Part 6, the Beijing-Shanghai Bullet Train

Date: 4/2/2017

Before I get going on the Beijing-Shanghai rail trip, I’ll mention a little bit about the Beijing South Railway Station, which we passed through on the way out of Beijing. It was designed by the British architectural firm Farrells and replaced the old train station in 2008. The train station is very cleverly designed. It is oval-shaped and is surrounded by street access on all sides, which gives it a great capacity for incoming and outgoing street traffic.

Inside, it has a giant central hall waiting area with all kinds of shops around the edges. The check-in gates are all around the waiting area, and when you go to catch your train, you go down a bank of escalators to the trains which are a level below all the street approaches, and thus avoids conflicts between the street traffic outside and passengers getting to the trains. They move a heck of a lot of people through this station. The central waiting area has a huge arched roof that spans a couple hundred feet, and is an impressive sight in its own right.

Photo 2434, Beijing South Railway Station, great central waiting area

 

Photo 2454, front of the Beijing – Shanghai bullet train

 

Photo 2467, inside of a 1st class car

Now on to the topic at hand: the world’s longest bridges and how the Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Rail (HSR) rail link fits into this.

If your objective is to visit the greatest engineering projects of the world, as we are, then finding and visiting the longest bridge in the world is has got to be high on the list! If you Google “longest bridge in the world”, the answer from a multitude of sources comes back the same: the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge in China. Length: 102 miles.

The Danyang what?? 102 miles? How can a bridge I never even heard of before be 102 miles long? How can ANY bridge be 102 miles long?

Let me back up a little bit. Perhaps you have heard that China has been on an infrastructure construction binge for a decade or more. They piled up a huge balance of payments surplus from what they were selling to us and everyone else around the world, and had to do something to recycle all that money. A huge infrastructure-building program was one of the results.

Here’s a short summary of where all that spending got China in the ranks of world nations in terms of infrastructure (bridges in particular), and how fast it happened. My point of reference is how much of all this was built since our first trip to China in 2005, just 12 years ago.

–     6 of the 10 longest bridges in the world are in China. All 6 of those bridges were completed since our 2005 visit to China.

–     4 of the longest 7 bridges in the world are on one railroad line: the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway: 30 miles long (the Beijing Grand Bridge), 71 miles (the Tianjin Grand), 72 miles (Cangde Grand), and 102 miles (Danyang-Kunshan) .

–     14 of the 20 longest bridges in the world are in China.   12 of those 14 were completed after our 2005 trip to China.

So you can understand my great curiosity about seeing those 4 ultra-long bridges on the Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway Line, hence our trip on this route. What obstacles are on that railway line that require a such long bridges? What do they look like? Do they cross big bodies of water? Are these bridges needed because of marshy or unstable ground?

Our ride on the Beijing-Shanghai line answered most of these questions. For the most part, this rail line passes through level agricultural land with no natural barriers. There aren’t any great bodies of water crossed, a few but nothing all that dramatic. Most of the alignment is on stable ground – there are some marshy sections along the Yangtze River, but nothing to explain a bridge of 102 miles. So why such long bridges?

Answer: this rail line is an elevated railway built on viaducts for most of its length.

None of the articles I have read on this say exactly why there is a need for elevated lines (since bridges are so much more expensive than surface construction), but here is my speculation on this: 1) with design speeds of over 200 mph, it’s not practical to have the line go up and down over obstacles like other existing roads, railroads, or rivers, and 2) if the newly constructed and quickly proliferating high-speed lines with their dedicated right-of-way were constructed on conventional embankments, they would create many barriers to the people and transportation in the countryside. With the elevated viaducts, the barriers to existing functions are minimal, plus the opportunity for animals or other obstructions to make their way onto the tracks is largely eliminated. Farmers do not have their fields divided, and they can get to where they want to go pretty much the way they always have — all those little rural lanes are still in the same places. And a lot of good arable land is not taken out of production.

Riding the high-speed rail from Beijing to Shanghai made it plain to me that “HSR” is a big deal in China. As in Japan, we passed a lot of HS trains going in the opposite direction at 5 to 10-minute intervals … dozens of them during the course of our trip to Shanghai. Also at station stops such as Nanjing near Shanghai, there must have been a row of over 20 tracks across the train station with about 4 HS trains in the station at the same time, with tracks headed off in other directions. The HS trains go everywhere!

Photo 2686, HS trains in Nanjin rail station.JPG

The scale of it all is monumental. The Beijing-Shanghai HS line cost about $22 billion, was built in a little over 3 years (2008-2011), and employed 130,000 people at its peak.

To put it in a Pacific Northwest perspective, the rail distance from Beijing to Shanghai is 819 rail miles, which is about the same as the distance as from Seattle to San Francisco (808 road miles). The HS train covers this distance in 5 to 6 hours, depending on the number of stops, compared to 12-13 hours by car. And there are 42 trains per day — 42 trains! Our train left Beijing South Railway Station at 11:00 a.m. and arrived at Shanghai Hongqiao Station at about 3:45 p.m. or in under 4 hours 45 minutes, for a calculated average speed of 172 mph. That is considerably faster than the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train that we rode from Tokyo to Kobe. Cost of rail travel? The Japanese Shinkansen tickets cost us $208 each for a 325 mile trip, whereas the Chinese HS train cost $152 each for a for an 819 mile trip.

