The World's Fastest Train Service

Most Americans do not see any reason to construct high speed rail in the country. Why would anyone want to ride a train when they can just fly? There are of course a slew of environmental ramifications of mass airplane travel, but beyond even these, I have always argued that high speed rail makes a ton of sense. Up until now, the only high speed rail I’d ever been on was in Sweden, on my way back to Lund from the Arctic Circle. Even at high speeds, that trip still took 24 hours – an amount of time that certainly makes even the extraordinarily expensive flight much more attractive.

Thus it was with personal excitement and academic curiosity that I decided to take a ride on the world’s fastest train service. Part of the almost finished high-speed rail from Beijing to Guangzhou – essentially from the far north to the far south of the country – the Wuhan-Guangzhou line covers almost 1000km in just over 3 hours. That’s an average of around 300km/hr, and at its fastest, the train hits something like 350km/hr. For those metrically challenged (don’t feel bad, I used a converter), that’s like 210mph, and right around 190mph on average. It is right now, by far, the fastest train ride on the planet, with higher sustained speeds over longer distances than ever before. When the full line is completed, the trip from Beijing to Guangzhou – which used to take over 24 hours – will be cut in a third, to just eight hours. While still longer than the three-to-four hours it takes to fly between the two places, these are speeds and times that truly do make train travel competitive with flights.

Technical specifications aside, what is the actual trip like? Well, fast of course. It is not the max speeds that are most impressive, it is the ability of the train to sustain these speeds that is truly mind-boggling. I’ve been hurtling along this track for over two hours at an almost continuous 200mph. The outside world is just a blur. Inside, besides being a bit too warm, its quite comfortable. The seats, five per row, arranged in a 3-2 format, are larger than your average economy seat, and the legroom is better too. You can buy drinks, snacks, coffee, and of course, instant noodles. The restrooms are clean and well lit, and the cars still look mostly new and no worse for the wear. There are power outlets available, overhead luggage storage, large windows to look out of, and nifty automatic sliding doors between cars. The train rides mostly on an elevated track, which means obstructions are likely harder to find on the rail itself. Tickets are expensive, which means that ridership is economically filtered. The mix is mostly business people and more well-to-do travelers, but that doesn’t mean people don’t still bring their own food and snacks on board. They run nearly a train an hour, and with at least 8 cars per train, the sheer number of economically filtered people still able to take this train is pretty incredible, especially considering my train was almost full. I’ve also found that the high speeds of the train have made my cell signal pretty spotty. That’s a small price to pay however.

Of course, it must be said, there is a dark side, or at least a less bright side, to the high speed rail construction here in China, a characteristic of the country that would make its duplication elsewhere (like the US) very difficult. Namely, the government here gets to do what it wants, where it wants, when it wants. They built a new railway station in Wuhan expressly for the high-speed rail, a behemoth of a station something like 18 platforms. It is surrounded by… nothing. Absolutely nothing, but dirt, and now, construction. The government has placed the high speed rail at the very edge of the city and is now hard at work bringing the city to the station, building entire swaths of residential areas literally from the ground up. The Changsha station, in Hunan province, was similarly isolated, and from the looks on the map, the end station in Guangzhou will be the same. There are technical reasons for this – in order to maintain high speeds, the rail should stay away from populated areas. Traveling through the middle of urban areas means slowing down. All along the rail line, there are stories of land being seized by the government for rail use, and who can guess how much of the environmental good from high speed rail has been offset by the footprint of all of this new building?

Another consequence of this type of rail routing is that one of the biggest advantages of traditional rail – that of being able to get off the train in what is almost always the middle of the city (think of London or Paris or New York) is now gone. Instead, it took an hour by taxi for me to get to the Wuhan station, and it took me an hour and a couple transfers on the subway system in Guangzhou to get to a different train station to catch my train to Shenzhen. This is a big trade-off in my opinion, making traveling by high speed rail unfortunately more close to the hassles of traveling by plane. I love the fact that I can step off the train and be right in the middle of all of the action. I don’t like ending up in an airport like Tokyo’s Narita or Seoul’s Incheon and having to make a one hour connection to get to the city. It’s so anti-climactic. Yet, to get these high average speeds, this trade-off may indeed be necessary and further, I have no doubt that the government will somehow connect these cities to these stations, either through convenient mass transit or by simply building the city so that the new train station is indeed in the middle of it all.

Everything else aside, high speed rail is still in its infancy here in China. It is very clear though that the central government has made a huge commitment to high speed rail (despite some anecdotal rumblings I heard from local friends about the lack of necessity, the high costs, and the age-old, why not just fly? Argument). There are numerous lines opening up everywhere in the country, and the government is on track to creating the largest and fastest high-speed rail network in the world. It is a stunningly ambitious and exciting. While there are still lots of kinks to iron out, my experience is that high speed rail truly may be the future of travel. Routes like the one I took – 1000 or so kilometers in three hours – are highly competitive with flights when you factor in all of the extra time it takes to fly these days. I’ve always said a two hour high-speed train from LA to San Francisco would be both completely feasible as well as highly competitive with flying. Unfortunately, it will be many years before we finally see this happening in the US. For now, if you for some reason find yourself in China with a few hours to kill, hop on a train and get a taste of the future.

First ten minutes of the journey, shot in achingly boring fashion.