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It’s no secret that my wife and I have had a strained relationship with the railway system here in China.  For the two and a half years that we have lived here it has been next to impossible to book a ticket to anywhere we’ve wanted to travel, and when we actually do break down and buy hard seats we are stuffed in the trains like…well, like Chinese (Update: this video is actually from Japan, although to be sure, such cramming does exist in China.  My apology for being misleading).

Even our most recent trip to Kashgar was a tad disappointing when we were forced to take a 24-hour sleeper bus back home because the train was sold out.  Most of this can be attributed to the fact that the only time we can travel is during the Chinese holidays, notably Spring Festival, which is the absolute worst time to try to squeeze through China.  Another reason is that the whole ticket selling process is so darn confusing (do tickets go on sale 7 days or 4 days before departure?).  Finally, there just aren’t enough railway lines in China.

At least the government is working to solve one of these problems.

Railway lines all over China are getting a boost, but that’s old news.  From 2006 to 2010 – a mere four years – China’s railway system will have grown an astounding 17.5%!  As if that weren’t enough, last weekend China’s State Council just approved 2 trillion yuan ($292 billion) to expand the rail system even more…all of this in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis.  Business Week called this move the largest railway expansion since the US’s transcontinental line in the 1860′s.

Thankfully, all this change is actually going to affect us here in Xinjiang.  Considering how little railway we have at the moment, we actually may feel all this change more than any other part of China.  Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, announced earlier this month that they have plans to build 9 more rail lines by 2020!  Currently, there is only one track traveling from Xinjiang to the rest of China, but in a decade we should be connected to each nearby province with the exception of Tibet – I guess those mountains were just too big to travel over.  Pretty amazing stuff considering the first rail line in Xinjiang was only opened 46 years ago.

Hopefully this will open up a few more train tickets for us to buy for travel around China – that is if we’re still here in 12 years (survey says…”nnaahh”).  Of course, odds are that most of these rail lines will just be feeding coal to this energy-hungry country, so we’ll either have to be content cramming ourselves in with China’s huge migrant labor force or just hop on top of a coal car.

We’ll probably just end up taking the sleeper bus.

For more info on the China State Council project, read this article.