Riding high on China's 'bullet trains'

I'm a rabid fan of China's "bullet trains". Sure, it's a vague and unofficial term. I had to dig deep to decipher the technical differences: China High-Speed Railway, or CHSR for short, runs faster than 250 km/h and serves passengers exclusively. By the end of 2015, China had 19,000 km of such lines - and they are expanding fast.

Lines that go at between 160 and 250 km/h are called Fast Railway, which stretches 40,000 km and serves both passengers and cargo. People often lump them together under the banner gao tie (high-speed railway), even though the English letter that denotes each train clearly tells them apart - G (gao tie) for CHSR and D (dong che) for the slightly slower one.

Now that I've got the technicalities out of the way, I'll share my fuzzy and unscientific passion for this mode of travel, for which I call bullet train for the sake of convenience.