How Faster Trains Draw China’s Cities Ever Closer by Sixth Tone & The Paper

“How Faster Trains Draw China’s Cities Ever Closer” is a visual-dominated piece reviewing the changes of time-distances between China’s cities.
China’s rapid development of high-speed railways have been very eye-catching in the recent decade. Six years after the 300 kph speed cap, the fastest train speed was increased back to 350 kilometers per hour – the world’s highest operating speed. To see the historical changes of speed, we turned to train timetables from 1949 (when P.R.China was founded) to 2017, and calculated the travel times between Beijing, China’s capital, and China’s provincial capitals.
We use basically the same graph to show the travel times. However, in accordance to each point we make in the article, we highlight or group the lines differently for clarity. For example, we would highlight cities on Beijing-Guangzhou line and find that these cities’ travel times have been shortened greatly, thanks to their locations and the importance of Beijing-Guangzhou line.
Another factor that contributes most time reductions, especially in the past decade, is the large-scale expansion of China’s high-speed rail network. Therefore, we include a gif map that shows the building of this network, with a special emphasis on railways designed for speeds of 350km/h or above.