This Day, That Year

Item from Jan 9, 1987, in China Daily: "This year China will start work on adding four new railway lines totaling 1,000 kilometers ... The 260-kilometer Houma-Yueshan railway is designed to share the shipment of coal from China's major coal producing area in Shanxi ... The Baoji-Zhongwei line, totaling 502 kilometers, is to be built to facilitate the opening of coalfields in Gansu province."

From 1979, one year after the country adopted the opening-up policy to move its economy away from centralized planning, the national railway network embraced a booming new stage of development.

Twenty-seven years later, China's railway network is 110,000 km long. High-speed rail makes up about 13.6 percent of the total network, while most of the high-speed strains travel at a speed between 250 km/h and 350 km/h.