CHINA National Railways (CR) has raised the maximum operating speed on the 1229km Beijing - Wuhan section of the Beijing - Guangzhou high-speed line from 310km/h to 350km/h. As a result, the journey time from Beijing to Wuhan has been cut from a fastest time of 4h 17min to 3h 48min.
There are also journey time improvements for cities south of Wuhan. For example, the fastest time for the Beijing - Guangzhou trip is now 7h 38min compared with 8h 1min previously, while the 2439km Beijing - Hong Kong journey now takes 8h 31min instead of 8h 56min.
The acceleration of trains between Beijing and Wuhan has increased capacity by 7% which CR says is the equivalent to adding up to 15 high-speed trains on the route per day.
CR says it now operates 57 high-quality 350km/h trains per day of which 53 serve Beijing, and four run on other routes.
