China’s high-speed rail carries record 10 billion passengers

The G7 Fuxing bullet train departs the Beijing South Railway Station in Beijing, capital of China, July 1, 2018. The new longer Fuxing bullet train ran on the Beijing-Shanghai line for the first time on Sunday. With a designed speed of 350 kilometers per hour, the new train measures more than 400 meters in length and has 16 carriages, twice as many as current ones. It can carry nearly 1,200 passengers. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

China's high-speed railway had transported more than 10 billion passengers by the end of the first quarter of 2019, a new world record, China Railway said on Saturday.

By the end of March, the total volume was "3.34 trillion passenger-kilometers," China Railway said in a statement released on its official WeChat.

China had almost 30,000 kilometers of high-speed railway track in 2018, twice as long as the rest of the world's railways combined, the statement noted.

High-speed rail is proving an increasingly popular option for travelers in China. Railway authorities recorded more than 2 billion high-speed trips in 2018, an annual increase of nearly 17 percent, or over three-fifths of all rail passengers.

China's volume of railway passenger transport, freight volume, transport density and other major transport economic indicators consistently ranks first in the world, China Railway said.

Since China's first Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway in 2008, China has been the world No.1 in terms of operating mileage, the statement noted.

The Fuxing bullet trains, which went into operation in 2017, have carried nearly 200 million passengers with an average passenger load of 75 percent, 1.3 percent higher than other high-speed trains, according to China Railway.

China will see 850 Fuxing high-speed trains put into service by the end of this year.