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By IB Times Staff Reporter: Subscribe to IB's RSS feed | September 29, 2010 5:51 PM GMT
A new high-speed train linking Chinese cities Shanghai and Hangzhou has hit speeds of 416.6 kilometers an hour on its trial run on Tuesday, China Daily reported.
The train expects to cut the travel time by half to 40 minutes for covering a distance of 202 kilometers between the two cities at an average speed of 350 kilometers per hour.
The train service connecting Shanghai and Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang province, is expected to start in late October, state broadcaster China Central Television said.
"The new record of 416.6 km per hour shows that China has achieved a new milestone in high-speed train technologies," Zhang Shuguang, deputy chief engineer of the Ministry of Railways, was quoted as saying.
Liu Yulei, a China National Radio reporter who took the trial run, said she felt like she was flying when the train reached its peak speed.
China, which has currently 7,000-km of high-speed railway lines, the most of its kind in the world, is not appealing to passengers due to prohibitively priced ticket charges and the long journey time for non-direct trains.
A first-class train ticket to travel between the two cities is estimated to cost more than 100 yuan ($14.90), which is twice the existing fare, Jiefang Daily reported.
Travellers believe that the high-speed train between Shanghai and Hangzhou make take longer than the two-hour drive on road if the train stops at all the nine stations along the route, seven of which are newly built in suburban districts of Shanghai and some cities of Zhejiang.
A number of non-direct high-speed trains running between Shanghai and Hangzhou may stop at these stations, with the goal of furthering economic development in these areas, China Securities Journal reported.
The report quoted a clerk with Shanghai Railway Bureau who did not want to be named as saying that the trial run for the Shanghai-Hangzhou line is for technical research. The ticket price and detailed operation timetable cannot be released yet.
Further details about the train will be released one week before the official operation starts, he said.
CORRECTION: This article, originally published on 9/29/10 mistakenly said that China's new train had set a world speed record. This is false. The record was set in April 2007 by the French TGV, which achieved 574.8 km/h.
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