China Opens more High Speed Rail

NZWeek – A new high-speed railway connecting central China’s Zhengzhou City and the eastern city of Wuhan opened last Friday. The Zheng-Wu high-speed railway, covers a distance of 536 km and trains will pass along it at a designed speed of 350 km per hour. The Zheng-Wu high-speed railway has cut the travel time from Zhengzhou to Wuhan from four and a half hours to two hours, said Li, integrating the central China economic zone and the Yangtze River Delta.

Investment in the Zheng-Wu high-speed railway hit 69.4 billion yuan (11 billion U.S. dollars), with its construction taking about four years, according to Yu Zhuomin, chief of the Wuhan Railway Station Bureau.

The Ministry of Railways, the main investor in China’s railway projects, reported a loss of 7 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) in the first quarter, with its debt-to-asset ratio standing at around 60 percent.

As of July 2012, the combined length of China’s high-speed railway has reached 13,000 km, the most out of any other country in the world.

China aims to construct a high-speed railway network with a total operating length of more than 40,000 km by the end of 2015.

The 40,000-km-long network will have lines with an operational speed of 160km/hour.

China’s high-speed lines, which have an average speed of 200km/hour, stood at 6,894km in August. The high-speed (200km/hour) railway will cover around 18,000km 2015.

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