Regional airlines gain, as questions abound over China high speed rail safety
By PDADCO payday loans
Tuesday, 02 Aug 2011 08:44
Train Wreck
The cause of the incident is shrouded in confusion with initial reports indicating a lightning strike exposing signalling design errors whilst others reporting human error as a result of modified working in the absence of a properly functioning signalling system. Whilst the damaged vehicles were scrapped and buried beside the crash site within 48 hours of the incident, official announcements were much slower.
On July 28 an official said that ‘having been struck by lightning, the signal system at Wenzhou South station failed to turn a green light to red’. On the same day, the Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal & Communication issued an apology for the accident.
Since the fatal crash, China has halted the operation of 58 trains, called for an emergency nationwide safety check and sacked three senior railway officials in an effort to head off public anger. The collision was the first serious accident involving China’s bullet trains, which began running in 2007. China’s railway shares fell steeply in the wake of the crash.
Officialdom vs Internet
Once a source of great pride for the Communist Party, it has turned into an embarrassment prompting a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy. The dismissal of three senior railway officials is unlikely to diminish public outrage at the accident, which came hard on the heels of several malfunctions in a new high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai.
Online commentators demand that the railway minister Sheng Guangzu lose his job too. Mr. Sheng was appointed only in February following allegations that his predecessor Liu Zhijun was involved in corruption.
airrail NEWS has long noted the impact of social media and in China too, the Internet has proved a powerful force with Twitter-like services providing real-time, uncensored insights into the disaster that presumably the Communist Party would also like to have buried. ChinaGeeks, has translated some of the comments and China Media Project notes that even the official press has been quoting the observations of microbloggers.
The political shockwaves of this incident will probably last. China’s high-speed rail plans have been highly controversial. Some Chinese complain that the new services are effectively forcing up the price of rail travel by reducing the number of cheaper, slower-speed trains. State-owned airlines also worry about competition.
Beijing to Shanghi glitches; airlines react
1,300km line was launched at the end of June to coincide with official celebrations of the Communist Party’s 90th birthday. Running at speeds of over 300km an hour, the sleek electric train cuts the travel time between China’s two most important cities by nearly half, to four hours and 48 minutes.
The service is designed as a rival to air travel with Beijing South station resembling an airport. The other terminus, meanwhile, actually is at Shanghai’s domestic airport meaning that passengers lose the benefit of a downtown arrival. Strangely, intermediate stops are far from urban centres.
Travel time might have been shorter still but for controversy over the train’s speed. Journeys of 350km an hour had been promised. Then a system-wide slowdown to around 300km an hour was announced. At the time, the government insisted this was to save energy. It strenuously denied that safety was a factor, despite concerns from Chinese and foreign engineers. But now an official at China’s Railway Electrification Bureau admits the slowdown was based on concerns over safety after all.
In reaction to the series of glitches, airlines stopped giving deep discounts and started charging higher prices for air tickets between the two cities. Most tickets were being offered at full price, and only a few came at a 20% discount. In contrast, airlines were selling tickets at a 70% discount immediately after the high-speed train line opened on June 30. The airlines’ move came after a series of power failures. The combination of speed and reliability promised by the new rail link was supposed to deal a major blow to air travel between Beijing and Shanghai, which has long been notorious for delays caused by everything from poor weather to the monopolisation of large areas of Chinese domestic air space by the military.
Root cause?
The political pressure to build the China high speed network may have some parallels with Conordski, the Russian version (some say ‘copy’) of the UK/French Concorde. It was pressed into service without thorough testing and lead to a high profile crash at the Paris Air show in 1973. Similarly, the Challenger disaster of 1985, where the spacecraft took off, against the advice of experts, in freezing weather conditions, in order to put the first civilian woman in space in time to coincide with (some say ‘deflect attention from’) a difficult state of the union address for US president Reagan.
Whatever the root cause of this accident, and the claims of the railway supply chain about intellectual property theft, it does seem that some fundamental mistakes are being made, with the location of stations missing the centres of population and preferred destinations.
The relationships with airlines are predictably poor though with so much central planning surely more can be done to make the networks between modes more co-operative as airrail NEWS has constantly advocated. An old Chinese proverb goes ‘A hasty man drinks his tea with a fork’, perhaps there is time for reflection on the breakneck speed that high speed is progressing in China.
