I had been traveling in southern China’s Guangxi province for three weeks. It was a rainy that Monday as southern China’s wet season became more inescapable all across the roughly 1,000 mile train journey from Guilin to Shanghai, crossing six Chinese provinces. A journey that took the old trains 20 to 22 hours, now takes a little over nine hours on the new high speed CRH trains. I wanted to see how the Chinese middle class travels city to city using the extensive new high speed rail network. The Train staff knew no English, as most of the other passengers didn’t. I don’t know Mandarin. I saw no other foreigners on the nearly full train. Most of the passengers were older, about my age, and many seemed to be returning from a holiday trip.
China’s rapid expansion of it’s high speed rail network has opened over 19,000 Kilometers of the system by the end of 2015. The Chinese government is spending over $300 billion to create the world’s largest, fastest, and most technologically advanced high-speed railway system by 2020, when they plan to have 30,000 Kilometers completed.
The electric motors would hum more loudly as we accelerated out of a station stop, gently pushing your head back into the headrest as the speed climbed.
The train’s cruising speed was about 300 KPH or 186 MPH. The countryside whizzed by the window like we were in a low flying rocket. It made for comfortable, green, fascinating, trip
I did travel on one even faster train that took me out
to the Shanghai Airport, the Mag/Lev suspended above a magnetic rail bed. That train cruised at 430 KPH or 267 MHP.