A former senior official of the Ministry of Railways said that the ministry has overstated the safety of high-speed trains and covered up operational incidents.
In an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald yesterday, Zhou Yimin, former deputy chief engineer of the ministry and head of the Science and Technology Department, said the new bullet trains had been plagued by problems.
'Some problems seem to be small, but they are not. [The ministry] classified all of them,' Zhou was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
He says the latest and fastest train, the CRH 380 series, which will soon begin operating on the world's longest high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai, would put the safety of passengers at risk if run at its top speed of 350km/h. He said the mainland was incapable of making trains that could run safely and reliably at more than 300km/h.
The ministry said this month that safety was not a concern at 350km/h, but that Beijing-Shanghai trains would run at 300km/h for economic and environmental reasons. Zhou said the maximum speed of the CRH 380 prototypes, bought from Japan and Germany, was 300km/h.
But Liu Zhijun, a former railways minister who was held by the party's disciplinary committee in February, put speed over safety to break world records, Zhou alleged.