The cause of the incident is shrouded in confusion with initial reports indicating a lightning strike exposing signalling design errors whilst others reporting human error as a result of modified working in the absence of a properly functioning signalling system. Whilst the damaged vehicles were scrapped and buried beside the crash site within 48 hours of the incident, official announcements were much slower. On July 28 an official said that ‘having been struck by lightning, the signal system at Wenzhou South station failed to turn a green light to red’. On the same day, the Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal & Communication issued an apology for the accident.
Since the fatal crash, China has halted the operation of 58 trains, called for an emergency nationwide safety check and sacked three senior railway officials in an effort to head off public anger. The collision was the first serious accident involving China’s bullet trains, which began running in 2007. China’s railway shares fell steeply in the wake of the crash.
Officialdom vs Internet
Once a source of great pride for the Communist Party, it has turned into an embarrassment prompting a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy. The dismissal of three senior railway officials is unlikely to diminish public outrage at the accident, which came hard on the heels of several malfunctions in a new high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai. Online commentators demand that the railway minister Sheng Guangzu lose his job too. Mr. Sheng was appointed only in February following allegations that his predecessor Liu Zhijun was involved in corruption.
airrail NEWS has long noted the impact of social media and in China too, the Internet has proved a powerful force with Twitter-like services providing real-time, uncensored insights into the disaster that presumably the Communist Party would also like to have buried. ChinaGeeks, has translated some of the comments and China Media Project notes that even the official press has been quoting the observations of microbloggers.
The political shockwaves of this incident will probably last. China’s high-speed rail plans have been highly controversial. Some Chinese complain that the new services are effectively forcing up the price of rail travel by reducing the number of cheaper, slower-speed trains. State-owned airlines also worry about competition.
Beijing to Shanghi glitches; airlines react
1,300km line was launched at the end of June to coincide with official celebrations of the Communist Party’s 90th birthday. Running at speeds of over 300km an hour, the sleek electric train cuts the travel time between China’s two most important cities by nearly half, to four hours and 48 minutes.The service is designed as a rival to air travel with Beijing South station resembling an airport. The other terminus, meanwhile, actually is at Shanghai’s domestic airport meaning that passengers lose the benefit of a downtown arrival. Strangely, intermediate stops are far from urban centres.
Travel time might have been shorter still but for controversy over the train’s speed. Journeys of 350km an hour had been promised. Then a system-wide slowdown to around 300km an hour was announced. At the time, the government insisted this was to save energy. It strenuously denied that safety was a factor, despite concerns from Chinese and foreign engineers. But now an official at China’s Railway Electrification Bureau admits the slowdown was based on concerns over safety after all.
In reaction to the series of glitches, airlines stopped giving deep discounts and started charging higher prices for air tickets between the two cities. Most tickets were being offered at full price, and only a few came at a 20% discount. In contrast, airlines were selling tickets at a 70% discount immediately after the high-speed train line opened on June 30. The airlines’ move came after a series of power failures. The combination of speed and reliability promised by the new rail link was supposed to deal a major blow to air travel between Beijing and Shanghai, which has long been notorious for delays caused by everything from poor weather to the monopolisation of large areas of Chinese domestic air space by the military.
Root cause?
The political pressure to build the China high speed network may have some parallels with Conordski, the Russian version (some say ‘copy’) of the UK/French Concorde. It was pressed into service without thorough testing and lead to a high profile crash at the Paris Air show in 1973. Similarly, the Challenger disaster of 1985, where the spacecraft took off, against the advice of experts, in freezing weather conditions, in order to put the first civilian woman in space in time to coincide with (some say ‘deflect attention from’) a difficult state of the union address for US president Reagan.
Whatever the root cause of this accident, and the claims of the railway supply chain about intellectual property theft, it does seem that some fundamental mistakes are being made, with the location of stations missing the centres of population and preferred destinations.
The relationships with airlines are predictably poor though with so much central planning surely more can be done to make the networks between modes more co-operative as airrail NEWS has constantly advocated. An old Chinese proverb goes ‘A hasty man drinks his tea with a fork’, perhaps there is time for reflection on the breakneck speed that high speed is progressing in China.
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