Korea Readies Nation's 1st Bullet Train

The government will hold a presentation to mark the completion of the nation's first bullet train at Gwangmyeong Station on Thursday, 11 years after the project began.

The train has been in testing since 2002 and has logged around 200,000 km on the rails without a single accident. In December 2004 it set a Korean railway speed record of 352.4 km/h, according to an official from the Ministry of Construction and Transportation.

The bullet train will be put into service in 2009 on the Seoul--Jeolla Province line. Korea joins France, Germany and Japan as one of only four nations in the world to develop a train that can travel faster than 300 km/h.

The transportation ministry official said the ministry is negotiating to export the train to foreign nations including Turkey and Brazil.