And we have a date (probably the "open before" date) for when the long-awaited Beijing-Shanghai services will start: 2012. If you thought this was a version of a direct flight between Beijing and Shanghai...

...you're right in the sense that there will be no transfers...

...and wrong if you expect that the doors bolt close from Beijing South to Shanghai Hongqiao.

Today's Wanbao tells us that the Beijing-Shanghai Express Railway will probably call at a select number of stops in between. Mentioned: Jinan and Nanjing. (Yep, Nanjing has a way cool railway station in front of a lake, although the HSR will be using the new Nanjing South Railway Station instead — not sure if that, too, will feature a "station plaza lake" or something nearly as watery.) By the way, the McDonald's by the railway station in Nanjing has the tendency to go soggy in rain...

This is probably nothing new, by the way. Some express trains that start with "C22" call at Wuqing, and we're more than prepared for other trains which will call at Yizhuang later this year. We are, of course, talking about express services between Beijing and Tianjin.

Stop times at these stations are likely to be brief: the average HSR stop time at a station is probably going to top out at 5 minutes. (Your Beijingologist, being a rider just today onboard train C2276 from Tanggu via Tianjin back to Beijing South, experienced a 4-minute wait in Tianjin.) D series regional CRH trains stop shorter still — about two or three minutes is the order here. Even the slow-as-heck S2 train to Badaling and Yanqing calls at stations for about two minutes a pop.

Remember that this thing will go up to 350 km/h, and earlier reports said it might even go up to 380 km/h. It'll be 4 hours of onboard joy (or boredom) and then that's it.

On a separate note, if any of you Beijingologists out there are covert Nanjingologists or Shanghaiologists, you'd be pleased to hear, thanks to mobile phone Wanbao updates, that they've apparently speedbumped the whole Nanjing-Shanghai Intercity Rail from 300 km/h to 350 km/h. That's Lake Xuanwu to People's Square in less than an hour. HSR is good...