What's staggering is the sheer amount of civil engineering prowess on display. A lot of the terrain crossed by these lines is not simple, there's so many bridges over gorges, tunnels through mountains, and construction through seismically active zones and China seems to have conquered both finding the engineering solutions to these problems and the logistics of such building in difficult construction sites. In a fact a big part of the B&R Initiative seems to simply be exporting China's extraordinary construction industry since they have more capacity then they know what do with and don't want to downscale. Of course it's not all rosy, but damn is it impressive.

Honestly, for a country as big as China the HSR being on the red is no big deal, the overall economic growth it creates more than pays for it

Yet UK 6th richest country is letting its once excellent rail coverage shrink and decline , The rail industry (and all other private services ) are more a cash cow for investors than actual interest in railways .(or other services )

Not sure if you've covered this topic before, but a video covering slab tracks and other ballastless tracks would be interesting as it's relevant to the subject of High Speed Rail. Side Note: My favourite type of track gotta be embedded rails as it's smooth and flushed with the surface and is more aesthetically pleasing compare to other ballastless tracks in my eyes.

Wow I like Chinese High-Speed Rail.

I'm sure all the "white elephant" people will be coming out soon, so I'd like to share my own analysis on why this is in fact, a great decision. 1. Long-term costs. China's population is aging, the number of people willing to work in construction is plummeting, and salaries are rising. Not only that, although the Chinese government can force the people to get out of the way, they nonetheless Do need to compensate the people. The longer they wait the more expensive buildings would have been built there in the meantime. In other words, if they wait too long, labor costs would double, land prices would triple and headaches would quadruple in the meantime. This isn't theory, just look at how hard it is to push ahead the California rail. Even if a few lines turn out to be useless later on, the overall savings by building them early would still be worth it. 2. Effect of inflation. When I was living in Beijing, within a few years the price of a standard public transportation fare suddenly rose from RMB 0.1 (about 1 cent) to RMB 2 (about 20 cents)! What the heck, a x20 price increase, this is highway robbery! Once I calmed down I realized that the fares were still pretty cheap. You see, in the US, the transcontinental railroad cost USD 60 million and forever changed the development of the US. The fixed costs of the HSR in China will eventually be a distant memory thanks to inflation, but the ticket costs can always be increased later once living standards have improved. 3. Social impact. Every year, during the Spring festival, China is home to the world's largest human migration: migrant workers returning home for the holidays. You see, to develop, China encouraged poor inland workers to work in the big coastal cities. It is upon the backs of these migrant workers that the Chinese economy was built. These people work far away from their homes for most of the year, and only return to see their relatives back in the countryside once a year during the Spring Festival. Long ago, I've seen one of these migrant workers try to log into the website to book a ticket home. Because of high traffic, she had to repeatedly try until she managed to get into the system only to find that the tickets had already been sold out. Can you imagine the heartache? China owes these people its current prosperity, the least it could do is make it a bit easier for them to go home. 4. Urban planning. As this point it is obvious that house prices in large coastal cities are not coming down, and you can't stuff a billion+ Chinese into just the few big coastal cities. I think the Chinese government chose the extremely smart option to instead build up alternatives. China now has over 100 cities with over a million inhabitants. Salaries are lower in these cities, but houses are much cheaper and life is less stressful. The thing is, for a city to be viable, it needs to be connected via infrastructure to other cities, hence the HSR among others. 5. Pollution. HSR is powered by electricity. Right now most energy in China is coal-generated, but China is working hard to develop alternatives. Once that's taken care of you have a massive reduction in pollution, made better when considering... 6. Energy independence. If you're not traveling by train then you're traveling by plane or by car. Electric cars are still sort of in their infancy, especially for long-range travel, so now we're talking petroleum. Petroleum is one of the world's most critical resources, and China is a net importer. This makes it vulnerable to all sorts of geopolitical issues that could occur in say, Russia and the Middle-East, not to mention a lot of oil is imported via the hotly contested South China seas. The less dependent it is on petroleum for something as critical as transportation, the better. 7. Technology independence and security. The US decided not to export chips to China. What next, planes? What if the EU follows suit? Well then China would Really be in trouble. Better not be Too dependent on planes, right? Total independence is not possible, but mitigating the damage is always good. Even if we don't consider this, money from buying foreign planes is going into someone else's pockets, while HSR money is benefiting domestic workers. 8. Long-term economic benefits. The HSR is infrastructure, just like schools it is not supposed to make money by itself, its benefits are much more far-ranging. For example, China's domestic tourism is already over half a trillion dollars per year, and growing fast. HSR also facilitates business interactions. Not only that, the positive effects should be especially salient in the less developed interior regions. 9. Economies of scale + export. This is what China does best. The more it builds something the cheaper it is to build, and then they can even export the technology! 10. But what about slow/freight rail? With HSR, slower lines can be converted to freight. What's more, the HSR is actually used for express freight. That said, slower freight lines don't have all the constraints of HSR: it doesn't need to be in a straight line, it probably can avoid expensive populated lands, etc. So there is less urgency to build them compared to HSR.

yeah but America has Greyhound buses ...

