Shanghai's railway stations, 1876–2027: from the Woosung line to Hongqiao, and where the trains go

The short answer. Shanghai’s first railway ran in 1876 and was bought by the Chinese government and torn up a year later. The city’s railway history since then is a story of termini: a North Station for the line to Nanjing and a South Station for the line to Hangzhou, both wrecked by war, then one cramped station for the whole city until 1987, and finally a set of new stations built for high-speed trains. Today you will most likely use Shanghai Hongqiao, beside Hongqiao airport, or Shanghai Railway Station north of Jing’an. From either, Suzhou is under half an hour away, Hangzhou under an hour and Nanjing about an hour. The table near the end lists where else the trains go, and the map shows every station mentioned, past and present.

1876: the railway that was called a road

Shanghai’s first railway was built under a false name. Foreign merchants asked Li Hongzhang, then governor of Jiangsu, for a Shanghai–Suzhou line in July 1863 and were refused, according to the Shanghai Railway Gazetteer (上海铁路志, Shanghai tielu zhi), the official history of the city’s railways published in 1999. Pott’s 1928 history of Shanghai gives Li’s reasons: railways would only help China if the Chinese built and ran them, and country people would resist losing their land. A merchants’ company of 1865 got nowhere either, and in 1866 the foreign office in Beijing, the Zongli Yamen, turned down the British minister’s request for a line to the mouth of the Huangpu.

The way round was a road. In 1872 an American vice-consul, Oliver Bradford, set up the Woosung Road Company, which told the Shanghai intendant (the daotai, the senior Chinese official in the city) that it wanted to build an ordinary carriage road to Wusong, where the Huangpu meets the Yangtze. It bought a strip of land 9.25 miles (14.88 km) long and about 15 yards wide. When the money ran short, British merchants took over as the Woosung Railway Company, registered in London, with Jardine, Matheson & Co. as its agent in China. Earthworks began in late 1874, still described as a road, with up to 2,000 labourers, and were largely finished by the summer of 1875. The locomotives, carriages and rails arrived the same year. The company asked to land them duty-free as iron “for the road”; the gazetteer says the officials refused, but did not stop the goods coming ashore.

Track-laying started on 20 January 1876. On 14 February the small engine Pioneer made its first trial runs north of Tiantong’an, and about a thousand people a day came to watch. The new intendant, Feng Junguang (冯焌光), had read the duty-free application and the reports in the Shenbao newspaper and understood what was being built. He protested to the British consul, Walter Henry Medhurst, on 22 February and formally on 21 March. Medhurst agreed to stop the engine for a month while Beijing was consulted. The gazetteer says the track-laying went on regardless.

By later standards the line was a toy. It was 14.5 km long on a gauge of 0.762 metres, the “30-inch gauge” of Pott’s account, with rails weighing 13 kg a metre, fifteen small wooden bridges and about fifty level crossings. It had three stations: Shanghai, Jiangwan and Wusong. The Shanghai station, two wooden rooms beside a 50-metre platform, stood on the north bank of the Suzhou Creek at what is now the corner of Henan Road North and Tanggu Road.

The first section, Shanghai to Jiangwan, was finished on 30 June 1876 and began taking fares on 3 July. Pott says six trains a day ran each way, passengers only, and that they were crowded. Then on 3 August a train on a trial run north of Jiangwan killed a man walking on the line. The gazetteer records the anger that followed and two earlier incidents. In July a fight broke out when railway staff fenced off villagers’ land, and a passing foreigner shot and wounded a Chinese man. Later a works train ran into a passenger train. Pott, writing from the foreign side, quotes an earlier historian who suggested the dead man had wanted to turn people against the railway. On 20 August the British minister, Sir Thomas Wade, ordered the trains to stop.

Why did China buy the line, only to pull it up?

