December 28 - a big day for China Railways

Today (December 28, 2013) a new schedule comes into effect on China's railways. Schedules, of course, are updated a couple time every year, but this time there are a lot of changes, because a number of major railways open on the same day:

• The Xiashen (Xiamen-Shenzhen) High-Speed Railway, which completes the high-speed corridor along the country's southeastern coast (Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo-Wenzhou-Fuzhou-Xiamen-Shenzhen-Guangzhou). One probably will see the introduction of direct Shanghai-Guangzhou high-speed service (although, actually, it could have been introduced several years ago, via Shanghai.
• The Yuli (Chongqing-Lichuan) High-Speed Railway completes the first east-west high-speed mainline, Changdu-Chongqing-Lichuan-Yichang-Wuhan-Hefei-Nanjing-Shanghai. However, news reports say that the Lichuan-Yichang section (which opened a few years ago) won't have high-speed train (D or G type) yet, just regular passenger trains. Supposedly, some signalling issues etc need to be taken care of first. So the long-standing promise of a day train from Shanghai to Chongqing will have to wait a while yet.
• The Xi'an-Baoji high-speed line. Baoji itself is not a major destination; this project is merely a step extending the western terminal of another east-west high-speed mainline (now from Baoji to Xi'an to Zhengzhou), which eventually will be extended in the west to Lanzhou, and into Qinghai and Xinjiang.
• High-speed (D and some G) trains will start running on an upgraded rail line into Guangxi: from Hengyang (on the Beijing-Wuhan-Guangzhou mainline) to Guilin, Nanning, and Beihai.
• Direct high-speed service starts between several existing high-speed railways. For example, direct high-speed service from the Northeastern China (Harbin, Dalian, etc) to Shanghai, Qingdao, and elsewhere on the nation's high-speed rail network is started. Elsewhere, direct service from Guangzhou to Qingdao opens.
• For "regular" passenger trains, somewhat symbolic is the extension of one of the overnight Urumqi-Yining trains all the way to Khorgos (Khorgas), near the border with Kazakhstan. On the Kazakh side, there is already an overnight train from Altynkol to Almaty. (So this is obviously not a "timed connection"). Incidentally, the track development in Khorgos looks pretty impressive for a place that only got its railway 3 years ago. Obviously, trade with Kazakhstan is a fairly major business...
  Khorgos area - View Larger Map
• The Wuhan-Xianning commuter railway, the first line of Wuhan's future commuter rail system opens. This is a specifically Chinese development. In most countries, commuter trains - like Metro-North and New Jersey Transit around New York City, elektrichka in Russia, or Cercanías in Spain share tracks with long-distance trains, often not without some detriment to both services. In China this is apparently considered impossible, due to the heavy load (especially freight) on the "regular" rail lines, and rather inconvenient track alignments on the new high-speed lines. So if Hubei wants to introduce service similar to New Jersey transit, with frequent and more or less conveniently located stops, it build a completely new system of tracks and stations. Except that, unlike New Jersey, commuter trains in Hubei will run at speeds up to 200 km/h...
• Ah, yes, there are also subway news. Wuhan opens Line 4 of its subway system, so now they will have three lines in total (Line 3 does not exist yet), connecting all three gigantic train stations of the city (Wuchang, Hankou, and Wuhan).

On another important east-west railline, Nanning-Guangzhou (Nanguang), the testing stage starts for the high-speed service. Revenue service is probably still a few months away.

(Based mostly on materials from http://news.huochepiao.com/ )

China's cheapest train ticket

While new high-speed railway lines keep opening throughout China, and cheaper slower trains are replaced with faster and more expensive ones, it is nice to know that you can still go somewhere for just 1.5 yuan (about $0.25). This is the full fare from Shenyang to the nearby (16 km away) station Masanjia (马三家). According to Liao-Shen wan bao (辽沈晚报 a local newspaper in Shenyang), this is the fare class for the train no. 6366 (no letter in the name, which means it's the slowest and cheapest class), and the travel time is 42 minutes.

Admittedly, not everyone may want to travel to that particular travel destination. (Google Search is your friend...).

According to the published schedule, the train makes 3 intermediate stops between Shenyang and Masanjia; inquiring minds may want to know if the fare to some of them is even lower, but, according to Liao-Shen wan bao's fact checkers, the fare to all stations is the same 1.5 yuan.

