Yes Kate, it's a plan for a land interconnected world with only a few places not connected by land. It was envisioned in the 1800's and fails to die even with the massive advances in shipping and air travel. You can still, always, ship more goods by land than by sea or air, for the same price.
Yep, Absolutely WM.
However if you look at the new high speed lines from France to Germany (via Strasbourg) fit into that map. As does the high speed links to London, Amsterdam and Brussels.
So it is going ahead, slowly but surely.
My suspicion is that the EU is fully bought into the whole land bridge thing but in typical EU "mandarin" style, they will not ever own up to it.
There are also rumours that the
Qinghai–Tibet Railway is part of the land bridge effort.
It's always interesting