Hong Kong Introduces a High-Speed Sleeper Train.

Seems like everyone to the East has solved or perfected long-distance traveling:

Interested in capping off your trip to Hong Kong with a long weekend in Beijing or Shanghai? A new high-speed sleeper train service is making that possibility easier than ever.

Two new overnight routes connecting the city with Beijing and Shanghai entered into service on June 15.

Both trains depart Hong Kong West Kowloon Station in the evening and arrive in Beijing at 6.53 a.m. and Shanghai at 6.45 a.m., making the journeys around 12.5 hours and 11 hours respectively. Return trips depart from Beijing and Shanghai at around 8 p.m. and arrive in Hong Kong at 8.47 a.m. and 7.29 a.m. These routes run four days a week, departing all three stations every evening from Friday to Monday.

“It will be more comfortable and faster, reducing the travel time by about half, and will cover a wider range of destinations, including popular tourist attraction cities,” John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, said in a press statement, referring to the previous overnight train routes that connected Hong Kong with China’s two biggest cities.

Those intercity railway services, Beijing-Kowloon and Shanghai-Kowloon, launched in 1997. The train ride to China’s capital took around 24 hours while the journey to Shanghai was about 19 hours.

The services were suspended during the pandemic in 2020 and have been replaced by the new high-speed options that launched on June 15.

But while the new trips do indeed slash the overnight travel time by almost half, the high-speed sleeper services take slightly longer than the daytime bullet trains already in service connecting Hong Kong and the two cities in mainland China.

Currently, the train company operates one daily high-speed connection to Beijing, which takes around 8.5 hours, and one to Shanghai, which is around 7.5 hours.

Why bother with the longer journey then? The new sleeper trains might not be the fastest way to get between Hong Kong and Beijing or Shanghai, but they are a great option for business travelers who need to arrive well-rested before standard office hours, as well as leisure tourists who don’t want to waste a full day on the train or wish to save money on accommodations.

Imagine something like this in the United States.