Fancy a look at the train driver’s view ahead during a journey on the new Yangtze River Shanghai-Nanjing High-speed Railway at super-high speed, as if the train was travelling at over two-and-a-half-thousand kilometres per hour?
The video, released yesterday, 6 September, takes viewers on a supersonic, 275-kilometre dash from Nanjing South Railway Station to Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station in just 6 minutes and 17 seconds.
An animated map along the way also presents an exterior arial view of each of the stations as the train makes its very brief stop.
Those stops, in particular, along the new line, are Jurong, Jintan, Wujin, Jiangyin, Zhangjiagang, Changshu and Taicang, where the train joins an existing line to take it on the final leg into Hongqiao.
The video, released by Shanghai-based media outlet, The Paper, can be seen via this link.
Such fast-motion videos showing the view ahead on a particular journey, usually by train, have become fairly common all over the world in recent years. But for the first, we need go back all the way to the early 1950s.
That’s when the BBC Film Unit created “London to Brighton in 4 Minutes”, filmed from the driver’s cab of a Pullman train going from London Victoria to Brighton on the south coast of England.
The short film has been a hit ever since, with remakes having been produced in the intervening years that show the development to have taken place along the route. Still even today dragged out for broadcast at times such as Christmas, London to Brighton in 4 Minutes was a then-dramatic speeding up of the 74-kilometre journey which at the time took about an hour.
70 years on, we can now go 370 percent further in the same time. Now undergoing its final tests, the Yangtze River Shanghai-Nanjing High-speed Railway is expected to open by the end of this month.
