A Carl's Jr. in Beijing South would make serious bank.

From what I understand, Nanjing South is more of a transit station for suburban and rural areas in Jiangsu and neighbouring Anhui. So mostly travellers who are very unfamiliar with any non-Chinese food and probably also prefer to carry their home-made food or cup noodles to the trains.

The urbanite Nanjing residents with broader tastes are still mostly using Nanjing main station, I would guess.

Alsoa place with cold beer.

It is peculiar that many HSR stations seem to be in extremely inconvenient locations (Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Ji'nan, Changsha, Wuhan, Nanjing, all come to time). Sprawl planning?

Wrt Carl's Junior, if I owned that place, I'd try my hardest to get a stall on the platform in order to serve through passengers during their 2 minute station stops.

Not a function of your Chinese level. Most stations have a cut-off time for selling the HSR tickets of 30 minutes before departure.

The infrastructure and construction needed is too great and too disruptive to put it in an already-built-up area of the city. You'd have to level a lot of existing stuff above (and below) ground---too much trouble and too expensive. Just the relocation costs for all the residents in a densely-populated area would be eye-popping. Beijing South isn't that inconvenient but it was not new, it was a rebuilt station but the track right of ways were already in place. My main issue is not station location, but (inadequate planning of linkages from distant new stations into the heart of the cities. Sprawl planning is an interesting theory but I believe is not the primary motivation for HSR station location. Sometimes it's the most logical place (i.e. Chengdu East).

What puzzles me is why no JingHu G trains serve Beijing or Shanghai main stations. There are tracks connecting BJ South to Beijing Station and Kunshan to Shanghai Station, so I can't imagine it would be too hard to pull off.

Wasn't in the plan
Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2005-2010) (Ministry of Railway, PRC, 2005).

inconvenient stn locations:
Developer considerations ....not urban sprawl planning.

Nanjing main to Suzhou main today in 1h10min with quite a few intermediate stops. Was rather tired after a long morning meeting and lunch and just sipped on a beer and watched the scenery en route.

Nanjing main station, though modern in appearance, seriously lacks Nanjing south in service offerings. Please do buy especially food in advance, nothing really available at the station itself.

But again, I love this city, it's stunningly beautiful at times, the food is brilliant, the people complicated but interesting and the surrounding mountains offer some of the best spa experiences in China.

While I'm going off topic here, I'm curious to hear more about both of the points I bolded. When I lived in Nanjing (17 years ago), it was a complete disaster of a city (construction dust everywhere, which made Beijing/Shanghai development appear environmentally friendly by comparison).

Regarding spas, I'm such a fan that I try my best to go to really cool (and expensive) spots in Japan at least once a year. As such, I've set the bar pretty high. I also spa in China whenever opportunities present themselves, but I had no idea (until reading your post) that Nanjing was even on the radar in this area. I have been to a few 温泉 in Guangdong that were extremely impressive on the surface, in spite of the fact that they fell short of what I'm used to in Japan in terms of the total experience (i.e. the Japanese places tend to have far better food, and never --as far as I know-- add products like milk or beer to their hot springs). In any event, if you have any good recs for Nanjing that won't take me 5+ hours to reach from Shanghai, I'm all ears.

I've been to Nanjing a few times and the spas are located in the place called Tangshan. Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to visit yet so I really can't provide any helpful tips at the moment... :(

And was gone yesterday when I boarded G211 from Nanjing South to Suzhou North. Don't think too many rural Anhui province and Lishui county folks enjoy foreign foods.

Btw, wondering if Nanjing South is also planned to have rail connections towards Anhui and Zhejiang provinces or already has? The location would be almost perfect and enable millions of travellers to transfer onto the Jinghu CRH trains.

Nanjing South --- Hangzhou East
 

I only know that in July, a new line between Nanjing South to Hangzhou East will be opened. Journey time around 50 mins.

This is a new line opening in July? Does it continue on to anywhere else? I was looking to take a daytrip to Hangzhou last week, but the 4 hour (each way) travel trip would have eaten up most of the day. Getting it down to an hour on the train would make things much more feasible.

According to this article, looks like it will link to existing lines to go all the way to Beijing. Guess we'll only know once it's opened.

Yes. Hangzhou-Ningbo is also due to open in July 2013.

And at Ningbo, it links to existing high-speed line all the way to Nanjing and Longyan.