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Some of your numbers are a bit over the top Wavy, but you are certainly on the right track[groan]. Almost all of China's HST routes are at least 1000klm
long, and some are considerably longer. What makes them viable, as you said,is the moderate distances between cities of 5-10 million people, so that very few people travel more than a fairly small part of the route. For an HST network to be viable, it just needs moderately sized towns and cities at
convenient distances apart,and train frequency adjusted to suit, as is the case with HSTs in many parts of the world, especially Europe, but alas, we don't even have that in the Eastern part of Oz, and forget the western part. The Chinese system is probably unique, in that when their government decided that they wanted an HST system, they built a system that in parts use existing lines upgraded as far as possible, and in other parts used new dedicated HS lines, resulting in different sections having different speed
limits, some lines are 250, some 300, and some 350. They also built in a
hurry, resulting in a high speed crash a while ago, and they had to spend enormous sums of money to fix the problems.
Sydney to Melbourne with no more than a couple of fairly equidistant
stops, making a trip of less than 3hrs, might work. The airlines would hate it though. That reminds me of when the open road in the U.K. was
unlimited, newly built buses used to travel up and down the just opened M1
motorway at a cruise of 160kph, Then 200kph Intercity trains started running from the major cities to London, and almost simultaneously the
open roads were limited to 70mph[about 115kph], and all the high speed
buses went out of business almost overnight Epistle finished.
raymo
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