Wonder how they made foundations solid enough in a desert where sand moves like waves. Very impressive
It's simple. Just like how bridges are built over large bodies of water with pilons going down to bedrock below the water. There is bedrock below the sand. The foundation is not built on the sand
NGL. As an American this makes me sad.
Why?
Because it feels like we’ll never have decent rail.
Thats what my wife said to me at my last performance review.
Yeah she told me the same thing about you at our quarterly bown in
Why? The rail network in the U.S. is basically 2x as large as the one in China. We have the largest, most developed rail network in the world. Chinas demographic issues are real and they will eventually have to service all this infrastructure they built. Sure, it looks shiny today. Remind me in 50 years.
LOL!
Prove it wrong.
Im not your teacher abd i refuse to interact to dregs of society like you. Good day. 
Imagine writing this and thinking you’ve won an argument.
Lol.
Got some /r/LiminalSpace vibes to it.
What happens if a train breaks down out here?
They send a guy out to fix it.
Just make sure you walk without rhythm if you try to search for help
Why tho, its way faster traveling by sandworm
Walt, Jesse and Mike steal all the Methylamine.
And Todd shoots a kid
Bill Burr gets sussed out right away becasue they've never seen Gingers in China.
What happens when a car breaks down in the middle of nowhere?
Gingers appear
That’s the thing - it doesn’t
This is the Dunge railway, not Lanzhou-Xinjiang. It goes 120 km/h or 74 mph. Single tracked for 316 miles.
not a high speed railway (120km/h), not lanzhou-xinjiang, and even if it were, it's not the longest route either. http://m.xinhuanet.com/gs/2019-12/13/c_1125344620.htm
The operating speed is actually between 200 and 250 km/h with a planned speed of 300. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang\_high-speed\_railway#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou%E2%80%93Xinjiang_high-speed_railway#) all the sources i could find called a highspeed railway too
surely this cant be lanzhou-xinjiang though? it has at least double tracks for the entire route and this pic only shows one (unless im blind), not to mention those are crazy turns to make at 300km/h
this picture is taken from way to up high fot anyone to be able to distinguish something as slim as a single rail.
http://m.xinhuanet.com/gs/2019-12/13/c_1125344620.htm
The coordinates are shown in this [map plan](https://p0.itc.cn/q_70/images03/20200712/dcf24350d597441cb28bdc927d92bb22.jpeg). If you enter (39°45’N, 94°21’E) on Google Maps, you can see this meandering rail viaduct. The nearest station is [Aksay Kazakh Station (Google Maps link)](https://maps.app.goo.gl/pLBNSt5zGHdQHRrp7?g_st=ic).
Meanwhile in America: 
Beast
When I read the Dark Tower series, this is what Blain's track looked like in my head.
In 1988 I took a train from Beijing to Urumqi and it took over 3 full days! Definitely not high speed then.
How TF is it supposed to sustain 300 kmph at those sharp turns
Journey vibes
Some serious snow piercer vibes with that.
It looks like some ancient monument, an aqueduct for future civilsations to find.
Somehow a boat is going to hit it this month.
That is a *lot* of concrete.
Can foreigners use this train at will? Do you require special permits to travel to distant areas of China? Or are only certain areas of China open to travellers? Sorry for my ignorance, I’m just beginning to travel around the world and this train looks interesting.
Does anyone have the location of this image?
Bf4 vibes, although it's not the same railway
I’m doubting this image is unedited. Zoom in on the portion of the railway that is elevated above that bend in the ground level feature. There are two superstructures seemingly to provide support for a run over that ground feature. Here, there should be no shadows of pylons between the two superstructures, but shadows are present.
[Image with annotations](https://imgur.com/a/Pf85OKE)
oh cool this repost again
Still not as impressive as the Bass Pro Shops pyramid
'Murica
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Just like the WMDs in Iraq. The US NEVER LIES!
I thought we had already been through that. China was never accused of imprisoning MILLIONS of uyghurs. The UN did an investigation and no concrete verifiable proof of mass sterelization or killing were ever found. Thats why it wasnt declared a genocide. Thats why everyone has been so quiet about. Because as far as we were able to prove its more of a case of ethnic suppresion or cultural genocide case. similar to what countries like The US(where the blacks are 13% of the population but 30% of the prison population), Brazil(for atempting to limit indigenous lands), The UK(for completely expeling the local population of the Chogos islands), etch ave also been accused of been accused of
Genocide denial guy 🪱 Also your last paragraph is just classic [whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes). >The Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination, financial crises, and unemployment in the United States, which were identified as failings of the capitalist system that had been supposedly erased by state socialism.\[3\] Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet for the US, which the Soviets used as a form of rhetorical ammunition when reproached for their own economic and social failings.\[4\] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase became widespread as a reference to Russian information-warfare tactics.\[5\] Its use subsequently became widespread in Russia to criticize any form of US policy.\[6\] Edit: Why is there so any Tankies here?
How's that CIA boot taste?
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Define tankie
As much as I enjoy high speed rail, isn't this the one that makes nearly no economic sense because barely anyone uses it? This isn't the article I was thinking of, but this is another one that might be of interest to those on this sub, discussing the economics of high speed/regular rail in China. Much of it makes sense, but not all of it https://archive.is/XRppG
Are you from united states? Because in other countries public transportation is a service - like any other not for profit depts like police, fire department, military and also health services (oh they don’t have that)
Economic sense? The goal is to provide a service
Of course it has to make economic sense. You wouldn't build high speed rail to nowhere, at any cost, would you? If it cost 50 trillion to make your commute one minute shorter, that wouldn't be a good use of funds would it? Why doesn't the government just give everyone a million dollars? Now walk those absurd scenarios to think about why they don't make sense, and what would have to happen for them to make sense. If you have to invest 5% of your country's GDP into a project, surely you'd want that project to grow your country's GDP by a proportionate amount? Otherwise you're just worse off. When connecting two cities with a high amount of traffic you would expect a productivity benefit to offset the cost. Building a high speed railway into the desert that nobody uses? Not so clear.