The officials’ own documents give the answer: sovereignty. In April 1876 Li Hongzhang proposed that China buy the line at cost and have Chinese shareholders run it, so that the foreign investors lost nothing and China’s sovereignty was not harmed. The British negotiator, William Mayers, wanted Jardines to keep running it for some years after a sale. Feng refused, and the talks broke down. They resumed after Li and Wade met at Yantai in September, moved to Nanjing in October, and produced ten articles for the purchase of the Woosung Railway, dated the 8th day of the 9th month of the second Guangxu year: 24 October 1876.

The articles are printed in full in the gazetteer’s appendix. China would buy the land, rails, engines, carriages and buildings outright. The intendant and the British consul, each with two impartial merchants, would fix the price, and China would pay in three instalments over a year. Until the last payment the company could carry passengers but not goods, and could not buy more land or extend the line. Article 7 required compensation for the man who had been killed. Article 9 said the deal was a special arrangement “to preserve China’s right of self-rule” and could never be cited as a precedent. The price was set at 285,000 taels, paid out of Shanghai’s customs revenue. Pott gives the same figure and calls it the promoters’ actual cost.

With the purchase settled, the full line to Wusong opened on 1 December 1876, a 30-minute run. The last train ran on 20 October 1877, according to the gazetteer. Pott dates the final payment to 21 October and says the last train was pulled by the engine Victory, watched by a crowd who would not see a train in Shanghai again for twenty years. In between, 145 merchants and residents of Shanghai, Jiangwan and Wusong petitioned the governor-general to keep the railway running. They got no answer. By 18 December 1877 every rail had been lifted, and the equipment was shipped to Taiwan for a line that was never built. Pott says it lay rusting on the beach for years.

1898: the same route, built by China

When the railway came back, it came as a Chinese project. After China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, the governor-general Zhang Zhidong (张之洞) twice proposed a line from Wusong through Shanghai to Nanjing, to be built in five sections, each paid for as money came in. Beijing ordered “Songhu first, Huning later”: Wusong to Shanghai first, then Shanghai to Nanjing. On 3 January 1897 it set up the Imperial Railway Administration under Sheng Xuanhuai (盛宣怀), who soon moved its head office to Shanghai.

The Songhu railway (淞沪铁路) was started on 27 February 1897 with government money left over from the Beijing–Hankou project, and a German engineer, Hildebrand, in charge. It roughly followed the 1876 route and reused about three-tenths of the old embankment, but everything else was different. It was standard gauge, 1,435 mm, on rails of 32 kg a metre and German steel sleepers. It ran 16.09 km from a Shanghai station near today’s Donghua Road to Paotaiwan (炮台湾), the fort bay at Wusong, with five stations. It opened on 1 September 1898 and cost 925,800 taels, more than three times what China had paid for the Woosung line.

The Songhu line lasted far longer than its predecessor, but it never became a main line. It was absorbed into the Shanghai–Nanjing railway in 1904 as the Songhu branch. It was wrecked in the fighting of 1932 and again in 1937, partly lifted in 1945, and its station at Zhanghuabang was burned in May 1949. In the end the bus took its passengers. Large buses began running up to Wusong in 1962 along much the same route, and the trains were blocking level crossings in Zhabei and Hongkou, so the city and the railway agreed to stop all Songhu passenger trains from early 1963. What was left became a goods line.

1903–1908: a British loan and the line to Nanjing

The main line to Nanjing was built with British money, on terms the gazetteer calls extremely harsh. In 1898 Britain demanded the right to build it, and Sheng signed a preliminary agreement with Jardine Matheson; the Boer War then pushed it aside. In 1902 the British and Chinese Corporation, formed by Jardines and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, reopened the talks through a former consul-general, Byron Brenan. The final loan agreement, of 25 articles, was signed in Shanghai on 9 July 1903.

Zhang Zhidong’s memorial to the throne reporting the deal sets out the terms. The loan was a nominal £3.25 million, issued at 90 per cent of face value, at 5 per cent interest for 50 years. It was secured on the Songhu line and the whole of the new railway, and the Corporation would take one-fifth of the net profit. The memorial says the text went through six or seven drafts in five or six months of argument. The gazetteer adds that the Corporation also took 5 per cent commission on materials, that repaying early, within 25 years, carried a premium, and that only £2.9 million of bonds were actually issued. Pott says construction and operation were in the hands of five commissioners: two Chinese, two British and the British engineer-in-chief.

