Track Network
China's high-speed rail system project is ambitious and when the major rail lines are completed by 2020, it will become the largest, fastest, and most technologically advanced high-speed railway system in the world. China's Ministry of Railways plans to build 25,000 km (16,000 mi) of high-speed railways with trains reaching speeds of 350 km/h. China invested $50 billion on its high-speed rail system in 2009 and the total construction cost of the high-speed rail system is $300 billion. The main operator of regular high-speed train services in the People's Republic of China is China Railway High-Speed (CRH).
China's conventional high-speed railway network is made up of four components:
- upgraded pre-existing rail lines that can accommodate high-speed trains,
- a national grid of mostly passenger dedicated HSR lines (PDLs),
- other newly built conventional rail lines, mostly in western China, that can carry high-speed passenger and freight trains, and
- certain regional "intercity" HSR lines.
Most of the rail lines in the latter three categories are now under construction.
Read more about this topic: High-speed Rail In China
Famous quotes containing the words track and/or network:
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)