Chinese are thinking way ahead

It currently takes three days to get from London to Moscow by train, and 6 days to get from Moscow to Beijing by Trans Siberian Railroad.

The Chinese want to reduce train time from Beijing to London to 2 days with a new high speed rail. Now that is ambitious.

It seems like there should be someway to build a train from Vegas to Los Angeles.

Autocratic totalitarian governments do have their advantages. Not letting every squabbling politician make sure they get their stupid little say in sure expedites things.

It only takes about 40 hours by train to get to London from Moscow.

London: Eurostar 9144 4:04PM arrives Brussels 7:03PM (1:59)
Brussels: Thalys9453 7:28PM arrives Cologne, Germany 9:15PM (1:47)
Cologne: Train447 10:28PM arrives Moscow 10:59AM. (34:31) - 1,894 mileskm

Moscow to Beijing "Direct" takes 145h 36m over 6,152 miles. That's one slow train.

Increasing the train speed even to about 80 mph on conventional track would shorten the trip to about 77 hours.

Quote: boymimbo

It only takes about 40 hours by train to get to London from Moscow.

London: Eurostar 9144 4:04PM arrives Brussels 7:03PM (1:59)
Brussels: Thalys9453 7:28PM arrives Cologne, Germany 9:15PM (1:47)
Cologne: Train447 10:28PM arrives Moscow 10:59AM. (34:31) - 1,894 mileskm

Moscow to Beijing "Direct" takes 145h 36m over 6,152 miles. That's one slow train.

Increasing the train speed even to about 80 mph on conventional track would shorten the trip to about 77 hours.

True, but I would leave London three hours earlier to make sure of connections, and there is a 10.5 hour layover in Moscow before the train goes to Beijing. I rounded up to 3 travel days (2 nights). In any case you are talking about getting from London to Beijing in only a little more time than it currently takes to get from London to Moscow

I don't think China wants to upgrade the Trans-Siberian Railroad. They are more interested in a route through Lanzhou and Khazakastan and on to Europe.

I think they will spin off a Southern route from the Chinese city in the Southwest , Kunming, which already has a century old rail link to Hanoi. From there it is less than 500 miles to Mandalay Burma, then less than 400 miles to Dhaka, Pakistan, and then 900 miles to New Delhi.

Myanmar will pay China in natural resources to connect their capital to a Chinese city. There is only 200 miles of rail inside their country, but Myanmar can't develop the capacity to build a high speed rail.

Am I missing something?

Why don't they just fly instead?

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Am I missing something?

Why don't they just fly instead?

There are currently 4 billion people in Asia (excluding the Middle East) vs 0.866 billion in Eastern and Western Europe and northern America (USA and Canada). Potential traffic could be a billion people per year in 20 years. Too much for airplanes.

That map is pretty old.

The Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou HSR has been in service for years.

Quote: teddys

That map is pretty old.

The Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou HSR has been in service for years.

Here is an announcement from two years ago that says the Nanjing to Shanghai link has won approval and will take four years to complete.

That is interesting, because I have ridden the Nanjing-Hangzhou route, and it is high-speed. I think I may be talking about this..

As I recall, it was pretty dang fast, but I guess they are constructing something faster.

FWIW, I recommend riding Chinese trains for an experience of complete and utter disorientation. I once showed up at the train station in Nanjing not knowing I was holding a bus ticket. That was fun.

Quote: teddys

That is interesting, because I have ridden the Nanjing-Hangzhou route, and it is high-speed.

As I recall, it was pretty dang fast, but I guess they are constructing something faster.

I don't know how important speed really is. If there was a train from the Las Vegas Strip to Anaheim stadium and it took 2.25 hours (average 120 mph) which is close to the bottom of HSR, and it was comfortable, cheap, and had decent frequency and a stop in Riverside and Ontario, I think it would be very successful. People don't like to wait in airports and they don't like the small airplane seats. I am not really sure how important it is to go 235 mph for these short haul trips. Most people would choose cheap over the extra speed.

Boeing was building a super-sonic cruiser back in the... 80's? The fact of the matter is high speed will always require more fuel per passenger and it's an exponential rise. Unless you get into hyper-sonic realms, the drag varies exponentially with speed so doubling your speed will more than double the aerodynamic drag. This is why airplanes will only get more fuel efficient, not faster, for the next century until we can blow a sonic boom on top of the continental US.

Quote: ahiromu

...the drag varies exponentially with speed so doubling your speed will more than double the aerodynamic drag.

