China's incredible £2.3bn train line that cuts 72 mile journey to just 21 minutes
Concentrated on the eastern side of the huge country, the network is made up of more than 27,000 miles of track and has cost around £220billion to develop.
China has one of the most extensive high-speed rail networks on the planet after a major drive to create it saw intensive construction from 2008.
Concentrated on the eastern side of the huge country, the network is made up of more than 27,000 miles of track and has cost around £220billion to develop.
The first to be built was a relatively short 72-mile section from Beijing to Tianjin on the Yellow Sea.
An average train in the UK does a maximum operational speed of 125mph, but the Beijing to Tianjin high-speed line - which cost £2.3bn - reaches well over 200mph, meaning its fastest train of the day, leaving Beijing at 4.55pm takes just 21 minutes, getting into Tianjin at 5.16pm.
This is the journey with the fewest stops. Many other departures take around half an hour due to stopping time.
Sam Bidwell, Director of the Next Generation Centre, a think tank striving to develop policies by and for younger people, is an advocate of high speed rail as key to the future and has highlighted the slow rate of progression in the UK since 2007.
He posted on X: "In 2007, the UK finished its first bespoke high-speed rail line, linking London to the Channel Tunnel.
"Seventeen years on, this is still our only high-speed rail line - but other countries are racing ahead.
"The most remarkable example is surely China's high-speed rail system, built almost in its entirety since 2008.
"In 2008, the Chinese Ministry of Railways announced plans to build 25,000km of high-speed rail in the country, backed by a $50 billion investment in 2009."
China has since created nearly double that length of track and the cost also ballooned.
Mr Bidwell added: "The Beijing-Tianjin intercity railway was the first high-speed rail project to be completed, opening in August 2008.
"The Beijing-Kunming railway is the world's longest high-speed railway line, and was opened in 2017.
"China's HSR system delivered 2.94 billion journeys in 2023."
The high-speed section of the UK's line to the Channel Tunnel has a maximum speed of 186mph.
The only other high-speed rail link under construction in the UK is HS2, when work began in 2017.
The line will run between Handsacre, in southern Staffordshire, and London, with a spur to Birmingham and trains will reach a maximum speed 225 mph.
It is expected to be completed by 2033.
The length of HS2 has been dramatically scale back since it was first announced in 2013.
It was to split into eastern and western branches north of Birmingham Interchange.
The eastern branch would have connected to the Midland Main Line and East Coast Main Line, with a branch to a terminus in Leeds, and the western branch would have had connections to the West Coast Main Line at Crewe and south of Wigan, and a branch to a terminus in Manchester.
The Tory Government scaled the project back between November 2021 and October 2023.
