China's high-speed railway economy taking shape (4)

Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway to show 'dumbbell effect'

The track-laying work of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway recently started after a track-laying machine quietly laid a 500-meter-long rail at the Xuzhou East Station. This marked the shift of the engineering construction of the world's longest high-speed railway with the highest standards from civil engineering to track engineering. It is estimated that the railway will be put into operation by 2012.

The maximum speed of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway is 350 kilometers per hour and can shorten the travel time for a distance of 1,318 kilometers between Beijing and Shanghai to less than four hours. The round-way passenger transportation capacity of the railway will reach 160 million a year.

"We can see on a map that the two ends of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway connect China's two major economic zones: the Bohai Sea Rim and the Yangtze River Delta economic zones. Such a relationship is just like a dumbbell. The Bohai Sea Rim and the Yangtze River Delta act as the two balls of a dumbbell and the railway acts as its bar.

According to initial research and estimations, upon the completion of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, the "dumbbell effect" will lift the GDP growth rates of the regions along the railway by about 19 to 21 percentage points.

By People's Daily Online

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