FRESH questions were raised Monday about China’s high-speed rail network, following media reports of extravagant spending on trains’ internal fixtures.

    For instance, each on board toilet facility costs as much as 1.2 million yuan (US$187,500), featuring “attractive but impractical” imported automated sinks and tissue boxes costing 1,125 yuan each.

    A probe by Century Weekly magazine, published Monday, found that train makers had been paying up to 10 times market value for toilet fittings. That’s despite placing bulk orders that industry insiders said should have brought a 40-percent discount on listed prices.

    The spending report could trigger a new round of criticism of the high-speed rail network’s rapid development, which had been hailed before the Ministry of Railways became embroiled in a series of corruption and mismanagement scandals early last year.

    The ministry’s woes peaked in July with a crash involving two high-speed trains in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, that claimed at least 40 lives and injured more than 100 people.

    According to purchase documents obtained by the magazine, public toilets fitted in CRH2-class high-speed carriages made by China South Railways (CSR) cost 300,000 yuan.

    But that figure was eclipsed by the 1.2 million yuan cost of toilets in CRH3-class carriages made by China Northern Railways (CNR).

    “At the time, we said we wanted to use the very best materials,” a CNR official told the magazine, referring to design specifications set forth in 2006.

    Among the most profligate of purchases were bathroom sinks from Japanese firm Toto’s TYL range — featuring built-in taps with automatic sensors — that cost more than 70,000 yuan.

    The magazine’s reporters found Toto’s top-of-the-line sink — the LW991B — on sale in Beijing for just 32,400 yuan.

    Although Ningbo CSR Times Transducer Technique, a CSR unit, had developed a domestically made automatic sink for use on the trains, this idea was abandoned after two purchase orders were made, a technical officer with the firm told the reporters, citing various defects.

    The magazine did not provide the cost of the Ningbo CSR sink.

    (SD-Agencies)