A second-class high-speed rail ticket from Hangzhou to Zibo costs 485 yuan. Of this 485 yuan, 40%-60% goes to infrastructure usage fees, which are the equipment costs of the high-speed rail; 20%-30% is for labor and energy costs; taxes and profits only account for 10%-20%. It seems that the bulk of the ticket price is indeed due to the costs of high-speed rail. In 2024, the total revenue of the national railway was 1.28 trillion yuan, while the total debt at the end of the year reached a staggering 6.22 trillion yuan! Since the 1990s, the losses of the national railway have been increasing. The reason for this is that the construction costs of high-speed rail are simply too high.
Laying one kilometer of high-speed rail track is even more expensive than laying a kilometer-long domino run of 5090 graphics cards! The infrastructure costs of high-speed rail cover many aspects, such as trainsets, lines, stations, electricity, operation and maintenance, and labor costs. Today, we will talk about where the money for high-speed rail is spent.
High-Speed Trains: Burning Money on Technological Crystallization
Let's start with the cost of the trains themselves. The average purchase price of a Fuxing Hao train is about 172 million yuan per trainset, while the earlier Harmony trains relied on importing technology from foreign companies such as Siemens of Germany, and the price was even more exaggerated, reaching a maximum of 380 million yuan per trainset! The current 172 million yuan is already the "cabbage price" version after localization.
In this high-speed, precise, giant machine, every item is a money-burning technological project. High-speed trains usually travel at speeds of over 300 kilometers per hour, and the wind resistance, vibration, and track impact are far greater than those of ordinary trains. To ensure that trains running at this high speed do not derail, drift, or shake, the car body material must be extremely sound and light, and the car body shape must conform to aerodynamics. The various "bullet-shaped" high-speed trains commonly seen in China generally use aluminum alloy hollow profiles, which are light and strong.
At the same time, traditional trains are powered by the locomotive, which pulls the entire train. However, when the train is traveling at high speed, the heavy ballast force at the rear can cause the driving wheels at the rear to slip, causing an accident. Therefore, the power source of high-speed trainsets is not the locomotive, but a large number of bogies. It is located at the bottom of the car body and bears the weight of the vehicle, just like the "feet" of the vehicle, giving the trainset the ability to move.
Two sets of bogies are installed under each carriage. High-speed train carriages are divided into motor cars and trailer cars. Each set of bogies on the motor cars is equipped with two traction motors and two sets of wheelsets, each set of wheelsets containing two wheels and one axle.
The structure on top of the trainset is called a pantograph. The slider on top of it maintains sliding contact with the overhead contact network, and the powerful electrical energy passes through the pantograph, and after a series of voltage reduction and output adjustments, it is finally supplied to the AC traction motor, so that the wheels on each set of power bogies independently generate power.
In addition, high-speed rail must ensure safety, otherwise an accident could result in hundreds or thousands of casualties. Therefore, the quality and price of every component of high-speed rail exceeds that of ordinary industrial parts. Thousands of sensors are spread throughout the car body, and in order to cope with the huge inertia of the train moving forward, the braking method is multi-pronged, including traditional disc braking, regenerative braking, and air braking, all to ensure that this hundreds-of-tons behemoth can stop smoothly from an ultra-high speed of more than 300 kilometers when needed.
And the above is just a small side of the technology of high-speed trainsets. From acceleration to braking to cornering shock absorption, to car body lightweight design and intelligent control systems, every detail contains cutting-edge scientific research investment and rigorous precision manufacturing, which is the core reason why high-speed rail is so expensive.
Sky-High Lines: A Game with Geological Environment
However, in the entire high-speed rail construction process, the purchase price of the train car body is only a drop in the bucket. The construction cost of high-speed rail lines in China is an average of 168 million yuan per kilometer! In other words, the purchase price of a train is only enough to pave one kilometer of road.
Why is it so expensive? There is a very important reason here, that is, China is too large, and almost all kinds of terrains are available. As one of the countries with the most complex terrain in the world, China's high-speed rail construction has always been playing a game with geological conditions. From the Gobi Desert in the northwest to the water networks in the south of the Yangtze River, from karst landforms to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the diversified geological environment forces builders to adopt the engineering strategy of "bridges instead of roads."
