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.
