Acknowledgments

Chinese Railways in the Era of High-Speed

ISBN: 978-1-78441-985-1, eISBN: 978-1-78441-984-4

Publication date: 7 October 2015

Citation

(2015), "Acknowledgments", Chen, Z. and Haynes, K.E. (Ed.) Chinese Railways in the Era of High-Speed, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 249-250. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78441-985-120151017

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015 Emerald Group Publishing Limited


The writing of this book started in the fall of 2014, which was the 10-year anniversary of the implementation of the “Mid- and Long-Term Railway Network Plan.” During recent years, although our primary research focused on an empirical economic assessment of the transportation infrastructure of railway systems in the United States and China, we have greatly benefited from the work of many transportation scholars during the annual meetings of the Transportation Research Board, the Joint Rail Conference, and the High-Speed Rail Tourism Conference, who helped motivate us to write a book on Chinese railways. The ideas in this book were further developed during collaborations with our transportation colleagues at the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University (GMU), including Kenneth Button, Roger Stough, Jonathan Gifford, and Laurie Schintler. The conversations with Huawu He, the chief engineer of the Chinese Railway Corporation, and Jianping Zhang, the director of the Development Program Division of the Chinese Railway Corporation, during the 8th World High Speed Rail Congress (in 2012) in Philadelphia were particularly insightful, as our momentum in writing was greatly strengthened. In addition, we owe a great debt to our friend Anthony Perl at Simon Fraser University, who provided enormous encouragement over the years, advocating us to work on introducing stories about the amazing development of Chinese railways to an international audience.

Our research on Chinese railways could not have been completed without generous support from both the Sol Price School of Public Policy at University of Southern California (USC) and the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at GMU. We especially would like to thank Adam Rose at USC, who provided us with the freedom to concentrate on our research. We would also like to thank the Association of American Railroads, the International Railway Union, and the SCI Verkehr, which have been very generous in providing us with access to many fundamental railway statistics, as will be seen in this book. We are also indebted to our friends, including Junbo Xue from the Chinese Academy of Science, Nobuhiko Daito at GMU, and Ander Audikana at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, all of whom have provided us with excellent assistance in data clarification and data search.

Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge the editorial feedback on this manuscript from the editor of Emerald Group Publishing and from Patricia Waldygo, as well as the invaluable help of Susan Haynes and Alice Zhang. We also wish to thank our publisher Cristina Irving Turner, who has been extremely helpful from the beginning to the end. This book would not be possible without their great efforts. Any mistakes and errors of interpretation and argument are solely our responsibility and are not due to the work of others.