High Speed Rail by Country 2024

China has the longest high-speed rail system in the world with over 40 thousand kilometers of rail lines in operation. It also has over 13 thousand kilometers under construction and over 11 thousand kilometers planned for the future.

This makes China's system tens of thousands of kilometers longer than any other country's rail system. The next longest system is in India, or at least, it will be. There are currently 508 kilometers under construction with a plan to build almost 8 thousand kilometers of high-speed rail there. Currently, the second-longest high-speed rail system is the one in Spain. It has 3.6 thousand operational kilometers with plans to extend the system to over 5.5 thousand kilometers.

The United States is set to have the third-longest high-speed rail system with a projected 6 thousand kilometers of rail line. While this sounds impressive, it is misleading. Currently, there are only 735 kilometers of operational line. Not only that but the US is an extremely large country. Looking at the density of the network is a better indicator of how impressive and useful a system is. Here, the numbers are telling. Even though the United States will have the third-longest rail system, there will only be 0.07 kilometers of rail line for every square kilometer of the country. To put that in perspective, China, which has a planned rail system ten times the size of the US rail system, has a density of 4.22, while Spain's system has a density of 7.24.

The only two countries with a density of network higher than Spain's are South Korea at 8.71 and Japan at 8.15. As for the US, it has the lowest density of network of any other country in the world. Four other countries have a density of less than 1, but all are at least three times as dense as the US rail system.

The final important measure of high-speed rail systems is maximum speed. Once again, China is in the lead with a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour. Twelve other countries have systems with a max speed of 300 kilometers per hour or faster. As for the United States, while it doesn't have the slowest system, it definitely lags behind with a max speed of 240 kilometers per hour.