The rail trip is also of interest for getting a good close-up view of the countryside. A few general observations:

–     There are still a lot of drab-looking rural villages out there in the hinterlands of China with a low-level agricultural economy that appears not to have reaped the benefits of the booming economy in the big cities.

Photo 2560, a rural village and its cell tower.JPG

      –     There was very little sign of homelessness. On our 800+ mile trip from Beijing to Shanghai, I saw maybe 5 improvised tents that looked like there were people living in them. You see much more than that under the bridges of I-5 in downtown Seattle.

–     The building boom of high-rise apartment blocks extends to the outskirts of just about every city. It’s not uncommon to see a pack of 10 of these buildings [being built], each 30 stories high. And they are under construction by the hundreds everywhere … tower cranes everywhere. The scale of all this is hard to get your head around.

Photo 2638, hi-rises gobble up villages

Photo 2732, more tower cranes.JPG

      –     China has surpassed Japan and France in HSR volume and now has the highest volume in the world: 1.4 billion riders per year in 2016.

–     New HSR line that opened in 2011 more than doubled the capacity of the Beijing-Shanghai rail line.

–     I had the same problem on the Chinese HS train as on the Japanese bullet train … it was hard to get photos because the scene you wanted to capture was already gone before you could get the camera up to your eye!

–     The viaducts appear to be a standardized design with spans of 100 feet or so. There is an interesting story out there someplace about how they built so many viaduct miles so fast.

Photo 2648, typical section of HS (High-Speed) viaduct elevated over existing fields

      –     Reading up in Wikipedia indicates that the Chinese have had lots of financing problems with HS rail … it does not pay for itself like freight does, and is subsidized. The Beijing-Shanghai line is an exception to this, however, and is profitable because its volume of traffic is so high.

–     History of the travel time on the Beijing-Shanghai rail link:

*    1949: Beijing to Shanghai: 36 hours

*    1956: Beijing to Shanghai: 28 hours

*    1968: Nanjing-Yangtze River Bridge opened: B-S time: 21.5 hours

*    2004: Z-Trains introduced: 75-101 mph, electrified, Beijing-Shanghai: 12 hours. This was how long this trip took when we visited China in 2005.

*    2006: CRH bullet trains introduced: 160-200 kph (250 kph for short distances), 10 hours.

*    2011: completion of the new HSR Beijing-Shanghai link: 5 hours.

–     Most of the HS rail lines are on completely new alignments to avoid conflicts between slow freight and fast passenger, which also allows building to higher-speed standards.

–     The high-speed rail lines in both Japan and China are unbelievably smooth and quiet … you just can’t feel the speed. In contrast, in my experience the Amtrak between Seattle and Portland runs on old rail lines, which are rough and uneven with noisy rails … the passenger rail cars sway back and forth and feel unsteady much of the time.  The train derailment on the Amtrak Seattle-Portland line on December 18, 2017 bears witness to the problems of using older tracks for higher-speed passenger rail that were not specifically designed for that purpose.

It seems like Amtrak is seldom on time. Japanese and Chinese trains run on time … the Chinese rode from Beijing to Shanghai even ran a bit ahead of schedule. Our Japanese Tokyo-Kobe [train] ran on time to the second.

So after all that about the Danyang-Kunshan Bridge, I could not tell when we were on it … there was nothing to mark it, no mention of it anywhere. You can look up the two towns on Google Maps to find out where it is, but you’d think they’d play up the longest bridge in the world for some propaganda points.

Our arrival in Shanghai was quite interesting.  The high-speed rail station is some 20 miles outside of the city center and there is no mass transit to get you downtown.  We were approached by some tourist folk in official-looking uniforms who started explaining to us how to get downtown via taxi.  At first I waved these folks off as hustlers, but they were persistent, and led us to a legitimate-looking Tourist Info kiosk.  The folks there called another young man who led us out into the parking structure to a brand-new leather-lined SUV taxi that had no meter.  I was suspicious.  We had paid a reasonable fare at the kiosk but as we drove toward the city, I became convinced that we were going to be hit up for a hefty fare when we got to our hotel.  But lo and behold, this fellow drove us right to the front door of the hotel and charged us nothing additional.  Sometimes honesty and good service make a surprise appearance!

We stayed in the the Hyatt in the Jin Mao Tower, which was kind of cool — it was the tallest building in China when it was built in 1999 (3rd tallest in the world).  The hotel portion of the building runs from the 53rd to the 88th floors, so to get to the lobby you have to go up to the 54th floor, which is something we had never experienced before. From all those photos of the atrium that you see around, I had the impression that the entire building had a central atrium. Not so … it only goes from the 56th to the 87th floor. I generally like heights, but my stomach was doing little flipflops when leaning out over the edge of the balcony to take photos. Those rings of balconies invite all kinds of photos to catch interesting abstract forms from different angles.

Photo 2763, Hyatt atrium lobby looking down

Our room Pudong across the Huangpu River from downtown Shanghai was gorgeous, had a view of downtown, the river and the Pearl Tower.  And it was quite a bit more expensive than our very posh Beijing hotel, but at $255 was still much less than you would pay in New York or Chicago.  We faced the west, and the setting sun turned into a red ball as it descended into the very heavy air pollution.

Photo 0137, sun setting into the air pollution

Note 1.  Source of image: 2434-3, Beijing South Railway Sta, Aerial View, Getty Images: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/beijing-south-railway-station-aerial-photo-high-res-stock-photography/624715203?esource=SEO_GIS_CDN_Redirect .