Comments by "Antony Wooster" (@antonywooster6783) on "Putin interview; Furious with Merkel. Biden predictable and hostile" video.

  1. 17:16 It used to be that the Chinede imported all the wheels for their highspeed trains (HST) from Germany. Something like 2 million/year IIRC. About two years ago, the Germans abruptly cut off the supply. So the Chinese worked out how to make them themselves. They need a lot of them, because they change the wheels on their HSTs after they have done two million miles of travel.
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  2.  @lorenzomagazzeni5425  China is a country about the same size as the US. It use to be the case that some parts were so far from the main centres of population that it took weeks or even month to get there. With enemy organizations always trying to stir up trouble, it made it easier for them if the centre was weeks away. It was difficult to develop the outer parts of the country, because it was so hard to get people and things into and out of the far away places. If someone fell seriously ill, in some parts of old China, they would die before a doctor could get to them or they could get to a doctor (See a book by Josh Horne called "Away with all pests!") To develop the economy and to raise all people out of poverty it was neccessary to enable everybody to be able to trade with each other. So the government built roads to every village, masses of bridges to shorten routs and then railways. Evidently, they thought that while they were building a railway they might as well make it a high speed one. The result is that the interior of China is now developing rapidly. Instead of weeks it now takes a matter of hours to get from one end of the country to the other. People in remote villages can sell stuff on the internet by post and they do. The problem with the wheels of an HST, is that the centrifugal force on a wheel rotating that fast is huge and unless the wheel is very strong it will fly to pieces. If you make it as a solid lump of steel the noise is terrible. The other problem is the bearings which have to be quite special, as otherwise they might seize up and derail the train, or as happened once in Germany a composite wheel came apart in the course of a journey, the rim of the wheel unrolled and came up through the floor of the carriage, passing between two people sitting there! The train left the track and IMMSMC hit a bridge. Quite a lot of people were killed. Obviously, the railways are an important strategic asset too.
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