Yet many workers traveling home for the lunar New Year were understanding of the high price. “Based on the distance, the price is not too high,” said a plastic injection molding worker who gave his surname, Li, and was catching the slow train to save money.

China’s lavish new rail system is a response to a failure of central planning six years ago.

After China joined the World Trade Organization in November 2001, exports and manufacturing soared. Electricity generation failed to keep up because the railway ministry had not built enough rail lines or purchased enough locomotives to haul the coal needed to run new power plants.

By 2004, the government was turning off the power to some factories up to three days a week to prevent blackouts in residential areas.

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation’s passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects.

Administrators mobilized armies of laborers  110,000 just for the 820-mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year.

Zhang Shuguang, the deputy chief engineer of China’s railway ministry, said in a speech last September that the government planned 42 lines by 2012, with 5,000 miles of track for passenger trains at 215 miles an hour and 3,000 miles of track for passenger and fast freight trains traveling 155 miles an hour. Top speed on the Tampa-to-Orlando line is supposed to be 168 miles an hour.

Image Janitors clean a high-speed train after its arrival at the Wuhan Railway Station, in Hubei, China. Credit... Thomas Lee for The New York Times

Though they have yet to retreat from their goals, Chinese officials have hinted in the last several weeks that stimulus spending may slow. Some transportation experts predict that a few of the 42 routes may not be finished until 2013 or 2014 as a result. One worry is whether China is overinvesting in high-speed trains that may require operating subsidies like those for maintaining highways: fares on a route from Beijing to Tianjin have been set lower than initially forecast to make sure they stay full.