Korail Timetables

As well as the XLS timetables & older ebook on the Korail site, a google search reveals a pdf.

I have rendered a table from the data for KTX trains, just for something to do.

KTX Up
KTX Down

Busan to Seoul

Korea is pretty small.

KTX make the cross country journey in 3 hrs and dep. roughly ever 20 mins.

Regular trains take around 4 hours, only 12 trains make the full journey between the cities.

KTX fare 47900 KRW standard class

Mugunghwa trains (slow) cost 26500 KRW

Saemaul 39300 KRW

The high speed KTX line is being expanded from Busan to Gyeongsan over the next couple of years.

The existing line is in now way run down, most of the tunnels are less than 20 years old. You can see the difference that the highspeed line takes north of Gyeongsan, it runs almost straight through massive hill sides, while the standard line runs around through the valleys.The KTX line only intersects the slower lines at a couple of major towns, not joining the suburban lines until 15km from Seoul’s main station.

Both routes are double lines.

Korail

KTX obviously dominate the railways of Korea. 3 other class of train still run on non-KTX lines.

Saemaul are long distance express passenger trains, usually DHC (fast DMU’s.

Mugunghwaare are long distance trains, they stop more frequently. They also are distinguished by a red colour.

Korean wikipedia is a good starting point.

Some fan sites do exist, although a little hard to come by and tend to be written in Korean, naturally or sometime Japanese.

One intersting article…

• Korail still operate a Staff and Ticket system at Osu. The manual kind, not the electric.

The Koreans have a flair for colour only rivalled by the japanese.

Korail run a number of tourist trains. http://www.ktx21.com/

• The Sea Train is a bright blue. http://www.seatrain.co.kr/
• Features seating facing the sea
• Doesnt run when there is a storm

Korail also runs a luxury cruise train, the Haerang. A deep blue/purple.

The LadyBug is red with black dots.

Other nice photos can be found here and there

Recent history of Korail is interesting. From the end of the war until the late 80’s, rail travel in Korea, outside Seoul was secondary to air and road transport, a slower mode of travel. A concious shift was proposed in the early 90’s to stop the rapid rise of car and air congestion with the introduction of the KTX. It wasnt an immediate sucess, partly due to economic slumps and an over-estimate of initial traffic (200,000 pax/day). As of 2007 KTX has reached around 170,000 pax/day, extensions are still planned & under construction. (see JRTR for more info)

Busan Korail

Korail is a bit of a mysterious beast. They have little information readily available other than their KTX, a modified TGV.

KTX run on 2 main routes from Seoul to Cheopan to Busan and Seoul to Cheopan to Mokpo.

Korail has a distinct American influence, they go by the name Korean Railroad. As well as this they also have build a number of diesel engines under license from General Motors.

Their electric locomotives are exclusively European (Eurosprinters)

The DHC PP look quite similar to some Vietnam & Chinese Railway engines.

Most DMU & EMU stock has been contructed by Daewoo Engineering fron 1969 onwards. Daewoo Engineering is one of the subsiduaries the survived the breakup and aquisition of  Daewoo Inc.

Timetables

Finding timetables is a bit daunting, KTX depart Busan roughly every 30 mins for Seoul, easily gathered from info.korail.com.

After a couple of hours I found XLS and PDF files in Korean and English buried on the Korean Pages.

http://info.korail.com/servlets/renew.sta.sta01000.sw_sta01000_v1Svt#1

Timetable Graph

or a space-time graph

Busan

Busan International Ferry Terminal

The International ferry terminal is at Jungdang-dong station, one stop for the Busan Station stop.

You can take a bus (Bus 5-1 ever 10 mins) or just walk the 2km to the main station, nothing too strenuous.

Busan

Has a new Subway. (Warning Korean songs)  Work began in ‘81 and the 3rd line was finished in 2005.

They have a english website with full timetable, which is more than can be said for Korail.

They are also in the final stages of constructing an LRT, similar to Singapore.

Yet again wikipedia has the best summation of information on both projects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busan_Subway

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busan-Gimhae_Light_Rail_Transit

There has been talk of a Sydney metro recently. The Busan runs at 6-8 cars (18m each), 110-120 pax, top speed 80km/h. Interestingly this is comprable with the existing Comeng S & R sets in Sydney, 8 car (20m), 115pax, top speed 115km/h. On the face of it it would seem the only benefit of building a metro style system is loading times.

The subway site provieds alot of information, even to the level of maintenance of equipment

This is in contrast to places like sydney where there have been numerous complaints about people being left in the dark as to what happens on the railway

Iphone blogging

Surprisingly easy. Although typing is a little akward. I think the way you use an iPhone lends itself to the media of blogging much better than an upright computer.
The typing gives you more pause for thought, time to get the grammer better like.
The wordpress app makes it easy to create new entries. The web method offers you too much, too soon.

Wow and adding photos is a snap. Yep this is one of those once in a decade computer tools that will leave their mark for another decade.