Connecting Urumqi and Hami, the 530-kilometer-long section of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railway will begin service on Nov 16. It will be the first high-speed service in China's far west. The line is designed to support high-speed trains solely for transporting passengers with a top speed of 250 km/h. At the start, trains will run at 200 km/h.

When the new 1,776-km line is in full operation at the end of this year, it will reduce the travel time from Urumqi to Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, by half - to about nine hours. People from Urumqi will be able to travel to Beijing by train in 16 hours instead of 40 after high-speed railways between the two cities are completed in 2017.