On a recent morning, Li, a migrant worker in her thirties, joined the crowds in Beijing West railway station. Behind a fortress of luggage, she waited for the bullet train to Sichuan province in China’s interior. Not long ago, the journey took 20 hours, but now, a high-speed train would whisk her more than 1,500km in just eight.
“I’ll be home by tonight,” said Li, who asked to be identified only by her surname, and whose pale, wrinkled hands bore the signs of her job as a dishwasher. “I’ll get off at Wanzhou North [in Chongqing] and take a bus back to my village.”
China’s railways have in recent days been ferrying about 20mn passengers a day, with half a billion train trips expected over the 40-day lunar new year period.
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