Ticket sales start for world's fastest train journey

WUHAN, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- China's railway stations Friday began selling passenger tickets for the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway, which boasts the world's fastest train journey with a 350-km-per-hour average speed.

The service between Wuhan, the largest city in central China, and Guangzhou City, a business hub in the southern Guangdong Province, was scheduled to start on Dec. 26.

The journey of 1,068.6 kilometers would take three hours, compared with the previous ten and a half hours, said an official with Wuhan railway bureau.

Tickets from Wuhan to Guangzhou ranged from 490 yuan (72 U.S. dollars) to 780 yuan, almost the same as airline tickets.

The China-made bullet trains reached a maximum speed of 394.2 km per hour in trial operations on Dec. 20, said Sun Bangcheng, general engineer of the Tangshan Railway Vehicle Co., Ltd of China CNR Corporation Ltd, the manufacturer of the trains.

China's government has launched a major upgrading of the nation's overstretched railway system. It will build 42 high-speed passenger rail lines with a total length of 13,000 kilometers in the next three years.

The country opened the first high-speed railway between Beijing and Tianjin last year.