If you've followed RMTransit for a while, you'll know that I love high-speed rail. And for our 10th episode of High-Speed Rail Explained, we have a very special country — South Korea with its KTX or Korea Train Express high-speed train services. South Korea manages to be, despite not being famous for it, a real high-speed rail powerhouse, with lots of history, interesting oddities, and big plans, as well as being the only nation with a high-speed rail-themed zombie movie. So without further ado, let's hop on board and take a closer look. Welcome to RMTransit, a YouTube channel about the world's high-speed rail networks. If you enjoy the video, please consider supporting my channel on Patreon and subscribing. South Korea is a fairly large country in East Asia with just over 51 million residents, and the country is highly urbanized as you can see in my video about the urban

railways of Seoul, the nation's capital, which is home to more than 50% of the country's population in its greater region located in the far northwest. Seoul is surrounded by other major centres like Incheon and Suwon, and its primacy shapes the Korean high-speed rail system, which is naturally highly centred on the country's largest city. Korea, however, is not an easy place to build high-speed rail, being an extremely mountainous place, with some of the largest centres in the country like Daejeon in central Korea and Daegu, Busan, and Ulsan in the southeast, all being surrounded and hemmed in by mountains. It's only really to the west and southwest of the country where broader valleys appear, playing host to larger settlements like Gwangju and Mokpo. Now, the trains used on South Korea's high-speed rail network,

which first commenced operations in 2004. After over a decade of works, are really interesting because the original KTX-I rolling stock is quite clearly a modified TGV Reseau, albeit with a total of 20 cars similar to the Eurostar class 373, including locomotives at either end and one powered bogie on the passenger coaches adjacent to each locomotive. The initial trains were naturally manufactured by Alstom, but pretty quickly production was shifted over to Hyundai Rotem for domestic production. Later in the 2000s, a new series of trains developed by Rotem, but again based on the locomotive and articulated coach design seen on TGVs, was introduced, known as the KTX Sancheon. These trains have a design speed of 330 km/h, shorter ten car configuration that allowed for more flexibility by coupling two trains together for a longer and more powerful train.

Much more recently, in 2021, the KTX-Eum, another domestic train model, was introduced, with technology derived from the HEMU 430X experimental train that Rotem built and tested at over 420 km/h. The EUM is an electric multiple unit model, which reflects Korea's transition, along with most of the rest of the world, away from locomotive-driven trains for high-speed services. The EUM sets each have six cars and a top speed of 260 km/h, making them well-suited to upgraded lines where 300 km/h top speeds aren't needed, and the extra acceleration provided by EMUs can be useful moving from slower lines onto the upgraded segments. The existing Korean high-speed network largely consists of two main corridors: The Gyeongbu high-speed rail line is the country's first, and it parallels the conventional Gyeongbu line from Seoul south to Ulsan and Busan.

coming together as several high-speed segments with conventional tracks through Daejeon and Daegu, naturally more like high-speed rail in Europe than in Japan or China. The second line is the Honam high-speed rail line, which runs parallel to the conventional Honam line from Daejeon to Gwangju as a branch to the country's southwest, with lower speed through service to Mokpo. Both of these high-speed lines see trains run at up to 305 km/h, though their geometry allows for speeds of up to 320 km/h. The entirety of the Korean high-speed rail system is unsurprisingly standard gauge, uses 25kv AC overhead lines, and actually also the European Train Control System for signaling. What's good about Korea as a model for other places is that the high-speed lines, although not without their problems, have been built quite affordably, in spite of tons of tunnels and bridges needed to deal with the country's difficult geography.

