First bullet train to autonomous region ready to roll, Zhao Lei reports in Urumqi.

Li Wenqing, deputy head of promotion at the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region tourism bureau, is eagerly looking forward to the opening of the region's new railway.

"You can see how many tourists the Qinghai-Tibet Railway has carried to Tibet since it became fully operational in 2006," Li said. "There's no doubt that the new line will impart huge momentum to our tourism market."

He was speaking as we rode a CRH2-061C bullet train during a trial run of the autonomous region's first high-speed rail line, during which engineers tested the line's dynamic response, rails, communication systems and aerodynamics.

The Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railway stretches 1,776 kilometers from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and crosses vast tracts of the Gobi Desert. The total investment was 143.5 billion yuan ($23 billion).

The line, with a designed maximum operational speed of 250 km/h, is expected to begin operations before the end of the year, according to officials, who said it will run parallel to the existing Lanzhou-Xinjiang railway, which was opened in the early 1960s and runs lower-speed trains.

"At present, travelers have to spend a lot of time on the road when they take tours in Xinjiang, leaving less time for sightseeing or other recreational events," Li said. "If they want to save more time, they have no choice but to travel by air, which is convenient but more expensive."

The new high-speed line, which will be priced competitively, will have 31 stations and the journey time between Lanzhou and Urumqi will be cut to eight hours from about 20.

Summer and autumn are the best seasons to visit Xinjiang, which is looking to make tourism one of its economic pillars. The region registered more than 52 million trips last year, a rise of 7 percent from 2013, and the visitors spent around 67.3 billion yuan.

In 2013, about 300,000 people worked in Xinjiang's tourism industry, and an additional 900,000 were employed in related sectors.

The region expects to receive 58.7 million tourists this year, and to earn 83 billion yuan from them, according to the local tourism bureau.

Li said the authorities will help tourist agencies to charter high-speed trains to transport their clients, and ticket prices will be discounted to reduce the cost of group travel.

"We expect that the first travelers to take the new line to Xinjiang will be skiers who will come to enjoy our famous resorts in spring and summer," he said, adding that the rise in visitor numbers will create new jobs in the region.

Those sentiments were echoed by Lai Xin, an official with the Xinjiang Development and Reform Commission. "The surge in tourism will boost labor-intensive sectors such as the services and handicraft industries and generate more jobs," he said.

"For instance, the area of Urumqi where the new railway station will be sited used to be a forgotten part of the city, but now it's becoming a hot spot for real estate and commercial development because residents and businesspeople are expecting a flood of tourists."

Two weeks ago, during a speech at a top-level conference to discuss issues related to the region, President Xi Jinping said the regional authorities must make boosting employment level their top priority. He urged officials to help residents improve their skill bases to help them find jobs or start their own businesses. Speaking at the same conference, Premier Li Keqiang said employment is one of the biggest concerns for people in Xinjiang.

New jobs

"We will spare no efforts to take advantage of the new line and create new jobs. It will be one of our concrete measures to honor the central government's pledge," Lai said, adding that the logistics industry will also benefit from the new line.

"The high-speed line will serve to transport passengers, thus relieving the heavy burden on the old Lanzhou-Xinjiang line, and enabling the latter to focus on freight transport," he said, explaining that currently most of the cargo to and from Xinjiang is transported by truck, resulting in higher costs for both businesses and purchasers.

"Almost all the vendors doing business on Taobao or other online shopping websites ask buyers in Xinjiang to pay a delivery fee, which is not the case for customers in many other parts of China," Lai said.

"That's because the costs of transporting freight to Xinjiang are usually higher. The improvement in rail transport capacity will help resolve the problem and will be beneficial to both businesses and buyers," he said, adding that the line will be extended farther west at a later date.

Erkin Tuniyaz, vice-chairman of the regional government, contemplated the larger picture: "The line will greatly improve Xinjiang's transport capabilities to the Central Asian and European countries, and strengthen its role as a transport hub along the Silk Road Economic Belt."

In a speech in Kazakhstan in September, President Xi proposed the construction of a "Silk Road Economic Belt", a modern-day equivalent of the ancient trading route known as the Silk Road, as a way of developing political and economic ties with China's neighbors, and accelerating the development of the country's western regions. The proposal is being studied, but as yet, there is no timetable for the route to come into being.

Advanced techniques

During the test run on June 3, the train exceeded its maximum operational speed, attaining 279 kph at one point and averaging 275 kph, according to Wu Ning, from the China Academy of Railway Sciences who helped to monitor the trial.

According to La Youyu, who led the construction of the Xinjiang section of the line, the remarkable speeds are a tribute to the achievements of the engineers in overcoming the strong winds that have long troubled rail operators in China.

La said the new line traverses five major wind-ravaged sections, which total 580 km in length, and explained that wind speeds in a section known as the Baili Windy Area can reach 60 meters per second.

"The Baili Windy Area is 170 km long. We have found that the winds in the area can hit Force Eight on the Beaufort scale (between 62 and 74 kph) on more than 200 days every year, greatly affecting the train's stability," he said.

The engineers devised a number of methods to handle the effect of the wind, such as the construction of windproof and dust-suppressing walls along the line. They also constructed a 1,200-m-long archway in the middle section of the Baili Windy Area.

According to La, the entire length of the windproof infrastructure is 462 km. "We estimate that without the walls, operations would have to be suspended as often as 60 times a year. These walls will reduce the number of suspensions to about 10 a year by enabling the train to travel safely despite winds as strong as 13 on the Beaufort scale," he said.

Liu Xinle, director of construction management with the Urumqi Railway Bureau, said the high winds weren't the only problems that faced the engineers, who also had to factor wide variations in temperature into their calculations.

"The highest temperature, in Turpan, is close to 50 C, while in Urumqi it can fall as low as -41 C. These extreme changes can seriously affect the condition of the railbeds and tracks, so we employed special techniques to treat the concrete," he said.

Liu said that about 90 percent of the line's infrastructure has already been tested, and trials will be conducted on the rest of the track in July.

Trials of the Lanzhou-Xining section will begin in August, and tests on the Xining-Xinjiang section will start in September.

La said the construction teams worked hard to protect the local environment. Bridges were built above the subterranean water networks in Turpan and the wetlands in Dabancheng so the landscape won't be affected by the rail tracks. Meanwhile, all vehicles that transported construction materials traveled along fixed routes on wetlands and grasslands to minimize the environmental impact.

In April, Sheng Guangzu, general manager of China Railway Corp, said that 78 percent of the construction investment in 2014 would be plowed into work on the country's central and western regions, where 86 percent of the new railways that will begin operations this year are located.

According to a Five-Year Plan (2011-15) formulated by the former Ministry of Railways, 23,000 kilometers of new lines will be built in the central and western regions, with investment of 1.85 trillion yuan.

Contact the writer at zhaolei@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/12/2014 page6)