Incidentally, this kind of local train service - 5 stations on a 10-mile section - is very rarely seen in today's China anymore. From a train, you see lots of small stations like this, with passenger platforms and everything, but when you look up a schedule web site, you see that there is no passenger service to them now. Presumably service existed years ago, but was abolished and replaced with buses. Short-distance, frequent-stop (commuter) train service, of the kind commonly seen in most European and some North American (New York, Chicago, Toronto) metropolitan areas is quite uncommon in China.

Nanjing to Nanjing in 12 hours

Ming Xiaoling, Nanjing City, Jiangsu	Hekeng Village, Nanjing County, Fujian

Until recently, China's southeastern Fujian Province had much less of railway network than the country's other coastal provinces. This may have been partly due to the province's mountainous topography, partly due to strategic considerations (too close to Taiwan?). A few rail lines that existed in the province mostly followed zigzagging river valleys, connecting Fujian's coastal cities (Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Xiamen) with the nation's heartland.

In the 21st century the situation started to change. In April 2010, the coastal Fuxia (Fuzhou-Xiamen) Railway opened, connecting all major coastal cities of Fujian to each other and to the coastal cities further north (via Wenzhou, Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Shanghai). This coastal line is scheduled to be soon extended further southwest, all the way to Guangzhou.

In the mean time work started on high speed rail lines into the province's interior, cutting across mountains and valleys from the coastal cities to the inland centers. The first of them, the Longxia (Longyan-Xiamen) Railway opened on June 29, 2012. It may potentially become a convenient way of accessing Fujian's tulou country, as it will actually have a so-called Nanjing Station （南靖站), halfway between Zhangzhou and Longyan.

Now, this Nanjing is Nanjing County, Fujian (南靖), not to be confused with the better known Nanjing City, Jiangsu (南京)。The way maps show the new line, it actually runs through the eastern part of the county, so the station will be probably quite a ways to the east of Nanjing County's county seat (Shancheng Town), while most of the well-known tulou sites are some 30+ km to the west of Shancheng. Still, the new Nanjing Station is just 50 min from the centrally located Xiamen station, while getting to Nanjing County from Xiamen by bus may easily take close to 2 hours; so I have no doubts that some local transportation services between Nanjing Station and the touristy tulou area in the west of the county will become available soon.

Xiamen Railway Station now offers service both to Nanjing, Fujian (南靖) and to Nanjing, Jiangsu (南京). Make sure to get tickets to the right station!

Looking at the schedules, the new Longxia line will mostly have trains circulating between Longyan and Xiamen, as well as those continuing beyond Xiamen along the coastal line all the way to Fuzhou. Interestingly, there is actually one train coming to Fujian all the way from Nanjing, Jiangsu! It follows the newly built high-speed lines in a rather intricate pattern, tracing China's south-east coast: from Nanjing (Jiangsu) south-east to Shanghai, then southwest to Hangzhou, east to Ningbo, southwest to Wenzhou, Fuzhou, and Xiamen, and finally north-west to Nanjing (Fujian) and Longyan. According to the posted schedule, it takes 12 hours 15 minutes from Nanjing (Jiangsu) to Nanjing (Fujian), with 3 provincial-capital-level cities in between (Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Fuzhou). （For comparison, a "traditional" Nanjing-Xiamen train, taking an inland route, takes over 30 hours.)

With the travel time like this, it probably would have been a lot more practical if it were an overnight train, but, alas, very few high-speed (D-series) trains (and none of the fastest, G-series ones) in China operate at night, presumably because the authorities want to reserve the night time for safety inspection, maintenance, etc.

I know how to say "to loiter" in Chinese

I used to joke that the English verb "to loiter", as in the "No loitering" sign, is one of the words particularly hard to translate to other languages. Well, thanks to David Feng's useful post with the do's and don'ts of picture-taking in China's railway and subway stations, I now know that at least in Chinese they do have a word for it: 久留 (jiuliu), which means more or less what its components indicate.