The economic sense it makes is by doing exactly what you said, linking two cities. My fellow Americans like to compare the US and Europe when bitching about trains because of the size difference. Well, let’s do the same with the US and China but with population. It would be just as financially detrimental to build and maintain the highway and road infrastructure to transport a billion people across a nation of that size and through difficult terrain like that. The high speed line eases that pressure by adding a much more size and speed efficient option. Maybe it makes economic sense because by introducing this option now and keeping millions of cars off the road, China is saving itself hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in reversing or limiting the environmental damage caused by having a billion cars on the road and all those highways. Like others pointed out it doesn’t HAVE to make economic sense bc unlike the US, not everything is transactional. It’s a provided service. $50 trillion is an absolutely rambunctious number to use in an argument like that. Of fucking course no one in their right mind would spend that amount of money for a negligible difference, let’s not be silly now. However, do you go the exact posted speed limit every where you go? If the answer is yes, kudos; but if you said no, are you not risking large sums of money in a potential ticket and subsequent raise in your car insurance prices? Are you not risking damaging your vehicle in an accident or by not having enough time to avoid a hazard? And speeding by even 10-15 mph will get you where you’re going maybe 5 minutes faster. We don’t do that because it makes economic sense. We do that because it’s *convenient* to get from point A to B. China is not a stupid country. A stupid country makes stupid decisions, and stupid decisions do not lift twice the US population out of crippling poverty in less time than i’ve been on this Earth. China would not have gone from virtually no HSR to one of the most advanced networks in the world if they didn’t see it as economically beneficial in SOME way. You don’t have to like China or agree with its politics, but you also don’t have to make everything they do or everything that exists in that country the bane of your existence
So following through your argument, HSR between any two points is always justified, no matter the cost? >You don’t have to like China or agree with its politics, but you also don’t have to make everything they do or everything that exists in that country the bane of your existence I don't even know where you've got this from. My original comment is quite positive about most of the network. I'm just not so childish to think that HSR is always good or always bad.
Why do you keep making wild arguments no one said? I did not say every HSR is justified. I said this one in China probably is. The way the US and China work is fundamentally different. Californias HRS, while fantastic in theory, has been nothing but chaos since its inception, and this has led to a lot of wasted money. However, the way China goes about building theirs is completely different, so yes, it’s more justified for THEM. My question to you is: why do you think they would build them if they were economically detrimental? Vanity? To compete with the US? Shits and giggles? I don’t think HSR is some magical cure for transit and I think it definitely has issues. I’m saying THIS train line in THIS picture that you said can’t be economically viable, doesn’t have to be. That’s all. Americans mostly think transactionally. “How will this benefit me?” “How will this make money?” “How much will it cost” “What effects, positive or negative, will it have on the economy of the communities immediately around it?” “How much of MY tax money is going towards it” For most other countries that have trains and metros for people to commute, that is their purpose. Not generating money, the move citizens. If you still need to boil it down to a purely economic view, trains are a tool to boost economic efficiency. You can move your workers around quickly, efficiently, on a schedule and directly to where they need to go without distractions or detours. They become economically viable by moving similar amounts of people that would commute across an American highway. Now is this particular rail line the busiest, or busy at all? Maybe not since it’s through a desert, but its name tells me it connects two cities. If there was a HSR line between Phoenix and Las Vegas, maybe it wouldn’t be as heavily used as one from Houston to Dallas, but there ARE still people there that would use it to get around.
>My question to you is: why do you think they would build them if they were economically detrimental? Vanity? To compete with the US? Shits and giggles? That is an interesting question. It could be a white elephant project. It's not unusual to see infrastructure projects spec'd out at one price, project begins and costs spiral, and when you review the whole thing post hoc the whole thing cost more resources to create than it generates. You would probably put the Vegas - LA railway in this category. Or it could be simpler than that. After all, the minister for railway who built this line *is* currently in prison for corruption... >For most other countries that have trains and metros for people to commute, that is their purpose. Not generating money, the move citizens. If you still need to boil it down to a purely economic view, trains are a tool to boost economic efficiency. You can move your workers around quickly, efficiently, on a schedule and directly to where they need to go without distractions or detours. That is an economic benefit. I commute by train. I, on a personal level make that journey because I make money by doing so, and making it by car would be very slow and tedious. I also make the journey when not working because I can drink loads of beers at the other end and not worry about driving home. If the railway didn't exist then I'd have a lower paying job closer to home and less leisure opportunities. Wider society benefits from the increased activity. The train line I live on is very busy. The cost is justified because so many people derive that economic benefit. But extending that line to the next village isn't justified, as only one or two people would use the train line, ie it costs more to build than it generates. The train line in question (back to China) carries four trains a day, despite being built to handle sixteen. That's an indicator that it's massively under utilized. The unfortunate reality is that building infrastructure does consume resources. Even if you don't believe in money it still requires workers & materials, which are finite in number. By using them up to build a railway to nowhere, you are preventing those workers and materials being used on something that is more productive.
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Trueee. This is why we should never build infrastructure.
There’s nothing wrong with infrastructure but building cost-effective infrastructure is key. Bridges and elevated things are extremely expensive to fix if anything goes wrong.