The Beijing-Shanghai Express Railway is being built at a rapid rate. Some 98 per cent of the 1,318km line is under construction, giving employment to 116,200 people. More than 70 per cent of the workers are returned migrants whose factories along the coast went under due to the global economic recession. After a period of training, they have started work on the biggest railway project in recent Chinese history. It is estimated that the number of workers directly involved in the construction could reach 600,000.

Started in April 2008, the project used a total investment of Rmb55.2bn last year alone, the single largest annual expenditure on a railway project in China. This year, expenditure is estimated at Rmb60bn. The railway line has a planned top speed of 350 kph and will pass through Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu before reaching Shanghai. Estimated figures show that the project will need 5m tons of steel, 380,00 tons of steel tracks, 27m tons of cement, 55m cubic metres of pebble stones, 33m cubic metres of sand and 60m cubic metres of cement.

The new railway line, scheduled for trial operation by 2010, is expected to take passengers, freeing up the existing Beijing-Shanghai line for freight.
Xinhua reported Li Heping, a researcher at the China Academy of Railway Sciences, as saying that trains will take less than five hours to make the journey from the capital to Shanghai, which is now at least 11 hours.

The researcher went on to say that current bottlenecks in China’s railway traffic system would be greatly eased by 2012 as a result of higher investment levels that form part of the Rmb4,000bn stimulus package announced last year. The Ministry of Railways has said it plans to have built 13,000km of passenger lines by 2012.