fast and focused - building china’s railways.docVIP

Fast and Focused – Building China’s Railways John Scales, Jitendra Sondhi, and Paul Amos World Bank Office, Beijing Over the past few years, China’s railway sector has built an astonishing number of large and complex railway projects under its Mid and Long-Term Railway Development Plan. Many of these projects, such as high-speed lines, employ state of art technologies. They have been delivered much faster than is typical of just about any other country. How is it done? The paper argues that three factors dominate: the concentration of responsibility, power and access to resources in one organization; strong technical capacity and processes; and a program effect that delivers economies of standardization and scale. Whether the sheer speed of implementation has adversely affected the overall life-cycle costs and reliability of project infrastructure is not yet known. THE challenge of A Century China’s railways entered a new phase of development with the Mid and Long-Term Plan (MLTP) adopted in 2004 and revised upwards in 2008. It currently aims by 2020 to increase the total rail network from 75,000 to 120,000 route-km. It includes construction of 16,000 km of high-speed routes, three new regional inter-city networks, new dedicated coal lines and substantial double tracking and electrification. It is the world’s largest national railway development program for more than a century. The government’s 2008 economic stimulus program encouraged and enabled the Ministry of Railways (MOR) to bring forward planned projects and ramp up individual project implementation speed to an unprecedented level. For example, the 1,068km Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway, started construction in 2005 and was commissioned in December 2009. At the time of writing, this line and more than a dozen other high-speed lines initiated in the last five years have been completed. A project that in China might take about 5-6 years from government approval of project concept to system commissioning