RailEnquiry

On Saturday a new high speed rail link between mainland China and Hong Kong opened which will vastly reduce travel time between the two places. It took 8 years to build the system with investment as much as 10 billion dollars. This new system can ferry 80,000 passengers per day to the manufacturing hub of Guangdong province.

The train travels the 26 km through Hong Kong to Shenzhen across the border in China in just 14 minutes. Till date trains took as much as 1 hour to complete the same distance. Immigration process would be done at newly built West Kowloon terminus as Hong Kong has its own mini-constitution and it practices its own laws and civil liberties after reverting from British to Chinese rule in 1997.

The Hong Kong legislature’s passage in June of the plan to allow Chinese law to apply at the railway terminus was a significant moment for the opposition, coming four years after mass street protests demanding reforms fizzled out amid Beijing’s intransigence.