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Hardly have I started this year with so little time to prepare for what’s going to be quite a bit of new developments in the year. The most important development is what I call The Chinese Rail Briefing. This is going to be a new, permanent project. The idea is that I’ll be giving weekly …
Continue reading “Happy 2024 — and hello, Chinese Rail Briefing”
Within 24 hours, I had crossed territorial borders six times (in and out), by air, road (bridge), and sea (hydrofoil), with two more to come within the next 12 hours (rail). The end of Zero Covid in Mainland China and the unconditional opening of its border (no Covid tests except if coming from abroad in …
Peking station. Terminus for trains from Mongolia, North Korea even, and of course, Europe — that’d be Moscow. The Vostok coming in every so often, and also China’s equivalent, Trains K3 and K4. Just a few years back, the biggest headache for Beijing would be replacing the K3/K4 service’s 1990s rolling stock. Today, the question …
Continue reading “A Return to an Empty Beijing Railway Station”
For a long time, I have been very interested in counting the number of miles – kilometres – all that, for all rail journeys I’ve made. However, so far, these were for the national, territorial, or regional train systems I’ve travelled in. Although I’ve been a very active user of metro systems and trams – …
Is the Xiongan New Area (雄安新区) finally the northern China equivalent of Shanghai and Guangdong’s mega-development areas? If you are looking at infrastructure development in that part of northern China, you might be tempted to conclude that it is indeed the case. The project itself has been hugely controversial — critics have claimed that it’s …
Continue reading “First journey on the Beijing to Xiongan intercity railway”
Just a few days back, the city of Beijing announced an end to inbound quarantine for all domestic travellers from the rest of China coming into Beijing. To me, this was a great chance to finally get some mileage on the rails. Unlike my very last journey in late January 2020, the facemask is now …
Just before 07:00, my wife and I arrived at Hong Kong West Kowloon railway station by High Speed train. But this would be an arrival like never before. It would be the first time we would cross borders inside a railway station itself in East Asia. Furthermore, media attention just made it an even bigger …
Continue reading “Arriving into Hong Kong by High Speed Rail”
