The world’s a tiny place indeed if you’re not adverse to jumping on an airplane, hurtling into the sky for a few hours and then plunging in a controlled, shrieking fall down at the earth’s crust several thousand miles away… but some people find that prospect a bit unnerving. They’ve got options to air travel, of course: boats and trains and velocipedes and buses and mules and camels… but these are all, by necessity, much, much slower methods of getting from point A to point B.
Those with a paranoid fear of flying, then, might be interested in a new scheme announced by the Chinese government. Taking the concept of Japan and France’s high-speed bullet trains and then twisting the knob up to 11, China plans to build a high-speed railway that would potentially allow people to travel between London to Beijing in under two days.
According to the Chinese government, the train, if built, would go from Beijing to Singapore, then connect to India and Pakistan. The senior consultant of the project said they were aiming for trains that run almost as fast as airplanes, and looking for a complete date of sometime close to 2020.
China’s supertrain ambitions don’t end there: they are also eyeing the possibility of super speed railways between Beijing and Russia and Beijing and Berlin. Another railway line could connect China to Vietname, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.
It’s all very exciting… but I’m more unnerved by this than plane travel. After all, I don’t really care to ride a train hurtling across the planet at 750mph when we already have a hard enough time keeping errant cows off of more sluggish train tracks.
Read more at the Telegraph