On Thursday, we took the bullet train to Suzhou (pop. 10,700,000). Driving would have taken over an hour, but the train only to 15 minutes at 180 mph. The Hongqiao railway station is the largest in Asia; it's also connected to the Hongqaio airport and Shanghai subway. I'm glad it wasn't busy.
We visited one of our suppliers that makes radiators for one of our suppliers. They also gave us a tour of their other plant that builds heat exchangers - Wow! What a cool factory! They make radiators for the bit Caterpillar mining trucks as well as heat exchangers for extreme chemical processing plants. Some of them have stainless steel pipes running through huge blocks of graphite. The biggest one they made was over 80 feet long.
When we got back that evening and explored "The Hub" which is the center of a new metro area. I'm not sure how they do city planning in China, but they do a good job. In this case, the story is that downtown Shanghai is maxed out, so the area immediately west of the Hongqaio airport is being developed as the next high-density metro center.
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