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In April 2011, I accompanied my wife on a business trip to Seoul, South Korea. Given that I had some time on my hands, I decided to take a day and travel on the KTX Express from Seoul to Busan and back. Most of the pictures below come from the areas around the two stations or en route. The service between Seoul and Busan operates at least two or three times per hour in each direction. Both trains I took were almost completely full. (I came back on a route that ran, initially, along a more easterly alignment.) What was most striking about the routes which I traveled was the level of infrastructure improvement going on everywhere. In many, many instances a new railroad right of way was being constructed alongside the existing one (or an older right of way already existed along side the one we were traveling on). The train equipment itself was made by (or more probably in partnership with) Alstom. The countryside of South Korea is quite hilly. As you might expect, the train passed through a great many tunnels. Often we would go straight into a hillside, come out 30 seconds later and then after another 15 or 20 seconds, go into another tunnel through the next hill. |
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