In the design specifications for high-speed railways, a strict standard is set for high-speed rail lines: high-speed rail tracks need to meet higher straightness, smaller slopes, and larger curve radii. For example, on lines designed to run at 350 kilometers per hour, the minimum circular curve radius needs to reach 5,500 meters, and the gradient of the main line should not be greater than 20 per thousand. This means that high-speed rail lines must be long and straight. Tunnels must be built when encountering mountains, and viaducts must be built when encountering valleys, and tunnels and bridges themselves are very expensive projects.
The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, the busiest high-speed rail line in China, has more than 80% of its roads on viaducts, so the construction of bridges alone reached 61.5 billion yuan! This does not even record the investment in key bridges such as the Dashengguan Bridge. The cost of standard bridges in plain areas is 80 million to 150 million yuan per kilometer, while special bridges across rivers or deep valleys can reach more than 200 million yuan.
And tunnels are even more expensive, usually costing 120 million to 250 million yuan per kilometer, and once encountering faults, soft rocks, and water sources, the cost will skyrocket, possibly reaching 300 million to 500 million yuan per kilometer. For example, the Qilian Mountain Tunnel of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang High-Speed Railway is currently the highest and longest high-speed railway tunnel in the world. During construction, faults, fissures, permafrost, and debris flows were dense, and the maximum water inflow even reached 105,000 cubic meters per day. Therefore, it was rated as a first-level risk tunnel. It can be said that every meter of the Qilian Mountain Tunnel was "piled" up with money and lives.
If it involves some more special projects, such as cross-sea bridges or undersea tunnels, it is even more difficult to imagine. For example, the Jintang Undersea Tunnel of the Yongzhou Railway is the longest undersea high-speed rail tunnel in the world with the highest water pressure and the most complex geological conditions. The total length is only 16.18 kilometers, but the total investment is as high as 30.5 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 1.8 billion yuan per kilometer!
Moreover, ordinary railways can tolerate some small degree of ups and downs, but high-speed railways cannot. Even a slight ups and downs can lead to derailment. Therefore, the rails used for high-speed railways are different from ordinary railways. Ordinary railways mostly use ballasted tracks, which have low maintenance costs, while high-speed railways use ballastless tracks except in special terrain conditions such as active fault zones and severe settlement areas. This track replaces the traditional crushed stone ballast with a concrete integral roadbed, eliminating the risk of loosening of sleepers and ballast, and can greatly improve the overall stability and accuracy of the track. The rail itself costs thousands of yuan per meter, and ballastless tracks are usually more than 30% more expensive than ballasted tracks.
In addition, in order to withstand higher speeds and pressures, high-speed railway tracks also require higher quality and manufacturing processes of steel rails, usually using alloy steel with higher toughness and wear resistance. In order to reduce the impact of thermal expansion and contraction, high-speed railway steel rails will be specially treated at the source of production. The blank material of the steel rail will expand after being fully heated, and then stress will be generated inside after being stretched by the machine to reduce thermal expansion and contraction. Ballastless tracks account for more than 90% of the Beijing-Shanghai Railway, with a total price of about 13.586 billion yuan, which is equivalent to about 10 million yuan per kilometer just for laying tracks.
In addition, as an electrified rail transit system, the operation of high-speed rail is highly dependent on external power supply, so in addition to track laying, it is also necessary to simultaneously build a traction power supply network, which also significantly increases the complexity and cost investment of the project. This high-speed railway contact network, which includes supports, wires, substations, and other facilities, usually costs 10 million to 18 million yuan per kilometer.
There is also the signaling system. High-speed rail flies at 300 kilometers per hour, and the distance between successive trains on the same track can be as small as a few minutes. It is impossible to use traditional traffic lights. Modern train control systems require the installation of a large number of electronic devices, costing 5 million to 10 million yuan per kilometer.
In addition, for stations, a medium-sized station in an ordinary prefecture-level city costs about 500 million to 1.5 billion yuan, while the total investment in the construction of a large hub station like Hangzhou East Station can even reach 11.7 billion yuan.
