Beijing to Shanghai Railway: diary of a 4h 48m journey
China opens its 820-mile Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link to the public this week ahead of schedule, just three years after construction began. Our China Correspondent, Peter Foster, was given an advance preview and details the journey.
Telegraph UK
A new high-speed train arrives at the Beijing-South railway station Photo: REUTERS
08.30: Our first glimpse into the future comes in the shape of the Beijing South Railway Station, a giant glass dome that's propped up on stilts. It looks like a flying saucer has just landed from outer space.
China has more than built 300 of its super-modern railway stations during the decade-long railway building boom, symbols of its growing power, much as the great London stations like Euston, Paddington and Kings Cross were for the Victorians
08.45: After putting the bags through an airport style scanner, and submitting to a peremptory waft of a security guard’s wand we reach the “Boarding Gate” for Train G1 - the 09.00 service to Shanghai.
A barrier opens with a wave of your ticket and the passengers are swept down to the platforms on banks of escalators. The number of each carriage is helpfully displayed on a moving digital display.
08.50: Settle into a First Class seat. The legroom on the plush, crimson corduroy seat is generous, and there’s a footrest and plug for the laptop, with an airline-style tray table that folds out from the armrest. It’s all neat, but not wildly flashy.
The ticket price in this class is about £90.00 one way. The narrower standard class seats, which are like economy class airline seats only with more legroom, cost about £50 one way.
09.00: And we’re off, gliding out of Beijing South behind a Chinese-built CRH-380BL locomotive.
The platform is so clean I can see the guard’s reflection in the polished granite as we pass. Within three minutes we’re travelling at 180kmh after five minutes the electronic speed readout shows 247kmh and seven minutes after departure we’ve hit the top operating cruising speed of 300kmh (186mph). At this rate, with a brief stop in Nanjing, we’ll reach Shanghai in four hours, 48 minutes.
09.30: Even after 30 minutes the sensation of speed is remarkable. It feels like we’re in an airliner, blasting down the runway, just moments away from getting airborne. (Obviously, hoping that’s not the case today). A hostess sets a refreshing cup of green tea down on my table. Even at this speed, the surface barely ripples.
09.50: Another train comes blasting down the line in the opposite direction. This must be one of the test bunnies. There have been some rumblings recently that China’s railways might have been built too fast, cutting corners on safety. Engineers deny this.
By the time this line opens on Friday the service will have already have been running flat-out (but empty) for a month, with 1,500 trains clocking up 2m kilometers of dry runs.
10.30. Go for a stroll up the train and, having been quite pleased to have been allocated a seat in first class, now find myself suffering from serious seat envy issues. First class is not, as I had fondly imagined, the best seat in the house. That title indisputably belongs to the “executive sight-seeing class” right at the front of the train. There are six flat-bed pods — like an airline business class seat — which look straight out over the driver’s head and down the tracks. (Cost £170, one way.)
The train gobbles up the tracks, the sleepers flashing underneath with hypnotic rhythm. The driver sits behind a glass partition, holding all this massive power lightly between thumb and forefinger which lightly the controller’s joy-stick. The speedo hovers just above at the 300kmh mark, but the dial indicates the loco is good for 450kmh. The official record for the CRH-380BL is actually 487.3kmh. Wei Qiang, the director of engineering for the project who is proudly walking the aisles, says in testing that “we have regularly exceeded 400kph”.
10.50: There’s something about trains that lend themselves to fact-spotting. Here’s one for you:
China has laid more high-speed rail track in the past decade than all new rail installed in Western countries combined over the past half-century. Or what about this mind-boggler?
According to the World Bank, the amount of freight hauled on China’s railways increased in 2010 by an amount equivalent to the entire freight carried by Britain, France, Germany and Poland. The Beijing-Shanghai link is expected to free up older tracks to carry an additional 50m tons of freight every year.
11.09: Time to test the 'facilities’. Happy to report they are very clean and comfortable, with a full-length dress mirror behind the door. (A major advance on the hole-over-the-tracks toilet I last used on a local train from Chengde to Beijing a few weeks back). The modern vacuum flush is a little startling, but highly efficient.
11.40: Rural China is flashing by outside the window. We’re flying through the countryside at about 40ft (nearly 80 per cent of the track is built on raised concrete pylons) while straw-hatted farmers till fields dotted with the tombs of their ancestors which they work around like an English farmer might circumvent an old oak tree. Some trudge behind mechanical rotavators, others have mules to plough the land, while the majority hoe manually between their lines of crops. Two hours ago it was fields of maize common to north China, but now the fields have morphed into the rice paddies of the warmer, wetter south.
Critics point to the yawning gap between the rural poor and the metropolitan users of high-speed trains and wonder if China's government should really be spending so much money on 'vanity’ projects like this railway, when its economy isn’t mature enough to reap the benefits of the higher speeds.
Wouldn’t it be better to invest in health and education, they say?
China’s railway ministry disagrees, arguing that the longer China leaves its railway building programme, the more expensive it will become to buy the land and construct the network. “Do it now, do it fast” is the mantra.
12.32: Arrive Nanjing. We’re on the fast train today, only making one stop to Shanghai. The longer version, taking in all 24 stations on the line, takes five-and-a-half hours.
12.58: Time for some reading. A survey by the Tax Payers Alliance recently found that nearly half of the general public want Britain’s own £32bn high speed rail plans to be scrapped and the Coalition government to spend the money on public services or cushioning austerity measures. If they rode this train, they might just change their minds.
It’s hard not to feel slightly inferior. Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Spanish colleagues are all discussing the relative merits of their own high speed rail networks. Alas, this is a conversation in which an Englishman cannot join. China built this Shanghai-Beijing line in 39 months (ahead of schedule) at a cost £21.4bn, making it China’s most expensive engineering megaproject, surpassing even the Three Gorges Dam (£19.8bn).
China is still investing £70bn a year in its railways while Britain wonders if it can find less than half that amount between now and 2032.
13.12:
One tiny grumble. This train is too fast! Sounds churlish, I know, but it means that you can never hold a mobile signal for more than a few minutes. My internet dongle is hopelessly confused 'hopping’ between cells at nearly 200mph while my mobile is draining its battery searching for the next cell. There is a wireless internet network on board, but as yet it’s not working. I suspect this might disappoint some businessmen looking forward to ditching the plane in favour of the train.
13.30: Xu Yifa, a lifelong servant of China Railways, is holding court. He started life shoveling coal into steam locos and reckons he’s personally shoveled 8,000 tons of coal, before becoming a diesel-electric driver. China is full of such people, who seen almost unfathomable changes in their own lifetimes. Is China, which has expressed an interest in tendering, the right country to be building Britain’s high speed rail?
“Of course it is!”, he says, “There can be no argument. China has been to all the countries with high speed rail and then taken the best parts. We are now the most advanced high speed rail nation in the world. We can build it for you easily.” And could China even fix our perennially late trains? “No problem, that’s not difficult, just a question of good management,” he says.
No doubt it’s more complicated than that,
but sometimes it’s impossible not to be swept up in admiration of China as it revels in its newfound capabilities.
13.45: We taxi into Shanghai’s Hongqiao Station. Like most of China’s high speed rail projects, we’re ahead of schedule.
