Talk:Passenger rail transport in China

Red links

I was going to stub out some of the red link articles, but I can't find anything on the regional rail bureaus. You'd think they'd have sites somewhere, but I couldn't find them in about half an hour on Google.

New station names - "Shanghai East", "Wuhan South", "Wuhan West" - on tielu.org

I wanted to see how the new train services after the opening of the Shanghai–Nanjing High-Speed Railway show up on www.tielu.org. (I am not endorsing that site, but it just happens to be the one Chinese train schedule site that I am familiar with). As I query "上海" to "南京", the full list of trains shows up, including dozens of the new expensive G trains. The trains that arrive to Shanghai Railway Station are listed as coming to 上海 as expected. But - quite surprisingly - those trains (the majority of the G's) that I believe are going to Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station are shown as arriving to some place called "上海东" ("Shanghai East") instead! So apparently this is how tielu.org chose to call the new Hongqiao Station... Moreover, Wuhan's two "old" stations, the Wuchang Railway Station and the Hankou Railway Station got new monikers as well - 武汉南 ("Wuhan South") and 武汉西 ("Wuhan West") respectively! (See e.g. the schedule for D3010, Wuchang - Shanghai Hongqiao, or, under tielu.org's new dispensation, "Wuhan West - Shanghai East". Now, I have used the tielu.org site long enough, and know that until quite recently Wuchang and Hankou always appeared there under their usual names, none of this "Wuhan West" / "Wuhan South" business. A quick web search did not find anything particularly useful about this matter, other than a few people's comments on the 武汉南 label for the Wuchang Station on a discussion forum. If anyone in the know reads this page - could he comment if this "renaming" is simply that website's own idea, or the "new" names have some official or semi-official status? If they are, we probably should indicate so in the appropriate articles. -- Vmenkov (talk) 00:53, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Completely non-sense. I suggest you use 12306.cn . Python eggs (talk) 01:13, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Cannot access that site, although some people with pedantic tendencies stress over the municipality in which the station is based. This, in my view, is unecessary. It's similar to those who insist that all subway stations must be named something "站", even if the subway station connects to a railway station, i.e. 上海站站. I enjoy seeing "irregular names" and wondering where they're from... like when Sifang Railway Station replaced Qingdao for a brief interlude. Colipon+(Talk) 02:29, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the www.12306.cn suggestion. Their site, indeed, still describes the same D3010 as Shanghai Hongqiao - Hankou, just as one would expect... One is left to wonder, though, how tielu.org has come up with their "nonsense" designations: after all, "Shanghai East" seems a remarkably strange way to describe the Hongqiao Station, considering that it is located both west of downtown Shanghai and west of all other major Shanghai stations (including, yes, the Shanghai West Railway Station as well). -- Vmenkov (talk) 03:04, 20 July 2010 (UTC)