Although Chen still prefers to fly on longer routes, she says on business trips shorter than six hours, the choice of train over plane is now a no-brainer.

Second, a point made by that toned-down critic:

"In less than a decade, we constructed more high-speed rail lines than what it took Japan and Europe 40 years to build," said Zhao Jian, an economics professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and one of the country's leading experts on rail transportation.

"We've had such amazing growth because land expropriation is cheap and so is labor," he explained. "You also have the economy of scale -- other countries usually build a few hundred kilometers of tracks, but in China we're talking about thousands of kilometers."

In Europe, economy of scale in rail construction is something that has been realised in Spain only, but austerity is set to eliminate that.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}