The trip between Shenzhen and Meizhou in northeastern Guangdong will be cut to 1.5 hours when a new high-speed railway opens in September, according to a Thursday post on iShenzhen, the official WeChat account of the Shenzhen Municipal Government Service Data Administration.
A test run held Tuesday on the Meizhou-Longchuan section of the under-construction Longyan-Longchuan High-speed Railway that links Longyan City in Fujian Province and Heyuan City in Guangdong, showed that a one-way trip took only 35 minutes.
Currently, it takes almost six hours to drive from Shenzhen to Meizhou, and a train trip takes around three hours.
The 94-km Meizhou-Longchuan section will have three stations in Meizhou and one station in Heyuan. It will link up with the Meizhou-Shantou High-speed Railway at Meizhou West Station and the Ganzhou-Shenzhen High-speed Railway at Longchuan West Station.
The rail is the first railway independently funded and constructed by Guangdong Province.
Along the route, the contractor, China Railway Construction Co. Ltd., completed a total of 52 tunnels including the 7,377-meter-long Xiahuangtian Tunnel, the route’s longest.
According to the Guangzhou Railway Group Corp., the railway will play a significant role in facilitating the integration of the eastern area of Guangdong into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
Meizhou, 345 kilometers from Shenzhen, is one of the most popular destinations for road trips in Guangdong.
Also known as the “Capital of Hakka in the World,” the city is home to millions of Hakka people whose ancestors are believed to have moved from Central China to the south centuries ago. With a long history and profound accumulation of Hakka heritage, it is both the final settlement place for the Hakka who moved south and the main departure place for the Hakka who have spread across the world since the Ming and Qing dynasties.