Word: railway
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TIANJIN, China — The railway station in Wuhan is typical of most such structures in China. The building is flat and sprawling, and it is mostly comprised of one large, non-partitioned waiting room. There are designated waiting areas, and these have seats and gates. So, if you are looking for a train to Shenyang, you might be looking for Waiting Area 10, which might already be fully occupied, and you might start forming a line in front of the gate that keeps the public separated from the escalators, which lead downstairs to the tracks...
...China was already in the midst of a nationwide infrastructure program when the recession hit. Emergency spending measures simply added to existing schemes already under way. In other words, the projects really were shovel-ready, and the money hit the streets quickly - and in large dollops. Outlays on new railway construction, for example, were $41 billion last year. They will be $88 billion this year. Says one senior FORTUNE 500 executive: "In the U.S., NIMBY [not in my backyard] is still the order of the day, whereas in China it's more like IMBY. They build where they want, when...
...should stimulate economic activity and enhance productivity for years to come. But some high-profile works such as the $10.7 billion Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai Bridge have been criticized as unnecessary vanity projects, while others are said to be wastefully duplicative - some 300 km of the Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway and the Shanghai-Beijing Express Railway, for example, are overlapping routes. Some local governments have also been discovered to be faking documentation and even entire projects. (See pictures of Beijing...
...operator and the S-Bahn's parent company, says it was forced to take the commuter trains out of service after an accident on May 1 in which a carriage of a train derailed after a wheel broke. No one was injured, but the incident spooked authorities. The federal railway agency launched an investigation and issued several urgent safety recommendations. "According to new safety regulations imposed after the accident on May 1, we have to double-check and replace the wheels of our entire S-Bahn fleet more often than we used to in the past," Jürgen Kornmann...
...Those unfamiliar with the challenges of building infrastructure in harsh environmental conditions might have assumed that an advanced nation like Australia would have had a north-south transcontinental railway for some time. But the funny fact is that while the Ghan's tracks were first laid in the 1880s, the entire line wasn't fully completed (on an upgraded track) until 2004, and at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Now, luxury trains up to one kilometer long, sometimes numbering 52 carriages, crawl through the forbidding primordial stretches of Outback twice a week, like giant high-speed caterpillars...