We took the overnight train from Hangzhou to Changsha. We booked soft sleepers, which are four beds to a compartment. Reasonably comfortable (free slippers!), but there were actually three other occupants, one of whom was about 12 months old and did not exactly sleep soundly through the night. However, perhaps a small child is better than alternatives since it seems you can smoke on sleeper trains. Almost every other compartment in our car was thick with smoke.
A standard part of DMZ tours is a stop at Dorasan Station. Apart from tourist stops, it gets very little traffic, although in principle it is the last South Korean stop before onward trains to North Korea and connections to the Trans-Siberian Railway, Trans-Chinese Railway, and Trans-Manchuria Railway. In practice, of course, this the end of the line and the only business is visitors who pay 500w (about 50 cents) to go out and snap photos on the platform.
We left Tokyo today, riding the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Shinagawa to Nagoya before changing for the regular train up into the mountains. It was super fast and efficient, but I wouldn’t say it really felt like 300km per hour except when another Shinkansen passed us heading in the opposite direction. The other noticeable aspect was the crazy cant of some curves - every now and then the train would lean in to a bend and the cityscape out of the window would disappear away. Slightly disconcerting.
Model C56 locomotive No. 31, which operated on the Taimen Railway between Thailand and Burma during World War II. This rail line was made (in)famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai.