The Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway Opens

The high-speed railway between Beijing and Shanghai opened to passengers on 30 June 2011. The line is 1,318 kilometres long and joins Beijing South station with Shanghai Hongqiao. It has 24 stations, among them Tianjin, Jinan, Xuzhou and Nanjing, and Suzhou is reached through the line’s Jiangsu stations.

The line

Construction began on 18 April 2008 and took a little over three years. Sources give the cost as roughly 220 billion yuan. Much of the route is carried on viaducts. One of them, the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge in Jiangsu, is about 164 kilometres long and is listed by Britannica as the longest bridge in the world.

The railway was designed for 350 kilometres an hour. During trials in December 2010 a CRH380AL train reached 486.1 kilometres an hour on the line. For the opening, the operating speed was set at 300 kilometres an hour, with the fastest trains taking just under five hours. Railway Technology describes the line as cutting the journey from about 14 hours on the older railway to five.

What it changes

The line connects the capital with the largest city in the country through a corridor of dense population. For visitors it makes the railway a practical alternative to flying between the two cities. Stations are closer to the centres than the airports, and the line serves Nanjing and the cities of Jiangsu, which become easy stops between the two.

For travellers

Trains were later run at 350 kilometres an hour with the Fuxing generation of rolling stock, from 2017. Tickets are sold by seat class, and an identity document such as a passport is needed to buy them and to board. Journey times and frequencies change, so check the current timetable before travelling.