Really great video and highly appreciate your research and quality of work 😊😊 Keep up the work 😊👍

the government subudises the cost because its a public good, kind of like how in the USA the military is just used for creating jobs, in china rail does the same.

The Grand Finale will be the Taiwan strait train tunnel, a 30minute train travel. With 3x lengths euro channel is still very possible due to ocean floor is even and hard, they got geo lucky.

Great video. It's amazing how quickly the Chinese HSR network has grown in such a short space of time. I would love to travel on it. Keep it up👍

I honestly don't think that the joint venture thing is about offloading debt. I think the real reason for the joint venture thing is to make local governments have more ownership over the specific sections of their lines and have them train and maintain local crews to service and maintain the lines which frees up CRRC staff to be more focused on their mission of constructing HSR lines.

I'm humbly asking about when you will make videos about metro system from various countries, thank you, great video anyway

Hey RE! A high but realistic number for fuel pr plane is 100 metric tonnes. With that, you are about a factor 10 off in fuel usage for flights. 1.1million flights = 100 million tonnes of jet fuel.

Can you make a video on rrts system being implemented on Delhi Meerut corridor and gonna begin operation in 2023 partially.😊

Love them used fast train a few times on China now... Amazing fast and comfortable... The Best

I found it quite funny with those computer-generated stock videos... especially the plane with British Airways tail with a giant Chinese flag on it... To be honest it subtracted from the video, making it feel less fact based. 5:10 And a clip of Shinkansen mixed in doesn't help. 5:51 - 6:01 The Chinese (with exception of HongKong) drive on the right side of the road like American and EU... not on the left. The trains are ran on the left side because the Chinese used a version of the European train control system. Their traditional railway run on the right side, Shanghai subway also run on the right side instead of left.

Not sure if you aware, you have a streamer called forsen who has watched a Railways Explained video on his channel pretty much everyday for a long time, hes very passionate about trains and is promoting your channel, he has a very passionate fanbase that would be thrilled if you shouted him out one day.

I know China is a vastly different regime... but... here is a big middle finger to those saying US is too big and has too much rail for HSR and electrification :D

It is no exaggeration to say that no country has public transportation comparable to China, and you can even take buses (not long-distance buses) and subways to communicate and travel the city💤

That is awesome!

We need a video about Italian HSR

It's a shame that California 's high speed rail has cost almost 20 BILLION DOLLARS without having even having any segment finished

900 billion in debt to build all this... 🥺😔 Much smarter to get over a trillion in debt to replace The Taliban with... The Taliban. 🤠😎

You probably should also mention the domestic airways in China was very congested, the average on time rate before Covid is only about 43%... Reasons are two fold. Chinese is like US, but with all West coast cities stuffed into East coast to Central, then multiply population by 5-fold, too many people concentrated together. The other is all Chinese airspace is controlled by military, you are pretty much restricted to the published airways. Hence you see almost all planes fly like cars in a city, only fly direct on the big arc curve once out of China.

hey can you make a video about new railway construction of KRG ?

10:05 lol. 😂.

3:50 min on top China wants connect to Mongolia/Russia border on north east with Russian border east next to Russian port Vladivostok

I hope to see an episode about Indian national railways soon. It's pretty amazing what India has done with its railway system.

The real gain by China as a society based on rail is seldom appreciated by those who think merely on ROI!

10:05 Ouch!

Still counting but one day they will be done, what will they now do with that money instead? to become #1 in the world at being best in everything, that is what 50year plans do.

Ppl must remember that the chinese hsr network does not intend to make money...its a public infrastructure akin to national highway networks. Who would really expect the tolled or toll-less highway network to make money?

The intro music us too loud compared to the rest of the video

高铁是民生项目，就像地铁或者公交一样，其实很多城市的地铁公交都不盈利，政府用纳税人的钱来补贴这些民生项目，取之于民，用之于民，这就是中国人说的民主😅盈利当然最好，但盈利不是民生项目的主要目标，让人们出行更便捷，让物流运输更高效，让国内各行各业从中获利才是主要目标

7:03 That is rare footage of the 500 km/h test train built by the Chinese... but seem like it disappeared from public eyes? Not much news after its debut... guess they weren't able to reach 500?

