China Railway has started, at the end of July, the tests to restore the maximum speed of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed bullet train to 350 km per hour, six years after it was reduced to 300.
The Fuxing bullet train completed the round-trip from Beijing to Xuzhou in east China’s Jiangsu Province, about 700 km away, in about 4 hours, about half an hour faster than the current minimum.
“The Beijing-Shanghai high speed railway is built to the highest standard in the world, while the Fuxing is designed and manufactured with an operating speed of 350 km per hour. It is out of question for Fuxing to run on the Beijing-Shanghai line at such a speed from the point of view of technical safety, reliability and comfort,” said Lu Dongfu, general manager of China Railway Corporation.
The test will pave way for a new schedule on the Beijing-Shanghai railway starting mid-September.
Connecting the Chinese capital with its major financial and trade hub, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is one of the busiest in the country, carrying over 100 million passengers a year.
The test showed that energy consumption on the Fuxing decreased to 10 percent less than on the Hexie train (CRH380) when running at a speed of 350 km per hour. Both “Fuxing” and “Hexie” are made by CRRC Corporation Limited.
China started to run its first 350-km per hour high speed train between Beijing and Tianjin in 1 Aug. 2008 and opened at least three more such high speed lines nationwide in the following years, until the authorities ordered speeds to be cut to between 250-300 kmh in 2011.
China’s Fuxing bullet trains were unveiled on 25 June and are capable of top speeds of 400 kmh.
The new high-speed train has completed 600,000 kilometers of running assessment and increased the design life to 30 years from 20.
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