3. Shanghai-Beijing High-Speed Rail
Place: China
Complete Expense: $34.7 billion*
2011 is the finished year.
The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, at 15,534 miles, dwarfs the Spain high-speed rail system, which is more than seven times shorter. It is the longest high-speed rail system globally. It took slightly less than three years to finish the project’s first line, and it took another ten years to build the rest of the system. More than a hundred times more steel and twice as much concrete were used to complete Beijing National Stadium and the Three Gorges dam, respectively, than was required to build China’s high-speed railway.
Shanghai-Beijing High-Speed Rail ©Shutterstock/ZZhang Sheng
The system that can presently transport passengers over a network of two hundred and forty bridges and through twenty-two tunnels at speeds exceeding two hundred and fifty miles per hour was built at a cost estimated at the height of construction to be slightly less than 100,000 workers and engineers. The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is a marvel of high-speed transit technology as well as construction.
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