“The world’s fastest bullet train, the CR450, has begun a battery of pre-service trials on a high-speed line in China, clocking a single-train speed of 453 kilometers per hour [280 mph].
The CR450 series, engineered for a top test speed of 450 km/h and a commercial service speed of 400 km/h, is now undergoing qualification trials on the high-speed rail linking the eastern city of Shanghai and a western inland one of Chengdu, Science and Technology Daily reported on Monday. …
… The CR450 will log 600,000 trouble-free kilometers before it is cleared to carry passengers.”
The train is being tested on a line which is over 1,000 miles long. At those speeds, it is getting within shouting distance of being competitive with aircraft. Remember the days when big news like this came from the US? Was not that long ago.
Some days, I wake up feeling very positive that things are changing for the declining West. Then I look at the news and realize – No! The West is simply falling further & further behind. The “Engineering” society of China is leaving the “Lawerly” society of the West in the dust.
Here is China celebrating what is undoubtedly a tricky technical task of coordinating rail shipments, but one that apparently involves no new technology and could probably have been implemented in the US thirty years ago, if anyone had wanted to try.
“Following the success of the test, China could increase its railway freight transport capacity by more than 50 percent without the need to construct new rail lines.”
Apart from SpaceX, when was the last time we saw any worthwhile applied technical advance coming from the US? And it is not even worth talking about Europe.
Subsidized battery packs and robots filled with Chinese-made parts are not really on the same level as potentially expanding the capacity of the freight system by 50% without laying any extra track. As for Oculus VR, a technology which has not changed the world ….
What counts is not who invents a technology, it is who puts it to productive use. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he changed the world. In its hey-day, the US was the place that ambitious people came to push back frontiers (eg Carnegie, and more recently Musk). Now there are too many red tape barriers to success for such people. And so we fall behind.
The fraudsters often try to beat the original to filing trademark application or they file for different goods and services in hopes of using the registrations to convince Amazon that they are legit.