Work began on 25 April 1905, in five sections from Shanghai to Nanjing. The line had to cross the canal and lake country of southern Jiangsu, and it opened with 309 bridges, 424 culverts and a 406-metre tunnel near Zhenjiang. Pott records a first train of invited guests to Nanxiang in 1905, with a reception and speeches. The gazetteer’s chronicle has trains running to Suzhou in mid-1906 and to Changzhou in 1907, and the whole 311-km line open in April 1908, two years ahead of the contract. There were 37 stations, with buildings in three standard sizes, from six rooms for the big towns down to a roof between two small rooms.

How the North Station got its name

The Shanghai terminus was built on a reed bed at the border of Shanghai and Baoshan counties, just north of the International Settlement, filled with earth to take the tracks. At first the station was six single-storey rooms. The building people remember came a year later. It was a four-storey office block for the railway, 58.9 metres long, with Qingdao granite on the ground floor, red brick above, marble columns and arched windows. It had 76 rooms and cost 329,000 silver dollars, and it was opened on 17 July 1909 before about a thousand guests. Only the ground floor was station; the floors above were offices.

The railway changed the Settlement’s map too. Pott says that when the Shanghai Municipal Council asked to extend the Settlement northwards a few years later, it proposed the Shanghai–Nanking line itself as the new boundary, “owing to the absence of any natural barrier”. The viceroy at Nanjing refused to discuss it.

A second line, built by shareholders

The Hangzhou line was a reaction against foreign loans. Britain had claimed the right to a Suzhou–Hangzhou–Ningbo railway in 1898 as well. In 1905 gentry and merchants of Zhejiang and Jiangsu met in Shanghai and demanded the right to build it themselves. Shareholders raised 4.84 million yuan in Zhejiang and 3.88 million in Jiangsu, and two private companies split the work at Fengjing, on the provincial border. The Jiangsu company dropped a route starting from Suzhou, which would have crossed flood-prone land near Lake Tai and needed two big bridges, and started from Shanghai instead, putting its terminus on the southern edge of the walled county town.

That terminus was the Shanghai South Station (上海南火车站). Its first train, in April 1908, left at 10 a.m. and reached Songjiang at 11:29. A ticket to Longhua cost one jiao, to Songjiang four. The whole line to Zhakou in Hangzhou, 186.2 km with 24 stations, opened on 13 August 1909. The railway sold itself with outings: specials to the Longhua temple fair in spring and, from 1915, trains to watch the tidal bore on the Qiantang River, with breakfast, afternoon tea and dinner served on board. It was also a busy goods station for tea and silk: in ten days of June 1920 it received 251 wagons of cocoons.

The government nationalised both private companies in 1913–14 and then joined the two railways. Engineers looked at three routes for a link across the city: an elevated line straight through the foreign settlements, a line around their edge, and a cheap line far to the west. They chose a compromise. The link branched from the Nanjing line, crossed the Suzhou Creek and ran south past Jessfield (梵皇渡) and Xujiahui to a new station at Longhua. The sources disagree by three days on when it opened. The gazetteer’s chapter on the South Station gives 12 December 1916, while Pott says the opening ceremony was on 9 December. From then on the North Station was the terminus for both lines, and the South Station kept a service that joined the Hangzhou trains at Xinlonghua. Pott adds that the handsome new station at Jessfield did little for local residents because the trains were too few.

1932 and 1937: what the wars destroyed

Both termini were wrecked in the fighting with Japan, and only one came back. In the battle of January 1932 the four-storey North Station building was destroyed. Between May and August 1933 the railway repaired the ground floor and rebuilt only the central part, to two storeys; from then on the main hall really was the station. In 1936 the railway administration moved into a new eight-storey office block on Baoshan Road, on the east side of the station square.

