(V) HSR Travel Time: China's Unique Expression of Distance Between Two Cities

i. “HSR travel time” becomes an increasingly popular term

A term has been steadily gaining popularity – “HSR travel time.”

“HSR travel time” means the travel time between two cities by high-speed rail. The term is establishing a new concept of time in Chinese conversations.

The HSR travel time is half an hour between Beijing and Tianjin, an hour between Shanghai and Nanjing, 5 hours between Beijing and Shanghai, 8 hours between Beijing and Guangzhou.…

Long HSR travel time includes the travel time between two adjacent cities on individual sections of an HSR line. For example, the HSR travel time between Beijing and Guangzhou includes the travel times between Wuhan and Guangzhou, Wuhan and Zhengzhou, and Wuhan and Beijing, while the HSR travel time between Beijing and Shanghai includes the travel times between Jinan and Nanjing, and Changzhou and Shanghai.

HSR travel time, different from the old “train travel time,” always appears in single digits, even for journeys stretching thousands of kilometers: For a city cluster with a 500-km radius, a journey to any city takes merely one to two hours. A journey to a city 1,000 km away takes about four hours, allowing travelers to make a same-day round trip, while a journey to a city 2,000 km away takes about eight hours.

For those who have stayed at an airport overnight, HSR travel time is relatively reliable. A high-speed train may be late, but never to the point of forcing you to sleep in a seat in the waiting hall.

If on the day the Beijing-Harbin HSR line opened, you pressed your finger on Harbin on the map and moved it slowly all the way down to Hong Kong, how would you feel having a 3,000-km line that operates at a speed of over 300 km/h?

According to experts, high-speed rail is best suited for journeys of about 1,000 km. For working-class people who pay for transportation out of their own pockets, high-speed rail is the most economical means of transportation during the public holidays. When it comes to value for money, experts’ theory is no match for real savings. This, coupled with speed, gives high-speed rail an edge.

The distance between two cities is measured in kilometers and used to be the shortest when measured by flight time. With the advent of high-speed rail, the distance can be the shortest when measured by the HSR travel time on certain block sections of the route and during certain hours.

ii. Night trains, morning trains

The city at 6 a.m. is quiet as people rise from their slumber. The slim bricks that pave the sidewalks, though great at quickly draining away standing water, are not at all suited for wheeled luggage. The small rollers give a rapid “click-clack” with each step.

The sound soon becomes monotonous, like the sound of a train passing over metal rail joints, except a fainter, less robust version. As fate would have it, it is on its way to be stowed away on a train – a high-speed train, in fact.

Nowadays, if you get up particularly early in the morning to catch a train, more often than not, it is a high-speed train. This way of scheduling trips has become popular thanks to high-speed rail.

In the old days, if you had to take a train to a far-off location, most people would choose to take a train that departed in the evening, rode through the night, and arrived in the following morning. This meant that the rush to get to the station was usually around dusk, during the height of traffic when everyone was getting off work for the day and the roads were packed with people heading home.

But nowadays you take more and more trips by train – high-speed train, to be exact – early in the morning. At that time, there still aren’t many people on the roads. That relative quietness brings a sense of freshness and clarity, contrasting starkly with the trips taken at dusk, and leaving a strong impression on travelers.

Sometimes I will make a conscious effort to catch a high-speed train with an early departure around 7 a.m. Having made this decision, I must then deal with the drudgery of getting myself out of bed in the wee morning hours and catching a cab in a city that still hasn’t fully woken up. Yet, the minimal traffic in the street means that the cab can go fast, and the trip to the train station takes no time at all compared to what you’d normally expect. That speed, followed by the ride on the high-speed train, which reaches 300 km/h, really brings a sense of relaxation and relief to those early mornings.

Actually, there still aren’t many people that take the early trains. This isn’t the station's busiest time, and there aren’t many people in the waiting hall. The same is true for the boarding platforms. Several high-speed trains have just rolled into the station. Inside, the air still carries the scent of the previous night and the coolness of the morning. At this time, people and objects have a languid calmness to them that you normally don’t see at a train station or among travelers.

Once, I passed by Wuhan Railway Station twice in one day. The station's stylized eaves jumped out as I looked at it, stirring my imagination despite not being able to observe them close up. The next day, I departed from Wuhan early in the morning riding a high-speed train. Through the bluish mist of the dawn, the train car pulled into the white-painted station. As we disembarked, it felt as though we were plodding through and dispersing the layer of night air and fog that had enveloped the station.

Still, not many people were in the train station, and the boarding platform was quiet. There weren’t many people in the train carriages, either, and dim light shone out through the train's windows, which was, for some unknown reason, a warm, light-yellow hue. This early morning trip suddenly took on the beauty of a hand-drawn picture, and was even a little bit moving.

These feelings were odd and difficult to explain. They linger in your brain, but they are nonetheless pleasant.

Sometimes without realizing it, individuals’ lives change with happenings in society, ranging from big political events to small personal trips. Everything in life is always moving forward. With the advent of high-speed rail, habits change.

Carrying its passengers at a sprint, high-speed rail is all about speed. Unlike before, when passengers rush to the station at dusk to catch a train that would arrive at its destination the next morning, high-speed rail frequently pulls passengers out of their beds early in the morning to catch their trains.

This change has been subtle but forceful. The night trains of the old days have transformed into morning trains.

Once the new way of doing things becomes a habit, the old way shrinks away until it is just a memory. In the world of rail travel, we see this happening with morning trains.

On morning trains, there is something that we cling to, something we simply cannot let go of, and that is time itself or change.