| Beijing yesterday unveiled the 'Great Wall Express,'a sleek new train service that will whisk visitors to the foot of the World Heritage Site in Olympic record time.
The Great Wall winds across more than 6,400 kilometers and receives an estimated 10 million visitors a year, mostly to the mere 10 kilometers opened to tourists at Badaling, the nearest stretch to Beijing. The train will cut in half, to one hour, the time it generally takes to get to Badaling. More importantly, it will avoid the traffic jams visitors routinely face on their return into the city. 'You look at Europe, for example Switzerland, they have their own famous sightseeing trains,' Zhou Zhengyu, vice head of the Beijing Municipal Committee of Communication, told reporters aboard the train. 'We want to make this into Beijing's own tourist train.' The train service was formally launched ahead of the Olympics opening ceremony last week, but regular services won't begin until later this week after cycling events in the area are finished. Visitors will like the ticket prices: just 17 yuan (US$2.50) for first class and 14 yuan for regular seats. Zhou said, however, that authorities were still working out some kinks in the service. For one, visitors will have to walk about 15 minutes from the station to the wall for now. The project is part of a massive upgrade of Beijing's infrastructure that the Olympics has helped accelerate, and that analysts say will transform the city to be based more around suburbs. The number of subway lines has already risen to eight from two over the past several years, and a high-speed train now carries visitors to the nearby city of Tianjin in just half an hour. The city government aims to roughly double the length of urban rail track in the capital to 560 kilometers by 2015, Zhou said. (Shanghai Daily August 13, 2008) |
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