China's Railway on top of the world

[Deltic]

China announced the completion of a history-making railway on the roof of the world, a 1,956-km-long project that is comparable to the Great Wall.

The announcement was made at a ceremony held at the Lhasa railway Station to mark the country’s success in “making the impossible possible’ “ by building a railway line across 5,000-meter-high mountain ranges and a 550-km-long frozen belt.

Tibet’s regional capital basked in glory as merrymaking crowd of railway builders, officials and ordinary citizens hailed in Tribetan and Mandarin the completion of the railway that is soon on to prove a more efficient and affordable means of transportation.

“In my younger days, I thought we’d have to wait for 100 years for a railway in my hometown,” said Qamba Zoinzhu, a 58-year-old businessman in Lhasa.

The newly completed Golmud-Lhasa section of the railway, zigzagging 1,142 kilometers across the Kunlun and Tanggula mountain Ranges, has rewritten the world’s history of railway construction.

Its highest point is 5,072 kilometers above sea level, at least 200 meters higher than the Peruvian railway in the Andes, which was previously the world’s most elevated track. State-Of-the-art technologies, management expertise and efficient teamwork have turned the impossible Possible.

Even in areas where the least exertion sends one to the side of oxygen bottle, no single death of altitude disease was reported among thousands of railway builders.

[fred henderson]

It is interesting that China is still able to use railway building as an instrument of Imperial domination. I cannot see any economic justification for the construction of this line.

[dario]

Links to the west thru Kazakhstan and Afghanistan, Iran on new standard gauge railways would be more important for China's economic development, so the line to Tibet is purely a domination issue, a pointed out by Fred Henderson.