On the afternoon of 28 August 1937, Japanese aircraft bombed the South Station. The gazetteer says the main building and the tracks were destroyed and several hundred people were killed or wounded. The occupation authorities later took up the 1.5 km of track between the station and Rihuigang, and the South Station was never rebuilt. Only its street names survive: Chezhan Qian Road (车站前路, “station front road”) and Nan Chezhan Road (南车站路, “south station road”). The North Station was repaired under the occupation, renamed Shanghai-eki, and kept running.

1950–1987: one station for the whole city

After 1949 the North Station was simply Shanghai Station, renamed on 1 August 1950. For 37 years it handled almost all of the city’s long-distance passengers, and it was too small almost from the start. In 1960 it dispatched 6.95 million passengers, nearly twice the number before 1949, and the railway kept squeezing more into it: a goods shed became a waiting room in 1961, the station restaurant a ticket hall in 1977. In 1987 the station sent off 18.59 million passengers from three waiting rooms with 4,844 m² between them. The trains were slow too. The chronicle records a new record of 3 hours 59 minutes from Shanghai to Nanjing in February 1958, down from 5 hours 2 minutes.

The replacement went on the site of the goods yard to the west. The yard had opened in 1913 as the Markham Road goods station, named after the Settlement road on the other side of the creek, and was renamed Shanghai East in 1953. It closed in 1978 to make room. The State Council approved the new station in 1981, and work started on 20 September 1984. It was built in three phases so that trains never stopped running. Clearing the site meant moving 7,219 households and 273 workplaces, and relocation took 41.5 per cent of the budget. The final cost was 405 million yuan.

The new Shanghai Railway Station (上海站) opened on 28 December 1987. About 80 per cent of its waiting rooms sat on a deck above the tracks, with entrances on both the north and south sides. Departing passengers went up to wait and down to the platforms, while arriving passengers left through tunnels without crossing the departing crowd. The gazetteer calls the design a breakthrough for large Chinese stations. There were 16 waiting rooms with 13,500 m² of space for up to 10,000 people, heating in winter, air conditioning in summer, and 36 ticket windows. It could handle 72 pairs of trains a day, two and a half times the old station.

The suburban lines

Two other lines shaped today’s network. The Jinshan branch was built for the Shanghai Petrochemical works on the coast at Jinshanwei. It opened on 11 September 1975, running 43.5 km from Xinqiao on the Hangzhou line. To get there it crossed the first bridge ever built over the Huangpu, the double-deck Huangpu River Bridge, now called the Songpu Bridge. The railway deck was 3,047.6 metres long with its approaches; the road deck below opened in June 1976. Today’s Jinshan line runs suburban trains from Shanghai South to Jinshanwei. Since July 2025 the last one leaves Shanghai South at 21:58 and arrives an hour later.

The other was a small station on the Nanjing line. Zhenru (真如) opened on 9 September 1907 as a halt with two tracks. After 1953 it became one of the city’s main goods stations. It got a new passenger building in January 1986 and was renamed Shanghai West in January 1989. The city still lists it as one of its four main passenger stations.

2006–2027: the high-speed stations

The new stations of the 21st century moved the railway out of the city centre. Shanghai South (上海南站) opened in 2006 in Xuhui, a round building that the Xuhui district government calls China’s first round, light-filled station. Despite the name, it is not on the site of the old South Station, which stood by the old walled city. Shanghai Hongqiao (上海虹桥站) opened on 1 July 2010 and is now the city’s busiest station by far. Its average daily departures grew almost sixfold in its first ten years. On 1 October 2024, the first day of the National Day holiday, more than 412,000 people left from Hongqiao, out of more than 672,000 from all of Shanghai’s stations, both records.

The network is still growing. The Shanghai–Suzhou–Huzhou line opened on 26 December 2024, with stops in Shanghai at Hongqiao, Songjiang and Liantang. The next day the Airport Link Line opened: 68.6 km of rail between the Hongqiao and Pudong airports, about 40 minutes, with fares from 4 to 26 yuan. The next main station is Shanghai East (上海东站), in Zhuqiao, Pudong, about 5 km from Pudong airport. Its main structure was completed in November 2025. It will have 15 platforms and 30 tracks and is due to open in July 2027, connecting to the Shanghai–Suzhou–Nantong and Shanghai–Hangzhou lines. When it does, the name Shanghai East will belong to its third site: first a goods yard on the Suzhou Creek, then a new passenger station in Pudong.

