Its called the miracle railway, and it takes a miracle to get a ticket.
Chinese travel companies are hoping for big business from the newly opened 2,000km Qinghai-Tibet railway, which critics fear will change Tibet for the worse.
The Tibetan tourist board expects the train to bring in an extra 4,000 tourists a day and new hotels are being built to cope with the expected hordes.
But according to the China Daily, would-be travellers will have to be persistent as the biggest problem is getting a ticket.
Another challenge is the shear distances involved. The world's highest train journey takes 48 hours from Beijing to Lhasa, so agents are recommending time-challenged tourists first fly to Xining and board the train there for a shorter 26-hour journey. To make the journey more bearable, a western firm plans to run luxury carriages to cater for well-heeled tourists.
The railway is the latest in China's growing catalogue of world-beating engineering feats. Almost 1,000km of the railway is at an altitude of 4,000m above sea level and more than 550km crosses permafrost.
A couple of western companies have benefited from the four-year project and both have been pilloried by human rights activists for their involvement.
Bombardier lead the consortium that supplied the pressurised rail carriages. Fellow Canadian Nortel has supplied a digital cellular network for the line. It uses GSM-R, a railway-customised variant of the familiar GSM system, and puts China ahead of many railways in the west, which still rely on analogue communications.
Nortel recently won a follow-on contract from China's ministry of railways to deploy the GSM-R system in 20 of China's 31 provinces.
Apart from benefiting china's fledgling tourist industry, the Qinghai-Tibet railway is meant to spur economic development of the remote Tibet autonomous region.
Is that the sound of wild antelopes thundering across the tundra or the stampede of adventurous western companies rushing down to the station to queue for their ticket?
