Balanced coin on high-speed train stuns global audience

A screen shot from a video taken by a Swede on Youku, a leading Chinese video portal website, showing a coin balanced on a high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing at the speed of 300 km/h. Click the photo for the video.[youku.com]

A nearly 10-minute video titled "High speed train comfort quality balance coin" has been widely circulated on Chinese video portals and social media. By now the open statistics show that it has been broadcast more than 17,262 times on Youtube and more than 240,000 times on Youku, one of the leading video portal websites in China.

A Swedish man named Ola Von Koskull claimed he shot the video during his Chinese business trip and then uploaded it onto Youtube on 14 March this year.

In the video, the Swede successfully balanced a coin on the window sill of a train traveling at 300 km/h(186ml/h) for nearly 8 minutes, and has gained widespread admiration on video portals like Youtube and its Chinese counterpart Youku.

A viewer commented under the Youtube video saying, "When I was in China, I travelled on high-speed trains (which are) reasonably-priced, reliable and comfortable. "

There were also some viewers who doubted the authenticity of the video.

"There is no doubt about the video's content," Xu Houguang, an expert on the high speed rail industry, replied when asked to confirm the authenticity of the footage.

"Although China is a latecomer in high-speed train construction, the country now leads the world in many aspects of this industry especially on stability," Xu explained further.

Xu went on to say that China has the highest standards for stabilizing high-speed trains on longitudinal, lateral and vertical dimensions.

Apart from the high-standard train, China's super-class railways also contributed to the coin stunt's success. "It is no exaggeration to say the Beijing-Shanghai rail lines were built with the highest standards in the modern world," the expert added.

"Seriously, the trains in Sweden shake badly no matter cheap or expensive the tickets are," a Chinese nicknamed "Black bean land" commented on the video on Youku.

"Modern High Speed Rail are extremely fast to build and smooth," the Swedish video photographer wrote under the clip."I want to build the new Swedish High Speed Rail network using modern and fast building technology."