Beijing-Tianjin bullet train ups speed to 350km/h

The Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway, China’s first high-speed railway, increased its maximum speed to 350 kilometers per hour on Wednesday, providing a fresh booster to the country’s Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration initiative.

By raising the maximum speed of the trains running on this line, the travel time for each journey has been cut by five minutes, but more importantly, it has allowed for the accommodation of more trains and traffic to meet growing market demand.

After Wednesday’s operational plan change, the line now runs 136 return journeys per day compared to 108.5 previously, while the maximum daily passenger transport capacity has subsequently grown by 6,200 to 157,000, said Zhu Dianping, manager at Stated-owned railway operator China Railway Corporation.

This rail transit improvement has provided a fresh booster to the growth momentum of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration initiative. Proposed in 2014, the initiative aims to develop the areas between the Chinese capital, North China’s Tianjin Municipality and neighboring Hebei Province in a more coordinated and balanced way.

Since the initiative was announced, traffic on the line has been rising rapidly and now, every train is 60 percent full on average. In the first half of 2018, 82,000 passengers traveled using the line on a daily basis, Zhu said.

“For instance, in Tianjin’s Wuqing Station, passenger traffic has grown to a high of 16,000 today from a low of 300 a decade ago,” Zhu told the Global Times on Wednesday.

After 10 years of operation, the line has recorded 250 million passenger trips in total. And within the past decade, China became the world’s No.1 country in terms of high-speed railway operation mileage with 25,000 kilometers, two-thirds of the world’s total.

The line also upgraded its bullet trains form earlier models to China’s homegrown Fuxing series, or “Rejuvenation” in English.