Which station do I use today?

Check the station name on your ticket. Shanghai’s government guide lists four main stations and gives the same advice:

Station	Where	Opened	Metro
Shanghai Hongqiao	Shengui Road, Minhang	2010	2, 10, 17
Shanghai Railway Station	Moling Road, Jing’an	1987	1, 3, 4
Shanghai South	Humin Road, Xuhui	2006	1, 3, 15
Shanghai West	Taopu Road, Putuo	1907 as Zhenru; building 1986	11, 15

Hongqiao handles the most trains, and the Jinshan suburban line starts at Shanghai South. For any other trip, the app shows the departure station for each train.

For booking with a passport, the 15-day sale period and what happens at the gate, see day trips by train from Shanghai.

Where can the trains take me?

These are the quickest times reported by official or news sources; always check the actual train in the 12306 app, since times change with every timetable.

Destination	From	Quickest reported	Source of the time
Songjiang (inside Shanghai)	Hongqiao	16 min	Shanghai Daily, 2024
Suzhou	check the ticket	about 25–30 min	Shanghai government guide
Suzhou South (Wujiang)	Hongqiao	26 min	Shanghai Daily, 2024
Jinshanwei (inside Shanghai)	Shanghai South	about 1 hour on the last train	The Paper, 2025
Hangzhou	check the ticket	about 45–60 min	Shanghai government guide
Huzhou	Hongqiao	55 min	Shanghai government and Xinhua, 2024
Nanjing	check the ticket	59 min on some trains	Jiemian News, 2022
Nantong	check the ticket	about 1 hr 6 min	Jiemian News, 2020
Ningbo	Hongqiao	one 2023 train took 1 hr 34 min	Guangming Online, 2023

The towns on these lines are the same ones the first railways were built to reach. Kunshan, Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou and Zhenjiang were the big stations of the 1908 line to Nanjing, and Songjiang and Jiaxing were stops on the shareholders’ line of 1909 to Hangzhou. The Shanghai–Nanjing express that set a record of just under four hours in 1958 now takes about one hour on the fastest trains.

What to look for

The Shanghai Railway Museum, at the North Station site. The museum at 200 Tianmu East Road stands on the old North Station site, near Baoshan Road station on Metro lines 3 and 4. Its building reproduces the 1909 station block at four-fifths of the original size, so what you see is a scaled-down copy, not the original, which was burned out in 1932. Check opening hours locally before you go; we have not found a current official listing.

The streets of the old South Station. Nothing of the station itself survives. Walk along Chezhan Qian Road and Nan Chezhan Road, south of the old walled city in Huangpu, and the names are the only trace of the terminus bombed in 1937.

The 1876 terminus. At Henan Road North and Tanggu Road, north of the Suzhou Creek, there is no marker that we know of. Stand on the Henan Road bridge and look north: China’s first passenger railway station stood a short way up this street, two wooden rooms beside a cotton field.

The Songpu Bridge. The Songpu Bridge in the south of the city, the first bridge over the Huangpu, still carries the Jinshan line on its upper deck. You see it from the train between Shanghai South and Jinshanwei.

Shanghai Railway Station’s deck. At Shanghai Railway Station, go up to the waiting halls: the long rooms over the tracks are the 1987 design the gazetteer called a breakthrough, still in daily use.

This story is based on the Shanghai Railway Gazetteer, including the 1876 purchase articles and Zhang Zhidong’s 1903 memorial printed in its appendix; F. L. Hawks Pott’s A Short History of Shanghai (1928); and official and news sources for the stations of the 21st century. Where they disagree, as on the date of the last Woosung train and the opening of the 1916 link, both versions are given.