Comment: My experiences of rail in China

Spending a week touring round China on the high-speed rail network, and being shown round the huge factories which make the trains, has proved to be a transforming experience.

Never again will I look at the statistics of China’s new rail network with the same disdain. Instead, one has to savour them and try to understand them:

48,000kms (30,000 miles) of high-speed track - three times the size of Britain’s entire network, completed in under 20 years and with another 20,000kms to come in the next decade.

4,380 high-speed trains already on the network, and another 200 coming on stream in the next year.

Around ten million daily travellers using the trains.

Consider, first, the Sifong Chinese Railway Rolling Stock Company (CRRC) in Qingdao, the biggest of the three manufacturing bases for high-speed trains, producing some 40% of the stock.

Its output is 200 high-speed train sets, each of eight carriages, per year. And that’s in addition to a whole host of other products, ranging from the carriages for the overhead railway in Wuhan to maglev (potentially, although I remain sceptical of the latter).

The works employs 16,000 people. But the supply chain is far larger, involving more than 200 companies, many of which have moved onto the huge sub-city that is being created around the factory - which itself was moved 20 years ago from the centre of Qingdao, to create space for expansion.

A few days later I visited a rival CRRC in Changchun - also owned by the state, but which competes for contracts with Qingdao. Here, 20,000 people are employed.

While both these factories produce all kinds of trains for all sorts of purposes, from trams and monorails to metros and suburban networks, much of the research and development is focused on making the best high-speed trains in the world.

Then consider the length of the network. Japan, France, Spain and a few others have a few thousand kilometres of line, respectively.

But China has around tenfold of any of those and will eventually have more than 15-fold.

And while the forthcoming target for 70,000kms (43,500 miles) is ambitious, don’t bet against it. Perhaps it will take a few more years than 2035 if the economy slows down, but they will get there.

This network has built up in less than 20 years. The first high-speed line did not open until 2007 (I will remind readers that HS2 was given the go-ahead just two years after that), and there was a lot of debate in China about whether the country needed it.

Domestic aviation was well established by then, and there was a strong contingent (led by the then-Prime Minister) for maglev. But it was the determination of the then-Rail Minister Liu Zhijun that won over the politicians of the day to the concept of high-speed rail.

He did that by pushing through construction of the first line, a short 117kms (73 miles) between Beijing and Tianjin, to demonstrate the concept.

A self-made man whose father was a poor farmer, Liu toured the country persuading local governors and the key Communist Party officials of the need for high-speed rail.

Whenever he took them on the first line, they were so impressed that they would be won over to the concept.

Soon, construction of the Beijing-Shanghai line, which now has 50 trains daily in each direction, was under way and provincial politicians across China were begging to be connected.

There was a strong rationale building for this. Not only would this network allow the politicians to say that they were helping the people by providing easy travel between all the main cities, they also recognised the positive economic effects.

As one of the many railway managers I spoke to put it: “House prices were going up in every city with high-speed line. That was helping local economies to boom.”

Of course, in China everything is determined by the state. So many times, when I asked how China had managed to build this network so quickly, I was told that it was because the government had backed it. And, of course, there are fewer Nimbys in an authoritarian state.

But it’s too easy to dismiss the achievement of this network as “they can do that in China because it is not a democracy, and they can just push things like that through”.

Yes, there is a bit of truth in that. But it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on it.

There are many misconceptions. “They have used slave labour to build the lines” was suggested to me by a couple of people - totally wrong as the work is contracted out to publicly owned but competing companies, although labour is obviously cheaper in China than in most of the rest of the world.

“They don’t care about safety” was another refrain which is utterly wrong. Safety is in fact the number one priority. Every time I asked a rail manager about the biggest challenge, they invariably said safety. There were no fewer than 39 different test rigs in one of the factories I visited, assessing every possible risk.

There has been one bad accident on the network. In 2011 a train, actually travelling relatively slowly at just over 60mph on a high-speed section, crashed into a stationary train near Wenzhou, about 500kms (310 miles) south of Shanghai.

Mystery still surrounds the fundamental cause of the accident, which killed 40 people. The subsequent report blamed a mix of signal failures, lax operating procedures, and failure to respond to equipment malfunction after a lightning strike, but no clear reason for such a basic failure ever emerged.

Instead, a number of officials were sacked. And Liu Zhijun, who had by then already left his ministerial position, was blamed for numerous failings.

It is clear, though, that lessons have been learned, and a far more rigorous signalling system, based on moving block technology, has been installed throughout the network.

Travelling on the trains was a revelation. My first high-speed rail journey was between Beijing and Qingdao, home of the famous Tsing Tao beer.

In order to sample the different passenger experiences, I went Business Class for a whopping £125, when Standard Class was only £35. First Class was only £61, but only offers slightly wider seats, whereas in Business Class you have an enormous amount of space - enough to extend your seat, which is like those they now have in cinemas which guarantee you get a good snooze if the film is boring.

Essentially, this was like First Class on an aeroplane And the service was very attentive, although the meal was unexciting - a pre-packaged and reheated stew of ribs and vegetables, with a pot noodle-type soup as an accompaniment.

The key takeaway was the smoothness. There was never a jolt or any vibration, and it certainly passed the old threepenny bit coin test of standing it on its side.

There was never any feeling of speed, and for much of the time the high-speed line was on raised track above the countryside - often above the old line with their locomotive-hauled elegant green coaches, which stop at many intermediate towns.

Building the line on this almost endless series of arches, a dozen or so feet above the ground, has many advantages. This method keeps any trespassing animals or humans off the tracks, it reduces the land take, and it crucially allows for much easier maintenance as the ballast is effectively stabilised and easier to fettle.

The train (the fastest service on this line) stopped only two or three times on the near four-hour journey, which was completed a couple of minutes early despite (unlike in Japan) starting two minutes late.

There were no onboard announcements, and while there is a bit of ticker tape information inside the trains, very little of it is in English so foreign travellers have to have their wits about them.

Don’t expect any of the staff to speak the language - but then there are not many Chinese announcements on British trains.

Building such a huge network which works so efficiently and reliably, at such an amazing pace, is an achievement on a par with building the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China.

It is a mistake to dismiss this because of Chinese ‘otherness’. It’s a very different culture and they work hard, but it is no good us Westerners simply accepting that we can never match any of this. We have much to learn from this.

China has everything going for it in relation to high-speed rail. It has already built more than 30 different models of train, with special versions created for the hot deserts of western China or the sub-zero temperature of the North. (I was, though, rather amused to see that one ‘innovation’ for the cold weather was to wrap aluminium tinfoil round various vital parts - I hope someone won the suggestion box annual prize for that one).

The approach to technology, repeated to me numerous times, was that initially in joint ventures with companies such as Alstom, Siemens and Japanese manufacturers, the Chinese learnt about the technology.

Then they ‘digested’ it, building it into their processes. And then they embarked on a well-funded innovation programme.

They emphasised they did not steal the technology, but it was willingly shared with them by these partners. Undoubtedly there are questions over the precise arrangements, but all this is in the past.

With the advantage of having 70% of the high-speed routes in the world under its control, China has a giant test bed which will allow for continued improvement.

As a comparison, imagine if China had a similar advantage in aviation, producing most of the world’s output. Data in the modern world is key, and the Chinese are gathering it at a pace with which western countries will struggle to compete.