"People nowadays want to have convenient ways of travel, and with more fast trains across China, they will bring convenience to everyone," he said on board the service from Beijing to neighbouring Tianjin.

Ren, 47, said a work trip to Tianjin now took him one day to complete, compared with two before the new line was introduced in August, when the train service took twice as long.

More is to come as China recently approved a two-trillion-yuan (300 billion dollar) investment in its railway infrastructure over the next two years in a bid to spur growth in the face of the global economic crisis.

Longer term, China is aiming to have 120,000 kilometres (74,500 miles) of tracks laid down by 2020, up from 79,000 today, deputy railway minister Lu Dongfu told reporters last month.

Investing in infrastructure is a good way to spur growth amid the current economic woes, said Hu Xingdou, economics professor at the Beijing University of Technology.

"The drop in exports is a situation that is very hard to change, consumer demand cannot be spurred very quickly, so investing in infrastructure becomes quite an effective method," he said.

China's economy is slowing dramatically, with the World Bank predicting the country's growth rate will be just 7.5 percent next year, the lowest in nearly two decades.

China made a similar move at the end of the 1990s amid the Asian financial crisis by investing heavily in the road network across the country.

The huge cash injection in the rail system is expected to boost employment and demand for raw materials, and promote real estate as land and towns near the new railways are also developed.

"I estimate these investments in railways could contribute as much as two percent to the annual GDP," said Hu.

But more than a way to spur growth in the face of the financial crisis, the railway investment was a much-needed cash injection in an industry that had been relatively neglected.

"China's railways have long lagged in development, so rail transport is the bottleneck of the nation's economic and social growth, the weak point of the transport industry, and urgently needs faster expansion," said Lu.

China's railway network is already one of the most extensive in the world, but it has come under pressure as the nation's economy has boomed, giving many of the country's 1.3 billion people more opportunity to travel.

Chinese New Year is a perfect illustration of the bottlenecks that grip the country's railways, when scenes of havoc take hold at stations throughout the nation as people desperately try to get a place on a train to go home.

China's vast territory, full of natural resources such as coal that need to be moved from far flung regions to the cities, also highlights the importance of the railway network in the country.

China is currently only able to satisfy around 35 percent of applications for freight transport, according to Wang Fang, transport coordinator for the Asia Development Bank.

"If the rail system is improved in terms of its capacity and its service, the overall economy can benefit from cost savings, time savings, for both cargo and passenger transport," she said.

But Joseph Cheng, professor of political science at the City University of Hong Kong, sounded a note of warning on focusing too heavily on infrastructure investment to spur economic growth at the expense of more important priorities.

"This is high time for China to spend some money on social services -- education, services for the elderly, medical care, and not only infrastructure projects," said Cheng.

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