Railways
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Quote:In a sign of China’s increasingly powerful role in Central Asia and the Middle East, on Tuesday a Chinese train arrived in Tehran after a 14-day journey. The freight train just used existing rail links to go from China to Kazakhstan, then to Uzbekistan, then Turkmenistan, and thence to the Iranian capital, Tehran. It is a feat that had never been accomplished until yesterday.[…]There are plans for new high speed rail links through Central Asia on which Chinese goods could be carried to Iran and thence to Europe. The two-week train journey of these goods through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan today was already less than half as long as the sea journey from Shanghai to Bushehr would have been.
A train from London the Shanghai, imagine the idea, one day it will happen, and soon. Imagine what that could mean, nd imagine it in a world without borders, without international rivalries.
Well it looks like it may be achieved in reality for freight as a result of 'free trade' or a 'communist China' if you read the Morning Star (lol).Saying 'imagine what that could mean' all smacks to me of Edward Bellamy's utopian visions, yes I could commute to Shanghai on a Monday morning to be exploited to work there instead of here. Anyway here's an excerpt from Wikipedia;
Quote:When pneumatic tubes first came into use in the 19th century, they symbolized technological progress and it was imagined that they would be common in the future. Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) includes suspended pneumatic tube trains that stretch across the oceans. Albert Robida's The Twentieth Century (1882) describes a 1950s Paris where tube trains have replaced railways, pneumatic mail is ubiquitous, and catering companies compete to deliver meals on tap to people's homes through pneumatic tubes. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) envisions the world of 2000 as interlinked with tubes for delivering goods,[22] while Michel Verne's An Express of the Future (1888) questions the sensibility of a transatlantic pneumatic subway.Yes Elon Musk is another Peter Joseph, or the 21st Century version of the 20th century's Buckminster Fuller or the 19th century's Edward Bellamy. "Emancipation will be by the emancipation of technological development (not class struggle)" etc.Engels did the best take down of this as a political ideology.
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