From Council on Foreign Relations:
With much fanfare, China opened the world’s highest railroad (AP) connecting Beijing with the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, on July 1, the Chinese Communist Party anniversary. An engineering feat, the high-tech train reaches heights of more than 16,500 feet and carries passengers in sealed cars pumped with oxygen across the frozen Himalayas. But two months after its inauguration, the train is already experiencing trouble. Cracks have appeared in concrete bridges and the railbed is proving unstable in certain areas (RFE/RL); one passenger has already died from altitude sickness (The Standard). [Full Text]
Read previous CDT posts on the railway.
