On Saturday, China opened a 360-km high-speed line linking Zhengzhou in central province of Henan and Xuzhou in the eastern Jiangsu Province. The line, which connects the west with two major north-south networks, initially has nine stations and trains running at 300-km per hour.
Last year, the country’s high-speed trains carried 961 million passengers, a whopping 237 percent hike from the figure in 2011. The number is expected to further increase as many who live and work in urban areas like Shanghai and Beijing have started to re-settle in neighboring cities and commute with the advent of the high-speed trains.
Chinese officials are confident that the country, which has already the world’s longest high-speed railway line, is on track in its plan to achieve a railway network of 30,000 kilometers by 2020.
Over 20,000 km! China's high-speed railways rank 1st worldwide in length Q6laF1VXcO
— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) September 10, 2016
Huang Xin of China Railway Corporation (CRC) expects the country’s high-speed railway network to reach 45,000 kilometers in 2030. He said it took 11 years for the network to hit the first 10,000-km mark but the line has since doubled in only three years.
Zhao Guotang, Vice General Engineer of the CRC, said by the end of 2015, China already topped the world in terms of length of high-speed railways. High-speed trains, he added, are already changing the traveling habits of the Chinese people.
China’s Standard high-speed EMU enters service: CHINA Railways Corporation inaugurated its new standard high-… railwayfansUK) August 15, 2016
“The operative mileage of HSR in China has taken 60 per cent of total amount in the world. During the decade from 2005-2015, the total mileage of HSR lines constructed in other parts of the world was no more than 4,500 km, so we can see most prosperous development of HSR lines is in China,” Zhao told foreign journalists at the China Railways headquarters in Beijing in April.
In August, the CRC started operating bullet trains which can run at 350-km per hour using the Electric Multiple Units (EMU) technology with its first passenger service, Train No G8041, departed from Dalian for Shenyang in the province of Liaoning.
“China independently owns the design of the EMU and it will be a leading model for China to export to the world,” said Zhou Li, head of technological management at the CRC, the country’s national rail operator.
China’s high-speed railway network covers three clusters that consist of the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the Pan-Bohai Region.
