"China to build high-speed rail link to Europe"

Expanded capacity for freight trains would make a lot of sense - maybe not so much for China, because it´s much cheaper to transport stuff on ships, but for all the landlocked countries between China and Europe.

High-speed trains? No.

A) You can´t run high-speed passenger trains and freight trains at the same time. The pressure wave of an high-speed train would take a freight train apart.
B) Lines for high-speed AND freight trains are extremely expensive to build. Freight trains can´t cope with uphill gradients and high-speed trains can´t cope with tight bends. If you need to cross mountains (and there are A LOT between China and Europe) you´ll need a lot of pricey tunnels and bridges that way. This will make the trains expensive to operate and the potential passengers in the middle Asian countries have no deep pockets to pay for expensive train tickets.

That sounds like another silly mega-project like the three gorges dam...

if anyone can pull it off, its the chinese though - its not really a country taht obeys the traditional laws of economics.

im sure they built a few gas and oil pipelines along side them, theyd find the central asian countries suddenly find a way of finding the dough.

In my opinion, China is the only country left that obeys the traditional laws of economics.

IMHO China is the only country left which has traditional industry by now... Especially since almost all developed countries has outsourced their industries to China. Not to mention that they only obey these laws until they can rip-off the technology... ;)

All the western corporations care for is the stock market and the next quarterly profit.

The fun part of realizing why this world order is designed to fall apart! :D

If our economy would have worked that way 100 years ago, the Panama Canal would have never been built.

I thought the Panama canal is something not to be so proud of... :rolleyes:

Germany still has a very strong manufacturing industry.

True, IMHO this is one of the reasons why Germany wasn't as hurt by the crunch... but still has a lot of the industry outsourced to PRC.

That reminds me when I bought a swing-sander in OBI. I bought the cheapest, 10EUR one which couldn't last a day. I bought it because the rental would have cost the same and I thought it could last 5sq. metres. Well, it didn't so I brought it back to the shop, bought a 20EUR one instead. This was the point when I checked all available sanding machines origin. Guess what, even the 100EUR one is made in PRC, including all German brands.

(This we discussed with my friend later on, that the price tag must depend on how many times it has been returned by quality control! :D)

Outsourcing is a mindless hype anyway.

Well, some people have to realize that saving could be costlier. On the other hand, I guess the the current setup supports consumerism. If you buy a TV today and you gotta throw it out a year later (or whenever the warranty is over), you need to buy another one. So why plan to make a TV which lasts more than a year, hence it costs more?

OK, OK, bad example! :D
Let´s take most railway lines in Europe, then. Those were financed by selling stock in the 1800s. It took often decades until some lines produced a profit.

I think those times were about underfinancing. Today everything is overfinanced. Investors just have no clue where to put their money so they either speculate on the market or invest into these mega-hyper-super projects like that. Maybe this project gonna be financed by U.S. Dollars just to burn it out from the Chinese treasury? It already holds a lot of space over there by now... :rolleyes: