“Even my laptop is running faster than usual,” she wrote.įor the Cao family, in the sleeper section, riding in style was a mark of achievement. A twenty-year-old college student named Zhu Ping took her seat, then texted her roommate that she was about to “fly” home on the rails. The guests were ushered aboard by female attendants in Pan Am-style pillbox hats and pencil skirts each attendant, according to regulations, had to be at least five feet five inches tall, and was trained to smile with exactly eight teeth visible. When the passengers for D301 reached the platform, they encountered a vehicle that looked less like a train than a wingless jet: a tube of aluminum alloy, a quarter of a mile from end to end, containing sixteen carriages, painted in high-gloss white with blue racing stripes. In all, some three hundred new stations have been built or revitalized by China’s Railway Ministry, which has nearly as many employees as the civilian workforce of the United States government. When Beijing South opened, in 2008, it was the largest station in Asia then Shanghai stole the crown. It contains as much steel as the Empire State Building and can handle two hundred and forty million people a year, thirty per cent more than New York’s Penn Station, the busiest stop in America. It was bound for Fuzhou, fourteen hundred miles away.īeijing South Station is shaped like a flying saucer, its silvery vaulted ceiling illuminated by skylights. On the morning of July 23, 2011, passengers hurried across Beijing South Station at the final call to board bullet train D301, heading south on the world’s largest, fastest, and newest high-speed railway, the Harmony Express. The Rail Ministry had been determined to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway more quickly than anyone thought possible.

Bullet train rails