China leads in high-speed trains. Your plan for 2030 shows a reality: it aims to be unattainable

If you were traveling through China in the early 2000s and wanted to travel between Beijing, the country’s capital, and Tianjin, a vibrant city with some European-style buildings, you had to prepare for the traffic congestion of a car trip or choose a slow rail service. Unlike what was happening in Spain and other parts of the world, the Asian giant it did not have high speed trains. This changed in the middle of the decade with the start of an ambitious plan to drastically improve the country’s transportation routes.

The first high-speed rail service It opened in 2008just before the Beijing Olympic Games held that year. The new track made it possible to connect Beijing and Tianjin, separated by about 120 km, with trains that departed every 3 minutes and made the journey in approximately 30 minutes. Some 17 years after that milestone, the country of the Red Dragon has more high-speed rail than any other nation in the world: its fastest trains move along a 48,000-kilometer network.

China aims to reach 60,000 km of high-speed roads

Globally, Spain is the second country with the most high-speed roads. Data from the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility They point out that the network national It has more than 3,700 km. In third place is Japanwith more than 3,100 km, followed by France (more than 2,700 km) and Germany (more than 1,600 km). Currently, as we can see, China is far ahead in the ranking of high-speed networks per operational kilometer. Now everything seems to indicate that he will maintain that position for a long time.

China has started 2025 by setting an ambitious future goal: it hopes to have an operational high-speed network of 60,000 km by 2030. Data comes from China State Railway Groupwhich this year plans to invest some 590,000 million yuan (about 76,275 million euros) to put into operation 2,600 kilometers of new high-speed roads. Investment in this area was higher last year: official data speak of 850.6 billion yuan in 2024 (about 109.949 million euros).

One of the most surprising aspects of China’s high-speed transportation system is that more than half of the network has been completed in the last eight years. In 2020, more than 70% of cities with a population of more than 500,000 had access to high speed trains. The last section to be inaugurated was Jining – Datong – Yuanping, a link between Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The trains move at about 250 km/h through several cities.

As we have seen, it is not only about laying tracks, but also about having the technology and industrial capacity to develop and build high-speed trains. China is the home of the new Maglev, which can reach breakneck speeds. But there is more. The first prototype of the CR450 was recently presented, a train that can reach 450 km/h and incorporates a variety of improvements in terms of passenger comfort, efficiency and safety. It should enter service soon.

Images | N509FZ (Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0) | N509FZ

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