English: Having finished my tour of Daejeon, and having just learned that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States, now I am about to head back to Seoul. This train will make the 100-mile journey in 48 minutes.

South Korea, following the example of Nazi Germany and post-World War II USA, invested heavily in expressways and neglected its rail system. But with the expressways and airports being jammed by the 1980s, it started its high-speed rail project in the early 1990s. By 2004, the Seoul-Daejeon-Daegu high-speed line, dubbed Korea Train Xpress (KTX), was open for revenue service, with trains operating through services to destinations further away using electrified conventional rail lines the rest of the way. Extension of the high-speed line all the way to Busan was under way, and was completed in November 2010.

The initial rolling stock for KTX was the French TGV, as seen here; its official Korean designation is the KTX-I while its French designation is the TGV-K. The TGV was selected, over German ICE and Japanese Shinkansen rolling stock, as part of a technology transfer agreement. The first twelve trainsets (including this one, 08) were built in France by Alstom and tested on the French domestic high-speed network, while the other thirty-four were assembled by Hyundai Rotem under Alstom license. The TGV-K is basically TGV Réseau, though with 18 passenger carriages (the longest TGV variant, alongside Eurostar) rather than the usual 8; they also lack a cafe car, as the longest KTX service has a run time of just 3 hours. I loved traveling on KTX partly due to the reminders of my past European travels on TGV trainsets.

From 2009 on, KTX added additional 10-car trainsets, developed indigenously by Hyundai Rotem and known as KTX-II, for service on low-demand routes that do not justify the use of these longer TGV KTX trains. The KTX-II is to be submitted as one of the rolling stock candidates for California High Speed Rail.

The red-striped train on the next track over is not a KTX trainset, but a conventional Mugunghwa ("Rose of Sharon") grade train that is the standard South Korean intercity train.