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New fast Shanghai-Nanjing train a bit too fast?

Today’s Shanghai Daily has an article on its front page creatively titled “It’s express delivery for a Delta dasher”. The article is about a new high-speed train connection between Nanjing and Shanghai, which construction started yesterday and that should be in operation before July 1, 2010. Pretty fast, but that’s what you get used to in China and the opening date right before the Expo 2010 is probably correct.

When I read the article I noticed a couple of things that cannot be correct, however. The article mentions for example that the ride on the 300 km stretch between Shanghai and Nanjing will be just over 1 hour. Then it mentions that the maximum speed of the train will be 250 km/h. Hold on, if a train goes max. 250 km/h it can not do a 300 km stretch in one hour. Especially not because there are up to 17 stations along the route where the train will stop!

And even more interesting, according to the article “the new train line will be leaving the stations every 3 minutes”. That would mean 20 trains per hour, which seems a bit too much to me – even during rush hour. Should the Shanghai Daily editor-in-chief not carefully read the articles before publishing them on the front page?

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  1. Sounds like Shanghaidaily need to be more careful. As for the train, I read it was being built for 350km/h operation which sounds about right for 1hour