They've also been built out to quite internationalized standards. Within Seoul, high-speed services call out three stations: Seoul station, Yongsan, and Yeongdeungpo, which you may recall are all on Seoul subway line 1. And as it turns out, works are actually already underway to remove high-speed services from the urban tracks, with them being undergrounded in the next few years. In addition, a limited number of services actually also serve Haengsin to the northwest of the city, which, similar to some situations on the Seoul subway, acts as a compensation for the presence of a huge yard for high-speed trains here. However, since these stations and corridor are somewhat to the west of the massive Seoul metropolitan area, and because at one point the Honam high-speed line was planned as its own entirely separate high-speed corridor from Seoul, a second high-speed corridor into Seoul,

this time purpose-built and dedicated to high-speed trains, was planned, and in 2016 this opened in a modified form as a 60-kilometre northern branch on the Gyeongbu high-speed line to Suseo in southeastern Seoul, close to places like Gangnam, Samseung, Lotte World, and the Olympic Park. And interestingly, services into Suseo are not KTX services run by Korail, but instead SRT services run by the Crown SR Corporation, spurring some competition in the Korean high-speed rail market akin to Italo and Trenitalia in Italy. That being said, unlike in the Italian situation, SR is not an open-access operator, and its parent company is actually Korail, so the amount of competition that really might happen seems more dubious. Those extra tracks into Seoul will also be getting even more use in coming years as Seoul's new high-speed GTX or Great Train Express network will utilize the high-speed

line into Suseo, but not the current Suseo station platforms, for the southern section of the A line. Now, on top of the two main high-speed rail corridors, there are actually a large number of other corridors with upgraded or newly constructed higher-speed infrastructure where trains can run at up to 250 km/h. Most notable of these lines are probably the Jungang and Gyeonggang lines, which run from Seoul to the southeast and east, respectively, allowing connections to Gangneung on the east coast and Andong in central Korea. The Gyeonggang line in particular received lots of improvements in the lead-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics, when there were direct high-speed services from Seoul but also Incheon Airport, a service which was later curtailed due to low demand. There are also semi-high-speed branches off of both the Honam and Gyeongbu high-speed rail lines,

with the Jeolla line that runs off the Honam high-speed railway south from Iksan to Jeonju, Suncheon, and Yeosu, and the Donghae line from Gyeongju to Pohang. A relatively new high-speed corridor which branches from the western section of the Gyeonggang line, currently disconnected from the eastern lake through Pyeongchang, is the Jungbunaeryuk line, which runs through the center of the country, and that leads us into lines currently being planned and built. For one, the Jungbunaeryuk line is meant to eventually be extended to Gimcheon-Gumi on the Gyeongbu line, with a future Nambunaeryuk line from there heading to the south coast. The trunk of this line, the Gyeonggang line, will also be connected to Suseo station and with its eastern half through Pyeongchang to the coast, allowing for far more services to operate.

Work is also underway to extend the Jungang line from Andang to Gyeongju, creating a second, albeit lower speed route from Seoul to Busan. On the west coast, the Seohae line, which is currently a mostly urban corridor in the west of Seoul, is meant to be extended further south as a semi-high-speed rail line that might someday connect with the Honam corridor, further expanding the capacity of the high-speed network. Meanwhile, in the country's northeast, construction is going on to extend the Gyeongchun line to the east coast as a 250 km/h high-speed corridor. On the 300 km/h side, the Honam high-speed line will get another segment traveling to Mokpo, speeding up trips to that city, and there's also probably the potential for the SRT corridor into Suseo station to be extended to other locales to Seoul's east and north.

At the same time, the line from Pyeongtaek — where the original KTX and SRT corridors meet, to Osong — where the Honam and Gyeongbu high-speed lines diverge, will be quad-tracked, to expand capacity in the core of the network, providing two dedicated tracks to each corridor in the south all the way to Seoul, with new tracks added underground, while speeds are also upgraded to potentially allow service of up to 400 km/h. There are, of course, also many possible new stations which could be opened up in greater Seoul, with the GTX and new Korail lines like the Suin-bundang and Seohae lines being urban lines constructed with the capability of supporting high-speed trains, right down to their platform screened doors, and Korail already having the experience running services on conventional rail lines. There are also new branch spurs being constructed

to bring KTX services directly into Incheon and Suwon in the near term. Suffice to say, while high-speed rail in Korea is already super successful, the future is even greater.

The World's Most Underrated High-Speed Rail System? | Korea Train Express

The World's Most Underrated High-Speed Rail System? | Korea Train Express

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