35 Dead; 210 Injured in Chinese High Speed Rail Crash

Beijing, Jul 24, 2011. At least 35 people died yesterday when a high-speed train smashed into a stalled train in China's eastern Zhejiang province Saturday.

An additional 210 people are injured, some very seriously.

The accident occurred on a bridge near the city of Wenzhou after the first train lost power due to a lightning strike and a bullet train following behind crashed into it, state television said.

The power failure disabled an electronic safety system that was designed to warn following trains of stalled trains on the tracks up ahead, and automatically halt them before a collision can occur.

It showed one or possibly two railcars on the ground under the bridge, with another hanging above it. Several other railcars derailed in the accident near Wenzhou, some 860 miles south of Beijing.
More than 210 people have been taken to hospitals, the official Xinhua news agency added.

Obama's Corporate Sponsor GE makes High Speed Trains

One train was heading from Beijing to the coastal city of Fuzhou, the other was running from Zhejiang provincial capital Hangzhou, also to Fuzhou.

"The train suddenly shook violently, casting luggage all around," Xinhua quoted survivor Liu Hongtao as saying.

These are exactly the same sort of trains that President Barack Hussein Obama, D-Kenya, says we need here in America.


In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama set a goal of giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years. Some high-speed routes in California and the Midwest are already under way, he said.

The President's proposed investment in a new high speed rail system would shovel tens of billions of dollars to his close friend and Corporate sponsor Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE. Hopefully GE would build these high speed trains right here in the USA, so a few jobs could be created, but there is no guarantee that they would do so.

Promised to buy trains from GE with borrowed mone

The entire rail project would be funded with money borrowed from China, and paid back by future generations of Americans.  

This means China could insist that the GE trains were built in China, as a condition of the loans.

The President admits that rail travel is the least preferable mode of transportation used  by Americans, but says "Once we outlaw gasoline powered cars, they won't have any choice."