China to build high-speed railway line from New York to Beijing

China is considering building a 13,000km high-speed railway line that would run from Beijing to east coast US, according to official Chinese media.

The journey would take two days to complete if the train maintains its proposed average speed of 350km/h. The line would begin in Beijing, travel north through Siberia, and under the Bering Strait to Alaska before heading south through Canada to reach its final - unspecified - destination in the United States, said the Beijing Times.

- We're already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years - said Wang Meng-shu, a railway expert with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

According to China Daily, work has begun with the tunnel technology "already in place". The technology is already being used to build a high-speed railway between Fujian, on China's southeast coast, and Taiwan.

The line would be 3,000km longer than the current largest railway line, the Trans-Siberian Railway, and 200km would be beneath the water in the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska – four times longer than the submerged section of the Eurotunnel.

The Beijing Times has said the China-US line is just one of four proposals for huge cross-border railway projects. One is a line from the southwest city of Kunming to Singapore, another runs from China's Urumqi Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey to Germany.

The final proposal would end in London, via Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev and Moscow.