The Beijing-Shanghai railway, linking the two biggest cities in China, is the busiest railway in the world, having an annual cargo capacity of 120 million tons and transporting 30 million passengers.

Connecting two economically developed regions--the Yangtze Delta and Circum--Bohai (sea) area-the railway runs through provinces covering one quarter of the country’s population. The 1,453-km-long railway represents only 2 percent of the country’s track length, but it carries 10.2 percent of the total passenger traffic and 7.2 percent of the railway cargo capacity, four times the national average.

Given the heavy use and resulting congestion, the State Council, China’s cabinet, has given final approval for an express passenger train on the Beijing-Shanghai route, as well as a Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev (magnetic levitation) project.

Based on accepted international standards, an express train means one that has a speed of over 200 km/h. The basic speed of express trains in France, Japan, Italy and Spain is at least 250 km/h.

In 1992, China built a railway between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, two big cities in south China’s Guangdong Province, where train speeds reached 170 km/h, and it was known as a “quasi-express railway.”

Because of their speed, large load capacity and low energy consumption and pollution, as well as safety and convenience, high-speed railways are seen as a good choice for China, which suffers from limited resources and a transportation bottleneck.

Early this year, the Railways Ministry announced that, during the 2006-10 period, China would invest 1.25 trillion yuan to set up a 17,000-km-long high-speed railway system, including 7,000 km of passenger railways, on the Beijing-Shanghai, Beijing-Guangzhou, Beijing-Harbin, Shenyang-Dalian and Lianyungang-Lanzhou routes. All the trains will travel at 200-300 km/h, which means that China will be more advanced than France, Japan and Germany in high-speed railway development.

According to China’s railway system development plan, by 2020, China’s entire railway mileage will total 100,000 km, of which 12,000 km will be for passenger transport only. Cargo and passenger routes will be separated, and the government aims to have 50 percent of the routes with multiple tracks and 50 percent electrified by that date. Economic experts predict that to realize this goal, the total basic investment will be 2-2.5 trillion yuan.

Experts from the China Academy of Railway Sciences began discussing the feasibility of building a Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway as early as 1990. The focus of the discussion was concentrated on whether high-speed wheel track technology should be adopted, or the maglev technology should be used. The final decision was to build a standard high-speed railroad track.

Xu Kuangdi, President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, explained that although the maglev plan was based on advanced technology, it would require a huge investment of 370 billion yuan, or 287 million yuan per km, as a 31-km maglev railway in Shanghai cost 8.9 billion yuan to build.

In addition to the cost, the maglev plan imposes high technical demands, which would be a challenge to the long-distance control technology along the Beijing-Shanghai route. But the 170-km Shanghai-Hangzhou railway will adopt the maglev technology.