In an age when commercial air travel often seems safer than moving about on the ground by any means, it remains true that the oldest form of mass transport - railways - can exact a terrible toll of human life when something goes wrong. Until the early hours of yesterday morning, the mainland had run the busiest, fastest-growing rail network in the world without a major disaster for more than 10 years. That seems to count for little now as scores of families grieve for the growing list of dead, and emergency services struggle to cope with hundreds of injured, after two passenger trains collided in Zibo , Shandong province . Our thoughts go out to them, even as we ask why 19th century transport accidents like this can still happen in the 21st century.
Mainland authorities took only hours to determine that the crash was caused by 'human error', according to state media. The director and party head of the Jinan Railway Bureau, which oversees the line linking Jinan , the provincial capital, with the industrial port of Qingdao , have been dismissed and face an official inquiry. Any investigation, however, must dig deeper than the alleged failings of senior regional officials to ensure that no safety issue is overlooked.
The tragic focus on the mainland's rail network comes at an inauspicious time, less than four months before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a magnet for international visitors and world attention. Indeed, Qingdao is the venue of the Olympic sailing regatta. One of the first moving stories of injured survivors to be reported by state media is that of a Chinese sailing team official. Doctors were fighting to save his legs from needing amputation.
More information about what happened can be expected to emerge over days. So far, it appears that a high-speed passenger train from Beijing to Qingdao derailed on a bend and collided with a train from Yantai to Xuzhou , derailing it too. About 10 carriages of the first train toppled into a trackside ditch.
The story of the mainland's railway system is inseparable from the development of modern China. It has more than 76,000km of track, more than three times the amount that existed in 1949. The mainland's rail system accounts for about 6 per cent of the world's total track, yet it moves 24 per cent of global traffic. To achieve this, the mainland has invested about US$100 billion in the network over the past few years. But further huge investment in rail infrastructure, needed to keep up with ever-growing flows of people and goods over vast distances, is one of the keys to future national development.
Despite the investment in new rolling stock and track upgrades, the system operates at near capacity and sometimes beyond, when vast numbers of migrant workers are on the move during holiday periods. The authorities too have pushed its limits, raising top speeds for trains on some lines six times in the last 10 years. Efficient co-ordination of this vast network is not always helped by having a proliferation of railway bureaus around the country.
