China Could Build Undersea High-Speed Railway To America: Report
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Chinese officials are discussing the possibility of building a high-speed railway line from Beijing to the United States, reported the China Daily last week, with the proposed railway set to pass through Russia, Alaska and Canada before hitting the American mainland.
According to Wang Mengshu, a railway expert and academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the project will be funded and constructed by China; though details had yet to be finalised.
Chinese officials are discussing the possibility of building a high-speed railway line from Beijing to the United States, reported the China Daily last week, with the proposed railway set to pass through Russia, Alaska and Canada before hitting the American mainland.
According to Wang Mengshu, a railway expert and academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the project will be funded and constructed by China; though details had yet to be finalised.
The route currently under consideration would reportedly begin in Beijing before heading north towards Siberia, then cutting through the Bering Strait from Russia to Alaska via a 200km long undersea tunnel, continuing south then through Canada, until arriving once again in the United States.
The entire trip would take about two days, said Wang, with the train travelling at an average of 350km/h.
[quote]”Right now we’re already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years,” he said.[/quote]Some experts have already begun to express scepticism at the scope of the project. Quartz noted that the project would cost at least $200 billion – an estimated $52 billion to construct the undersea tunnel and a further $172 billion for the rest of the railway across land.
“China’s railway sector is still being haunted by deep debts,” an unnamed expert from Beijing Jiaotong University told The Economic Times.
[quote]“Therefore, even with the government’s support, it must persuade banks to lend a colossal amount of money,” he added.[/quote]But the China Daily claims that the technology needed to construct the undersea tunnel is already available. The government is already spending an estimated $32 billion on an underwater tunnel that measures just 123 km long, linking the ports of Dalian and Yantai.
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The Beijing Times listed the China-US line as just one of four international high-speed rail projects currently in the works. The first is a line that would run from London via Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev and Moscow, where it would split into two routes, one of which would run to China through Kazakhstan and the other through eastern Siberia.
The second line would begin in the far-western Chinese city of Urumqi and then run through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey to Germany.
The third is a Trans-Asian Railway Network linking the Chinese south-western city of Kunming to Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Work on this project will reportedly commence next month.