Every where china is no 1

13000 km network only above 300kmph remaining are upgraded for 200kmph

China number 1!🥰

As many issues as I have with China, their rail system is fucking INSANE. props to them.

As of 2023 42,000 kms of hsr lines are finished! Please update your video its outdated by china's terms xD

Couple of things worth to mention: 1: The cheap cost comes from : cheap labour, basically no private prpoperty (the government takes any land it wants and be happy if you get something in return... meanwhile the US is struggling because of US ownership laws). Also most of the building is done in rural areas where they only had to worry about farmlands. One more thing: environmental ministry and laws are not a thing there. 2: High debt is not an issue as long as you are capable of paying it back. Evergrande's problem was that they couldn't make enough profits to cover their debts. Meanwhile here the losses can be written down on capital and the debts still can be paid. Therefore no issues with the huge debt. Also there are lines making a profit so they are somewhat capable of covering for the rest. And these projects are still in baby age. Their usage will go up heavily in the next 15 years so not really in issue either. 3: Most of the lines conect extreme sized cities which makes the investments worthy and will make returns. Just needs a few years for the people to get used to it and see the possibilities.

Proud to say that the first 50sec are not relevant to me!

I would like to add something important about construction that is missing. The biggest problem is eminent domain. In China, it is not allowed to hold land as personal property, and in a democratic country, the problem of land tenure during construction is the biggest bottleneck.

California Homeless are looking anxiously for the completion of the High-Speed rails they can Poop in San Francisco and be back in Los Angeles homeless shelter for complimentary cocktails by afternoon.. 🍹

why China built 70% high speed railways in one decade? because China need to bail out herself from 2008 wallstreet crisis though 2008-09 Chinese economic stimulus infrastructure plan, that's very important reason why China was so much in hurry, but most people don't know the political reason.

The high speed railway is insane, the debt is also insane.

While looking at railways in China people always forget “regular” rail that is crumbling because all the funds are in HSR. Freight rail traffic decreases year after year

Well in China if they want to put a rail anywhere they just do it, where the locals like it or not, they have no say in the matter. Then in the USA excuse the expression Red Tape. Theirs right of way acquisition of private property, environmental impact studies , law suits by people or parties against the rail line this goes on and on. It can cost 1 billion dollars per US mile to build HSR. Then the wages of the workers, cost of equipment and materials. It goes on and on. Then theirs the requiring operational costs. I live in Portland, Oregon USA that built the first above ground lite rail system in the USA and is operated by Tri-Met the cost of a one way ticket a 2.5 hr pass is 2.50 US dollars. A all day pass is 5.00 dollars US. Then you can get a 7 day pass , 14 day pass , 30 day which are more. But the point is the fare doesn’t come close to make it self supporting. We have a Tri-Met payroll tax and it’s a percentage of the gross payroll of a business but I think it works out to 600.00 per year per employee to the employer which is past on to us consumers as higher costs of goods and services. The point I’m making is as a car guy, hot rod guy is the faster you want to go the more it’s going to cost you no matter your mode of transportation. Ask me how I know😂😂😂😂😂😂👍

China measures profitability with different metrics: 1.4+ Billion Improved Bettered Lives👍 at negligible operating losses (costs distributed to only more affluent tax-base) vs others elsewhere: ❎😕👎Hundreds Millions of impoverished lives overspending on both wasted time and transport costs to/from precarious underpaid wage-slave work, and higher transport costs of goods/services/utilities $$$ Excessive "monetary profits" (pocketed by private-power stakeholders) only from overpriced inefficient personal transit or overpriced mass transit (at the expense of bilked passenger-users

I like what they built but I hate HOW they built it.

Well done for a well balanced video. I think it's great that China have invested so much in HSR and shown the world what is possible. Unfortunately I think they went too far and too fast with it. Not to mention they don't respect people's property rights and just bulldoze homes to make way for new lines. I think they should have built the network out a bit more slowly and probably not done the lines that go far out to the extremities to reduce the debt burden. HSR only really works over medium distances because trains aren't as fast as planes over long distances, so I don't know why they built some of those lines (was it vanity or was it trying to create a public service and help the environment? Not sure). Perhaps in 10 or 20 years it will make sense if ridership increases over time, but given that China's population is plateauing now, I'm not so sure.

It looks like China is in a rush to build it's HSR infrastructure before it plans to adopt the stricter and more costly environmental standards of a developed country. Look at global CO2 emissions in recent years, and how much China has contributed.

Financially unsustainable. Easy to build but impossible to maintain.

Little Xi's zoom zoom train!

What about the fact that all these trains are running in debt. They have accumulated huge debt.

Its always cheaper when its built fascist. 🤠