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Recently, China launched the first bullet train in Tibet.
About Tibet’s bullet train
- It links Lasha to Nyingchi near the border with Arunachal Pradesh, India.
- Nyingchi is prefecture-level city of Medog which is adjacent to the Arunachal Pradesh border.
- The 435-km line, on which construction began in 2014, has a designed speed of 160 kilometres per hour
- It reduces the travel time between Lash to Nyingchi with a travel time of three and a half hours.
- Over 90% of the track is 3000 metres above sea-level.
- The line is the first electrified high speed rail (HSR) line, as China refers to bullet trains, in Tibet. China has the world’s longest HSR network.
- The Lhasa-Nyingchi rail is one section of the Sichuan-Tibet railway line connecting the two provincial capitals.
- The Sichuan-Tibet Railway starts from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, and travels through Ya’an and enters Tibet via Qamdo, shortening the journey from Chengdu to Lhasa from 48 hours to 13 hours.
- It will go through the southeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, one of the world’s most geologically active areas.
- It crosses the Brahmaputra river locally called Yarlung Zangbo 16 times.
- It has an annual freight transport capacity of 10 million tonnes which provides strong support for the flow of goods.
- This will be the second railway line connecting Tibet to the hinterland, following the already open Qinghai-Tibet rail.
- The first section of the new line, from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, to Yaan, was finished in December 2018, while work on the 1,011 km Yaan-Nyingchi line will compete the entire railway line by 2030.
- China completed construction of a strategically significant highway through the Grand Canyon of the Yarlung Zangbo river, as the Brahmaputra is called in Tibet. This is the “second significant passageway”
Source: The Hindu