China Railways CRH380A

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The CRH380A is a very high-speed EMU designed by China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock based on the reverse engineering of current import high speed trains. It is the fruit of the continuation of the CRH2 (Chinese manufactured Kawasaki E2-1000 EMUs under license) programme and looks distinctively different from the E2, unlike the earlier variants of the CRH2.


More powerful traction motors and higher performance bogies are equipped on the CRH380A. As the name suggests, the design maximum speed in service of the CRH380 series trains is 380 km/h or 236 mph. The EMU comes in two flavours, 8-car 6M2T CRH380A and 16-car 14M2T CRH380AL. Only the end cars of the EMUs are not powered and they have a total power output of 9.6 MW (12,900 hp) and 20.44 MW (27,400 hp) respectively. Like all modern electric trains, regenerative breaking system is equipped on the CRH380A along with electronically control pneumatic breaking.


On 26 November 2010, an unmodified trainset, the CRH380A-6041L (16-car set, which has better power to weight ratio than the 8-car sets), reached a top speed of 486.1 km/h (302 mph) during testing between Zaozhuang and Bengbu on the yet to be opened Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway. The CRH380A have been in revenue service on other railway lines since 30 September 2010.

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