From Shanghai to Chongqing: The World’s Most Expensive Railway
China's Yichang-Wanzhou Railway: 253 Bridges and 159
Tunnels
By Larry Romanoff, December 11, 2019
The Yiwan Railway
Work was finally completed in 2010 on China’s Yiwan
Railway, a route paralleling the lake formed by the Three Gorges dam, a 380 km
East – West line running through beautiful but challenging mountainous terrain
from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, and Yichang (the site of the Three
Gorges Dam), to Wanzhou City, just East of Chongqing.
The route was originally proposed by Sun Yat-Sen in
1903 to shorten the rail journey between the mountainous regions in the
southwest and eastern parts of China. The project initially began in 1909, but
was repeatedly abandoned from insurmountable technological problems due to the
difficult natural environment, until the central government decided to relaunch
it in 2003.
This railway is a part of one of China’s most
important national transport corridors. The project achieved its main
objectives of increasing corridor capacity, removing transport barriers, and
reducing transport costs, and has already contributed significantly to economic
growth and poverty reduction in the project area, and potentially benefitting
the entire Western area.
China’s Tunnel and Bridge Museum
This railway line through a stretch of mountains on
the edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau was China’s most difficult and expensive
to build. It took a staggering seven years and 50,000 workers to dig and drill
159 tunnels and build 253 bridges. In one extreme case, it took nearly six
years to drill a tunnel through Qiyue Mountain along the route. Of the
railway’s total length of 380 Kms, 75% percent or 280 Kms, consists of bridges
and tunnels. Each and every kilometer of the railway contains at least one
bridge or one tunnel, most often one of each, leading the locals to refer to
the railway as the “tunnel and bridge museum.”
60 Million RMB per Kilometer
The railway goes through some of the most difficult
terrain in the country, with many sections running through karst topography,
and the railway’s chief designer claiming this to have been the hardest project
he had ever worked on. The line involved more than 20 billion RMB in total
investment, about 60 million for each kilometer, and is China’s most expensive
railway, costing double the 30 million RMB per kilometer for the Qinghai-Tibet
Railway which was the second most expensive.
It is a bit of anticlimactic irony that this railway
required so much time to build that railway technology surpassed it during its
own construction. The Yichang-Wanzhou railway was designed for trains traveling
at about 200 kph, which were the fastest at the time construction began, but
was two generations behind by the time construction was completed. Given the
construction difficulties, there is probably no one in China interested in
upgrading this railway in the immediate future.
This railway reduced the Yichang-Wanzhou travel time
from 22 hours to just five hours, and travel time from other Central or East
China cities to Southwest part of the country are now also significantly
shorter, bringing new opportunities for residents who live in the steep and
remote Wuling mountains. One local resident said, “We used to pay 100 Yuan
(US$15) for a one-day bus trip to Yichang before. Now, 30 Yuan can get us there
in two hours.”
Infrastructure and Privatisation
China has invested heavily in railways in remote areas
like the Three Gorges, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet, in an attempt to connect
the length and breadth of the country with convenient and fast transportation.
Chinese leaders recognised from the beginning that economic development follows
transportation, and thus maintaining control of the transportation
infrastructure derives from a determination to distribute the benefits of
development to the entire nation.
The reality is that not all infrastructure is destined
to be financially profitable – profitability being the only measure by Western
standards. A privately-developed railway system would be built only on the most
profitable routes, those likely to amass billions for their owners but that
would leave perhaps half the nation destitute for transportation and sentenced
to perpetual poverty. Thus, railway privatisation would saddle China’s central
government with the costs of building all the unprofitable routes without
benefitting from the profitable segments. This is one of Western capitalism’s
main mantras: privatise the profits and socialise the losses.
It was the same with mobile communications.
Recognising the development potential attributable to rapid and inexpensive
communications, China’s central government decreed that the entire population
must benefit equally, or at least have more equal opportunity to benefit, and
thus the entire country was wired, including the deserts and the most difficult
mountainous areas (such as Wuling) with sparse population and no realistic hope
of profitability. But with China’s universal mobile phone system, farmers in
some of the most remote mountain villages are on the internet daily, learning
better agricultural methods, checking and negotiating prices and arranging
sales. And with this new railway through some of nature’s most formidable
barriers, local farmers and business people (who would have been ignored by
private enterprise) can not only easily arrange delivery of their produce but
quickly travel between regional population centers, stimulating enormous
increases in tourism and all manner of commerce, thus benefiting the entire
region.
China's Mega Projects: Transportation
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He
can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
All images in this article are from the author
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai,
Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
