Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway

By -
The Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway (aka Wu-Guang Passenger Railway) is the second and latest high-speed passenger-dedicated railway ever built in China.  It is state owned and operated by the Wuhan and Guangzhou Railway Bureaus under the Ministry of Railways.  Its mainline covers a distance of 968 km (601 miles) from the northern terminal in Wuhan, capital of the Hubei Province to its southern terminal of Guangzhou South in Guangzhou (aka Canton), capital of the Guangdong Province.  Of the 968 km of mainline, 468 km is laid on bridges and 177 km in tunnels.  The Wu-Guang line is part of the planned Beijing to Kowloon high-speed railway (over 2,100 km or 1,300 miles) and will be the third railway to connect Beijing and Hong Kong.  The construction of the Wu-Guang line began on 23 June 2005 and commercial services between Wuhan and Guangzhou North (922 km or 573 miles) began at 0900h on 26 December 2009 with trains achieving a top speed of 350 km/h (217 mph).  Guangzhou South Station was later opened on 30 January 2010.

Wuhan Station with CRH3C in the foreground and CRH2C in the background

The signal system used on the Wu-Guang line is Chinese Train Control System Level 3 (CTCS-3) which combines GSM-R wireless signal communications, balises, and ATP (Automatic Train Protection).  The CTCS-3 is functionally equivalent to the ETCS-2 where the E stands for European.  The current rolling stocks used on the Wu-Guang line are the CRH2C (based on the Kawasaki E2-1000) and the CRH3C (Siemens Velaro C), both manufactured in China.  These trains have a standard consist of 8 cars and are usually coupled (with the same model, these trains are not compatible with each other for obvious reasons) into 16-car trains in service.  None-stop services on the Wu-Guang line travel between Wuhan and Guangzhou North in just 3 hours (compared to 10 hours on the existing Beijing-Guangzhou Railway) with a start-stop average speed of 313 km/h (194 mph), making Wu-Guang officially the fastest commercial railway in the world.

Kawasaki CRH2C on the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway

Siemens CRH3C on the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway

Please feel free to read on for some brief background information about fast trains in China, it might come in handy one day when you need to book a train there.

Update: a report by Train of the Week on riding the Wu-Guang HSR is linked here.


Fast trains in China
Train services in China are numbered but not named like North American countries, and train numbers have a prefix of one English letter to indicate the type of service.  Before high-speed rail, there are already a number of fast train services on China’s existing mixed running railway mainlines.  Here is how one can tell if a train in China is of the higher end, faster kind.  Let α, β, γ, δ denote integers in the closed interval [0, 9]:
  • Gαβγδ, where G stands for gaosu in Mandarin and means high-speed: these are the true high-speed trains running on dedicated lines with a top speed of up to 380 km/h (236 mph).
  • Dαβγδ, where D stands for dongchezu and means multiple-unit: there are DMU or EMU (loosely speaking, since push-pull trainsets are used sometimes, the majority of proper EMUs in China are imported from Bombardier, Alstom, and Kawasaki) services on dedicated lines or mixed running lines with top speeds ranging from 160 km/h (100 mph) to 250 km/h (155 mph).
  • Zαβγδ, where Z stands for zhida and means non-stop: these are conventional locomotive-with-carriages trains that either do not stop between origin and destination or make very few stops with a top speed of 160 km/h or 100 mph.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Briefly on the AAR Coupler Part 2

By -
Image
Last week, we've identified the Janney coupler and briefly looked at its elegant design. This week, let's, again, very briefly, look at the different types of Janney coupler that are widely used today. I will only talk about the head of the coupler, and ignore anything that the general public may need to trespass onto railroad property and get in a unsafe situation in order to have a good look at. As far as coupler heads are concerned, there are 3 types in used today. Type E, F, and H. Types E and F are used on freight, and H used on passenger equipment. Since the withdrawal of passenger service in North America by private railroads, the Type H standard is no longer maintained by the Association of American Railroads, a trade group formed of major freight railroads, but is under the control of the APTA, the American Public Transportation Association. Now let me introduce another term, slack. Slack is an allowed gap between two coupled up couplers. In other words, when most ...
Read more

Amtrak NPCU

By -
Image
The NPCU or Non-powered Control Units are control cars used by Amtrak that are modified from surplus EMD F40PH locomotives. A control car is a generic term for a non-powered railroad vehicle that can control operation of a train from the end opposite to the position of the locomotive. They can be used with diesel or electric motive power, allowing push-pull operation without the use of an additional locomotive. Control cars first appeared in the USA and France in 1960s. Trains operating with a locomotive at one end and a control car at the other do not require the locomotive to run around to the opposite end of the train when reversing direction. In the United States, most control cars are modified from retired locomotives by removing tractive equipment and adding side baggage doors and have been used on several passenger railroads. The control cars are connected through the consist of the train by standard AAR 27-wire multiple unit jumper cables. The NPCUs at Amtrak are a...
Read more

SD70ACu

By Yi -
Image
After the post on the shiny rebuilt GE road power, it's only fair to have a look into what Progress Rail has to offer on their side of the table. I'm using the company's recently-changed, formal name of course. For those who are not up-to-date on the current state of North American railroading affairs, Progress Rail is the company (owned by Caterpillar) that purchased EMD a few years ago. The SD90MAC was arguably the biggest gong show in EMD's recent memory. It happened at a time when they were comfortably resting on their laurels, unaware the fateful changes that were about to occur in the locomotive market in the not-so-distant future (they got beaten badly by GE). What was supposed to be one of the most remarkable locomotives whose presence is to grace the mainlines in modern history, turned out to be an utter disaster (I'll redirect further readings to Wikipedia). As a result, today, the number of SD90s still in operation on a Class 1 Railroad is, if not id...
Read more