After nearly eight months of hard work by China Railway No. 5 Engineering Group, the Yunnan and Guizhou sections of the Shanghai-Kunming high-speed (HSR) railway line are connected, laying a solid foun-dation for integrated commis-sioning and testing, as well as for general operation during the second half of this year.

The Shanghai-Kunming high-speed railway line is 2,264 kilometers long and has a de-sign speed of350 km/h. As one of the “four vertical and four horizontal” high-speed  railway channels included in China’s Medium and Long-term Rail-way Network Planning scheme, it is currently the country’s longest east-west railway line, passing through a large number of provinces. It consists of three sections, namely the Shang-hai-Hangzhou section, the Hangzhou-Changshasection and the Changsha-Kunming section. It is said that after the Shanghai-Kunming HSR is put into opperation, it will take about 10 hours from Kunming to Shanghai and 4 hours from Kunming to Changsha. Now, the travelling time from Kun-ming to Shanghai by train is 40 hours.