Chinese High-Speed Rail Station Breaks World Record, Serving One Million Riders in a Single Day

During the first week of October, China experienced its "Golden Week" holiday, a period marked by extensive travel. The peak day of the holiday season saw unprecedented demand for high-speed rail transportation in Guangzhou. South China Morning Post reported that Guangzhou South Railway Station, a major station, served a staggering one million passengers in a single day, breaking the world record.

High-speed trains at the station arrived every 40 seconds, with a total of 1,252 trains passing through the station that day, a rate of 52 trains per hour. This performance outpaced the peak headways of Tokyo's Tokaido Shinkansen Line by more than double, with an average of 20 trains per hour during major travel periods. The Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China's publicity department shared social media posts claiming that the trains were arriving "faster than people could scroll through short videos."

On the national level, the railway network handled an impressive 25.2 million passenger trips on October 1st alone. Earlier reports suggested that the China State Railway Group had predicted a record 284 million passenger trips across late September and early October, as the National Day holiday coincided with the late Mid-Autumn Festival, another significant Chinese holiday.