KORAIL has unveiled the proposed interiors of the “luxury transcontinental trains”, which will be used to transport the joint North-South Korean cheerleading squad to the Beijing Olympics. All this to haul a bunch of cheerleaders? Out of all the looney things that the S. Korean government has done or is planning to do, this takes the grand prize.
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15 Comments
Question from a non-Korean reading fool: Who keeps the cars after the Olympics?
#1.
It doesn’t say and your guess is good as mine.
Looks like the coach has an excellent “try-out” cabin.
#3,
Ooh yeah, nothing like a good workout before the games, eh?
Who gets to keep the cars afterward? Well, between the two heads of state, only one has a patent dislike of air travel, and prefers to go by train. Could this be developing into another gift for the Dear Leader?
terrible interior design
Yeah, he the “great leader can make his way around the NK in the luxury train carriage. I wonder it Pres. Noh will let him keep the south Korean cheerleaders to add to his collection-harem?
Our tax dollars at work. Grrr!
Basically the same layout as “Free Space” or “Snackers” dining cars you can find on some Mugunghwa or Saemaeul Korail trains, but with what looks like varnished wood and plush chairs in place of the cheap cafeteria plastic that is presently featured. And, as one who has been paying taxes to the ROK for the last decade or so, I can’t say I’m any more impressed with this waste of money as I am with the design.
Is it just me, or do North Korean cheerleading squads bear an eerie resemblance to the robots in the “Small World” attraction at Disneyland? Y’know… like post-ethnic cleansing.
The DPRK have a habit of keeping Chinese trains that are used to drop off supplies. Sometimes they return them stripped and sometimes they never return them at all. I’ve got to think these will also go to the DPRK chop shop.
“베이징올림픽 응원열차로 사용된 후 국내 여행객을 위한 관광열차로도 전환해 활용할 수 있도록 계획하고 있다”
So i guess that KORAIL will use it aftwerwards as part of a site-seeing tour promotion? (Travel in style.. 명품 기차 여행.. yadda yadda)
Also, I doubt that ‘응원단’ means an all-girl cheerleading squad. The train will probably be full of stuffy old men in boring suits.. like you normally see at important official events.
Me? I’d rather fly there in an hour than ride on a train for 33 hours…
Maybe Korail, assuming they keep the cars, can later use them to expand their wine tour service, which wouldn’t be all that bad except for the fact that they insist on serving some locally grown and bottled pseudo-wine called Chateau Mani. Slightly better than the Jinro red you can buy for 3000 won/bottle, but not nearly as good as a Majuang cabernet!
“Basically the same layout as “Free Space” or “Snackers” dining cars you can find on some Mugunghwa or Saemaeul Korail trains, but with what looks like varnished wood and plush chairs in place of the cheap cafeteria plastic that is presently featured.”
You know lumber is way overpriced when people are easily fooled into thinking that particle board and wood-plastic composite are luxurious materials.
These trains cars will hardly go to a chop-shop and their excuse to be used to transport cheerleaders is just that : an excuse.
This is yet another gift made by “The Great Pretender” Roh to his Emperor Kim Jong-Il at the expense of the Korean taxpayers, which includes a majority of the posters on this site.
So, how do you like “our” gift to “The Dear Leader” up north ?