China High-Speed Rail Section Collapses

By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU

Reuters

Excavators in central China's Hubei province were at work on Monday to repair a section of high-speed rail line that had collapsed after rains.

BEIJING?A section of new high-speed rail line in central China has apparently collapsed two months before it was scheduled to go into use, in the latest blow to the nation's already troubled high-speed rail ambitions.

The extent of the collapse wasn't clear. The state-run Xinhua news agency and other local media said Monday that a 300-meter (almost 1,000-foot) section of a high-speed rail line intended to connect the Yangtze River cities of Wuhan and Yichang collapsed Friday, apparently following heavy rain. The collapse, near the city of Qianjiang in China's Hubei province, happened on a rail line that had already undergone test runs.

The reports mentioned no casualties and offered few details. Xinhua said hundreds of construction workers were rushing to repair the affected section.

However, Hou Xinyue, a local railway official in Qianjiang, disputed the media reports, saying the incident affected 4.3 miles of the rail line, a larger amount of track than reported by state media. Mr. Hou, deputy director of a local office that oversees one 27-mile section of the 175-mile Wuhan-Yichang line, said rail tracks on an above-ground platform sank as the foundation gave way, possibly due to heavy rains.

Mr. Hou said the rail bureau in Qianjiang was still investigating the accident. He didn't disclose further details.

While the Xinhua reports also blamed heavy rains as the main trigger, other local media cited a recent report by the state-run magazine Time Weekly, which said that engineers working on the construction of the Wuhan-Yichang high-speed line had complained of a sloppy construction method used by builders on another section of the same line, with soil substituted for rocks in the railway bed. Details of the Time Weekly report couldn't be confirmed.

A person who answered the phone Monday in the information office of the China Railway 12th Bureau Group Co., which is in charge of the project, had no comment and declined to give her name. An official for the media office of the Qianjiang municipal government said his office also had no comment.

Calls to the Ministry of Railways went unanswered.

The accident followed a fatal high-speed railway crash last July that called into question the pace and quality of China's high-speed-rail buildout, which officials had touted as a signature program and a sign of the nation's rising technological might. That accident?which involved one bullet train rear-ending another in the eastern China city of Wenzhou?killed 40 people and injured 172.

Chinese government reports following a state-led investigation have blamed flawed signal equipment and poor communications procedures as well as corruption. The accident prompted Chinese authorities to slow expansion of the bullet-train system.

The incident reported on Monday came as Railways Ministry officials started to boast again that the country is committed to pushing ahead with its high-speed-rail expansion program.

China's central government conceded late last year that China's high-speed-rail-network expansion had gone too fast. The network is already the world's largest and is planned to stretch some 16,000 kilometers (about 10,000 miles) when it is completed in 2020, at an estimated total cost of more than $300 billion.

Reports of the incident on Monday triggered a selloff of China railway-related stock. On the Hong Kong stock exchange, China Railway Construction Corp. closed Monday's trading at 5.31 Hong Kong dollars (68 U.S. cents), down 7.3%. China Railway Group Ltd. dropped 5.4% to HK$2.83 while CSR Corp. lost 4.1% to HK$5.42.

?Stefanie Qi and Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 13, 2012, on page A8 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Rail Line Collapses in China.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304537904577277200065540834.html?mod=rss_about_china

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