The first seven days of October mark an important period in China. Known as one of the three “Golden Weeks,” this holiday period begins with National Day on October 1, marking the founding anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and kicking off one of the busiest travel seasons in the world.
With so much holiday traffic, China’s transit authorities regularly deploy unfathomable resources to accommodate travelers. For this year’s National Day celebration, unprecedented demand was met with equally extraordinary supply, with one high-speed rail hub in Guangzhou setting a new record of one million passengers served in just one day.
That blistering figure was reported by South China Morning Post, which notes that headways for high-speed trains at the Guangzhou South Railway Station peaked at 40 seconds on October 1st — meaning that every two minutes, three new trains arrived to pick up passengers.
In all, the station reportedly handled 1,252 separate trains that day, a rate of over 52 per hour in a 24-hour period. For comparison, the incredibly busy Tokyo station of the Tokaido Shinkansen Line sees peak headways of about three minutes during major travel periods, a rate of about 480 trains per day, or 20 high-speed trains per hour.
In social media posts shared by the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China’s publicity department and viewed by SCMP, officials boasted that the trains were arriving “faster than people could scroll through short videos.”
Beyond Guangzhou, the volume of travelers on October 1st set a new record for China’s railway network, which handled an astonishing 25.2 million passenger trips in a single day.
Earlier, international press reported that the China State Railway Group anticipated a record-breaking 284 million passenger trips across late September and early October, as the National Day break butts up against an unusually late Mid-Autumn Festival, another major holiday for the People’s Republic.
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