We've built it, now we must make them come

I suspect that quite a few Chinese rail passengers have received the recent news of the firing of the railway minister with some glee. While the last few years' projects to connect most of the country's major cities with a high-speed rail network are very impressive, they have at least one downside: it is often reported that with the introduction of the new high-speed service, "regular" services on a parallel "regular" are greatly reduced, and passengers in effect are forced to take more expensive high-speed trains. From what I have seen, this certainly is the case with the new Shanghai–Nanjing Intercity High-Speed Railway, commonly known as Huning Gaotie. The new fast line, opened in 2010, parallels the existing "conventional" Shanghai-Nanjing railway, and soon will be paralleled by the even faster Beijing–Shanghai High-Speed Railway. It seems that with the opening of the Huning Gaotie, it became practically impossible to travel in the Shanghai-Nanjing corridor on any of the less expensive "older" services: either the regular K/T/no-letter trains, or the fast D trains (which themselves were introduced only a few years ago). It appears that hardly any D trains from Shanghai terminate in Nanjing anymore; and even though D trains running from Shanghai via Nanjing to points beyond (such as Hefei or Wuhan or Beijing) may often have some spare capacity on the Shanghai-to-Nanjing sections, ticket office won't sell such tickets, and will tell customers to buy a ticket on a (more expensive) G train running on the new line. Same goes for K etc. trains. The difference between the Y146 Shanghai-Nanjing ticket for a G train, and a Y80-90 D train ticket, or a Y50 K-train ticket may be trivial to an upper-middle class professional or a foreign tourist. But for someone who earns Y1000-1500 a month (seems to be a typical wage level e.g. in the service sector) it may mean the difference between being able to afford to visit one's family every weekend or only once a month. Of course, G trains are about 1.5 times as fast as the D train, and 3-4 times as fast as "regular" trains; for the entire Shanghai-Beijing trip, this is 1 h 15 m to 2 h vs. 2-3 hours vs. 4-6 hours. However, for traveling shorter distance (say, Nanjing to Zhenjiang) the time saving is fairly trivial, compared to the overall time cost of buying the ticket, navigating the (huge) train stations, and waiting for the train.

Shanghai Metro - airport to airport

Trying to post by email...

Here's our experience trying the new Pudong-to-Hongqiao subway line (Line 2) in Shanghai.

• 16:00 - landing in Shanghai Pudong (PVG)
• 16:50 - having passed immigration, baggage claims, customs, finding our way to the Metro stop (not much farther than the Maglev), figured the ticket system (my Shanghai Metro fare card from 2008) apparently no longer valid) and the escalators, actually boarded a train
• 18:10 arrived to Hongqiao metro station (this included a cross-platform transfer at an intermediate stop at Guanglan Station)
• 18:25 got to the ticketing machines and purchases a ticket for a 19:00 train to Nanjing. (We probably could have even made the 18:30 train if we had been a bit faster earlier on, and more familiar with the layout)
• 18:35 navigated through the gigantic Hongqiao Station, got to the boarding gate
• 19:00 a G train leaves Shanghai Hongqiao Station

  20:15 - arrival to Nanjing Station. (This was a non-stop G train, probably one of the fastest trains of the day.

  The subway fare was just Y8 - and that's to cross the entire huge metropolitan area, probably over 30 km across.

  The G train to Nanjing, was Y146 (a bit over US $20) - as compared to something like Y70-90 on a D train (which takes 2-2.5 hrs) or Y50-60 on a K ("kuai", "fast") train which may take over 4 hrs

Overall, both the subway and the intercity train line are of course major engineering and public works achievement, as was the Shanghai Maglev. One is left wondering, however, whether the travelling public would have been better off if, instead of building the Maglev and the Huning line (where the new G trains run between Shanghai and Nanjing), Shanghai had instead somehow extended the regular train line from Shanghai (Main) Station to Pudong Airport, with a couple stops near Pudong's dense business and residential areas. That would allow some D trains to run all the way from Nanjing or Hefei to Pudong, making the overall travel time from PVG to places like Suzhou, Wuxi or Nanjing quite a bit shorter than the current arrangement does.

P.S. Traveling back on a Sunday afternoon; subway trains pretty full, but not overcrowded. 1 hour 30 min from boarding the subway train at Hongqiao to arrival at Pudong Airport Station.

Rails to Khorgos

On July 1, 2010, China Railways started passenger service from to Yining (a.k.a. Ghulja, Gulja, Kuldja, Yili, etc.), on the railway that was completed a few month previously and that runs all the way to Khorgos on the Kazakh border. Now it takes less than 12 hours from Urumqi to Yining on an overnight train.

To get to Yining, they had to build a 13.6 km tunnel across the Borokhoro Mountains (a range of Tianshan).
Kazakhstan wants to extend the railway on their side, from Khorgos to Almaty. Much easier terrain on their side of the border... but let's see when they actually finish.

Yining, of course, is the same Kulja, or Ili, that was the capital of the Manchu governors of Xinjiang, and and which was occupied by the Russians during the Dungan Rebellion in the 1860s-1870s.