On 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday, Shim Yeon-soo waited for the Korea Train Express at Seoul Station to visit her hometown Daegu. The 57-year-old housewife was planning to have lunch with her relatives in the city near North Gyeongsang Province, some 280 kilometers southeast of Seoul, in less than two hours.

“When I was in my 20s, it took more than seven hours to come up to Seoul by train. But since the KTX started operations, it has significantly shortened travel time to only three hours back and forth,” she said. 

Shin is one of over 150,000 passengers who use the country’s high-speed trains every day, which enabled travel to and from almost anywhere in the nation within six hours since it was launched in 2004 to link Seoul and Busan.

From steam-powered trains to a homegrown bullet train, the railway’s evolution has been an indispensable tool for the nation’s industrialization with over 115 years of railway history.

It is no wonder that transport experts see the KTX’s launch as one of the major leaps forward in South Korea’s railway technology as well as logistics gains.

“The high-speed railway brought a new growth engine to the country. Our railway technology used to lag behind other nations, ranking below 30th place globally, but now we are the world’s top five after obtaining technology to develop our own high-speed railway,” said Choi Jin-seok, director of railway research at the Korea Transport Institute.

Korea is currently one of the five countries in the world including Japan, France, Germany and China that can independently produce high-speed trains running above 300 km/h.

The high-speed rail was constructed through the government’s effort to revive the waning railway industry as a sharp increase in the number of cars caused congestion on expressways. The problem was most serious on the Gyeongbu line between Seoul and Busan, the logistics backbone that played a crucial role in Korea’s economic growth.

The KTX brought about significant changes to the nation’s territorial space. The new train system has reduced travel time from Seoul to Busan by one and a half hours or 33 percent, and to Daegu by one hour and 24 minutes.

“The construction of the high-speed train reorganized Korea’s transportation industry. The number of passengers using KTX outstripped the number of airline users, except on the Busan and Jejudo Island routes. It cut a tremendous amount of logistics costs and changed people’s lifestyle patterns,” said Bae Eun-sun, KORAIL’s PR deputy general manager.

The latest development of the high-speed KTX train service is the launch of the Korea Train Express Honam, linking Seoul and the southwestern region, in April this year.

Work on the Honam line began in 2009, with total construction cost reaching 8.39 trillion won ($7.6 billion).

According to government data, it will deliver drastic regional economic growth and accelerate social and cultural exchange with a 25 trillion won economic impact.

The two experts said the advent of the Seoul metro subway had an economic impact on par with the high-speed trains, marking a milestone in the country’s land and transportation development.

“The opening of the Seoul metro subway enabled Seoul to become a mega city with a population of 10 million like other top global cities such as New York and Tokyo,” said KTI director Choi.

The urban railway system runs a total length of about 327 kilometers, of which 70 percent is underground. The Seoul metro system carries almost 7 million passengers per day to more than 300 stations.

On the other hand, the expansion of metro lines also led to the development of satellite cities.

“It was a revolution of transportation. The commuter trains that fumed out exhaust gas from diesel engine were replaced with new electric trains while the interval between trains was shortened to five to 10 minutes from 30-60 minutes,” said KORAIL official Bae.

“With low fares and convenience offered by the new metropolitan subway, people were able to commute from other satellite cities such as Anyang and Bucheon in Gyeonggi Province,” he added.

By Park Han-na (hnpark@heraldcorp.com)