Dignitaries, including Minister Suh Seoung-hwan of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and 

Transport, Chmn. and CEO Kang Young-il of Korea Rail Network Authority (KR) and President Choi 

Yeon-hye of Korea Railroad Corp. (Korail) clap hands at a ceremony to celebrate the 10th anniversary of 

the Korea Train Express on April 1. 

Korea Train Express (KTX) observed the 10th anniversary since its debut as Korea’s first high-speed railroad service. At 5:05 a.m. on April 1, 2004, KTX started its run out of Busan and arrived at Seoul Station at 7:54 a.m. taking only 2 hours and 49 minutes, setting a speed record in railroad travel between the two cities.

A decade has passed since that day and KTX has revolutionized railroad travel throughout the country with the KTX running at a top speed of 300 km/h, substantially cutting travel time within the country to bring the large cities close together.

In the past decade the new railroad system has transported a total of 414 million passengers, which adds up to every citizen in the country taking eight rides on the KTX over the past 10 years. In terms of distance, it totals 240 million km, enough to circle the earth 6,000 times.

The high-speed train has brought a revolution in commuting, allowing residents as far away as Daejeon to travel to their offices in Seoul on the KTX. This has made nearby cities like Cheonan, Osong, and Asan in South Chungcheong Province to become suburbs of Seoul, although they are so much farther from Suwon, the satellite city in south of Seoul in the old days.

The regular passes for KTX exceeded 71,770 cards last year, meaning that those cardholders use their cards to ride the KTX to their offices every day. One out of four of those pass users lives in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, which takes only 39 minutes on the KTX to get there, so close that the people call the city a ward of Seoul.

An average of 149,000 people ride the KTX daily, nearly three times the 54,000 who rode it daily 10 years ago. Some 90 percent of the total population of Korea live close to 41 major KTX rail stations along the 938 km of the high-speed railroad across the country. Some 69 percent of the people who travel between Seoul and Busan ride the KTX, an increase of 31 percent during the past decade with airline passenger numbers falling to 15 percent from 32 percent. The airlines had to close their flight operations from Seoul to Daegu at the end of 2007 due to a fall in the number of passengers.

With KTX taking only two hours and 17 minute straight from Seoul to Busan, the map of Korea has changed in terms of lifestyle. The popular places in Seoul, such as entertainment spots in front of Hongik University and Doksu Palace, are no longer “pie in the sky” for the residents of the remote areas of Korea. The speedy rail has also changed the culture of corporate life such as business travel and meetings. Any business travel is just a day’s work, unlike in the old days when it used to take at least a couple of days.

Busan has now become a leading city in Korea where many international meetings take place with the number of those meetings increasing 33 percent, while some 340,000 people attended business meetings in the port city in 2011 compared to 4,000 in 2005, an increase of 80 fold. On the other hand, the international meetings held in Seoul dropped from 80 percent of all international meetings in Korea in 2003 to 51 percent in 2011 all due to the KTX traffic, according to the Korea Trans-portation Research Institute.

Dr. Kim Young-kook of the institute said the analysis of KTX passengers showed that 39.2 percent of passengers used KTX to visit friends and relatives, 27.3 percent for business travel, 0.4 percent for shopping, 2.9 percent for medical checkups, and 1.1 percent for attending institutes. Research on a faster KTX has made great progress with Korail conducting test-runs on a new KTX at a maximum speed of 430 km/h and are expected to begin a commercial run from 2015 under the name “Haemu.” The ticket price for the new KTX will be 30 percent cheaper as it can carry more passengers on its larger cars.