China's 'train hunter' on a quest to chronicle its fast-expanding railways
Wang Wei has spent 10 years travelling all over China to photograph trains and new lines, but can he keep up with the incredible pace of the country’s rail boom?
Armed with his trusty Nikon camera, Wang Wei has hiked up to the frosty Tibetan plateau and across the Gobi desert; he has journeyed to a tropical island in the South China Sea and to China’s remote border with Pakistan – all to satisfy his inexplicable urge to photograph trains.
“I never get tired. You don’t get tired if you are doing something you feel truly passionate about,” says Wang, who at 24 has already built a personal archive of hundreds of thousands of photographs of trains.
China’s No 1 trainspotter, who grew up just next to Beijing’s Xizhimen station and still lives with his parents, believes he was born with a fascination for ferroequinology.
Since that pre-Olympic push began, China has built the world’s longest and fastest high-speed rail routes, using sleek white bullet trains to slash the distances between mega-cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
In just over seven years, about 11,800 miles (19,000km) of high-speed track – about 55% of the global total – has been laid. “What the world did in half-a-century, we have done in 10 years,” said Zhao Jian, a transport expert from Jiaotong University in Beijing.
While China has expanded its railway system there is one difference in how they have addressed safety and reliability as compared to Japan. The last passenger train derailment in Japan was more than 10 years ago. When a motorman working for JR West and behind schedule took a train at speed into curve in western Osaka resulting in several hundred deaths. The Shinkansen which has been in operation for 51 years has never been involved in any fatal accident.
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