Yes. In fact, wind resistance is a cube function of speed.

That is one of the few math/physics things I remember.

I doubt that we will see supersonic transoceanic air transit. Even in the 1970's they knew that the environmental cost was too high. The next step is neutrally buoyant vaccum tubes.

For transcontinental travel, I don't think we will go supersonic. After 50 years we've gotten used to this speed. Travel time is determined by number of connections and ground wait time for security.

We need to build a 100-300 mile neutrally buoyant tunnel immediately to get some practice. The Balkan Sea, Lake Ontario, Sea of Japan, Sicily to Africa, Spain to Morocco. etc.

Quote: ahiromu

Boeing was building a super-sonic cruiser back in the... 80's?

There was a government project in the 60s, at the same time the Brits and French were working on the Concorde, to build a supersonic passenger airplane in the US. It was called SST (Supersonic Transport) and it failed.

The Concorde was a spectacular failure in its own right, even if it got built. As a first supersonic passenger plane it was good enough, but that's all it was.I think it took over 20 years to turn a profit.

Yet the one big fatal flaw of the Concorde wasn't exactly its fault. Concorde debuted at the time of the 73 Arab oil embargo, which set oil prices through the roof and made Concorde too expensive to operate. Absent that, I think more planes would have been sold and there would ahve been demand for a follow-on plane, a larger one with greater range.

Boeing until less than a decade ago was working, largely on paper, on a near-supersonic plane, I think it was called the Boeing Sonic Cruiser. It would be faster than today's jets, but not that much faster. In other words a complete waste of effort.

Quote: Nareed

In other words a complete waste of effort.

Just being nit-picky because this is my area of study, Aerospace Engineering. I think it's not proper to consider something such as this a complete waste of effort. You really don't know how much of this technology is being adapted to their other planes as well as some of the military technology that they provide. As a side note, my dad works for Boeing and said they were almost completely set to get into heavy research until the customers basically said "Read my(our) lips, we don't want it."

Quote: ahiromu

Just being nit-picky because this is my area of study, Aerospace Engineering. I think it's not proper to consider something such as this a complete waste of effort. You really don't know how much of this technology is being adapted to their other planes as well as some of the military technology that they provide. As a side note, my dad works for Boeing and said they were almost completely set to get into heavy research until the customers basically said "Read my(our) lips, we don't want it."

I have to imagine that Boeing does some research before starting a development effort. They may have felt that customers like Southwest Airlines who posts

# The average aircraft trip length is 639 miles with an average duration of one hour and 54 minutes.
# Southwest aircraft fly an average of 6.25 flights per day, or almost 11 hours and 45 minutes per day.

could squeeze in 7.0 trips per day with the sonic cruiser making the bottom line that much better. The passenger is not going to appreciate the small increase in speed very much, but the business might.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Am I missing something?

Why don't they just fly instead?

For the record, when I asked that, I was responding to the first post and map which indicated that travel from London to Bejing was 9 days by train.

If we're talking about a much shorter trip, then, yeah, high speed rail might be better.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

For the record, when I asked that, I was responding to the first post and map which indicated that travel from London to Bejing was 9 days by train.

If we're talking about a much shorter trip, then, yeah, high speed rail might be better.

This post sort of got sidetracked.

In a few years, possibly by the Olympics in London it will be possible to take high speed rail from London to Malaga Spain. Air distance is 1042 miles, but rail distance is probably closer to 1400 miles. It should be the longest continuous stretch you can do on high speed rail in Europe.

Malaga is a popular vacation and retirement destination for the British.

Currently it takes almost exactly 24 hours by train (with a change of station in Paris, and a change of train in Madrid). That is down by at least 6 hours from just a few years ago. But by air it is about 2 hours.
When all the high speed train connections are completed with stops and train transfers it should be about 9 hours maybe faster depending on how efficient the transfers are set up.

So, for Europeans or Americans it is unlikely that high speed rail will be all that much use for trips over 1000 miles, since low cost air choices will usually be available. I don't think Asia will ever be able to establish the low cost extensive air network for 4 billion people. There will still be a market for people who could spend 48 hours in a train rather than 11 hours in a plane.

Beijing is now the 3rd busiest airport in the world behind Atlanta and London's Heathrow. It has now surpassed Chicago ORD The roughly 65M passengers that are using the airport now would be overwhelmed by the 100M passengers that would want to go to Europe. A train that can make the trip in 48 hours would be the only way to handle the load.