Operation and Maintenance: Continuous Huge Expenditures
Finally, there is the cost of operation and maintenance. Contrary to what many people imagine, the power consumption of high-speed trains is actually very low. Taking the trainsets on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway as an example, at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour, each kilometer consumes only about 21 kilowatt-hours of electricity. But this amount is really huge.
However, the maximum daily capacity of high-speed rail exceeds 12,000 trainsets, and the average daily mileage exceeds 7 million kilometers, consuming 150 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per day. Considering that high-speed rail needs to start and accelerate frequently, the actual total power consumption needs to be about 190 million kilowatt-hours. According to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, it also requires 80 million yuan in electricity bills per day, which is 29.2 billion yuan a year!
In addition, compared with ordinary trains, high-speed rail requires more complex electrical and mechanical personnel. And the track maintenance standards for high-speed rail are also stricter. Most high-speed rails will be suspended at 12 o'clock at night because the tracks need to be repaired. And after the repairs are completed every morning, the first high-speed rail running on the line is empty to ensure safety.
This operation and maintenance cost is a very large expense. The average annual operation and maintenance cost of a high-speed rail line can reach 4 million to 7 million yuan per kilometer.
| Project | Value (RMB) |
|---|---|
| Average purchase price of Fuxing Hao | 172 million per trainset |
| Bridge construction cost of Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway | 61.5 billion |
| Bridge cost in plain areas | 80 million - 150 million per kilometer |
| Tunnel cost | 120 million - 250 million per kilometer |
| Total investment in Jintang Undersea Tunnel | 30.5 billion (about 1.8 billion per kilometer) |
| Contact network cost | 10 million - 18 million per kilometer |
| Train control system cost | 5 million - 10 million per kilometer |
| Average annual operation and maintenance cost | 4 million - 7 million per kilometer |
China High-Speed Rail: The King of Cost Performance?
It seems that the cost of China's high-speed rail is already very high, but compared with foreign high-speed rail, we are really already "cabbage price". Let's first exclude the British high-speed rail that cost 27.1 billion pounds to build 30 kilometers in 10 years, and then exclude the American high-speed rail that cost 11 billion US dollars to build 487 meters in 9 years. Just look at other mature high-speed rail lines in the world.
Among them, China's high-speed rail not only has the lowest construction cost and ticket price, but also has the world's undisputed first place in terms of quality, running speed, and safety. However, even with such excellent cost performance, China's high-speed rail is still continuously losing money. Not to mention recovering costs or lowering ticket prices, it is even difficult to fill in operating costs.
If measured by the commercial thinking of payback period, China's high-speed rail is almost destined to be a loss-making business. But what high-speed rail really leverages is countless development opportunities outside the books, and the ability to drive urbanization, industrial chain, consumption, and employment.
"Vanity Projects" of High-Speed Rail Stations?
But will high-speed rail definitely bring development to a city? According to statistics from the China Business News, at least 26 high-speed rail stations across the country are in an unused or closed state due to reasons such as remote locations, insufficient surrounding facilities, and low passenger flow, such as the Zhoucun East Station in Zibo, Shandong, which has been idle for 15 years, the Ningbo East Station, which has been built for 15 years and idle for 12 years, and the Shenyang West Station, which has provided more than 5 years of service.
The reasons for the idleness are simple. First, some local governments ignore the actual situation and use the construction of high-speed rail stations as a lever to drive land development in new urban areas, and the passenger flow is far lower than expected. Second, many governments habitually link high-speed rail stations with the urban image of towns and cities, and show a willingness to invest and build high-speed rail stations that far exceeds the actual development needs of the city. Many people may still remember the "high-speed rail scramble" that was staged in many places across the country in previous years.
So perhaps we should ask not whether building high-speed rail is worthwhile, how much the central government invested, and how much land the local government invested, but whether we have made good use of this high-speed rail. High-speed rail itself will not change anything. It provides an opportunity for development. What really changes is whether we have seized this opportunity and truly connected people, industries, and the future before it speeds past.