Chinese High-Speed Train Sets New World Record

shmG writes "A new high-speed train linking Chinese cities Shanghai and Hangzhou has set a fresh world record for train speed at 416.6 kilometers per hour (259 mph) on its trial run on Tuesday. The train is expected to cut the travel time by half, to 40 minutes for covering a distance of 202 kilometers between the two cities at an average speed of 350 kilometers per hour. 'The new record of 416.6 km per hour shows that China has achieved a new milestone in high-speed train technologies,' Zhang Shuguang, deputy chief engineer of the Ministry of Railways, was quoted as saying."

Wrong!

[SmilingBoy]

The TGV holds the record with 575 km/h! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record [wikipedia.org]

416.6 km/h isn't a new record.

[tempmpi]

A TGV test train reached 574.8 km/h in April 2007. The new record is the average speed of 350 km/h.

I'd be happy if our intercity trains did 300kph!

[fantomas]

Here in the UK we're lucky if our intercity trains get much over 200km/h [wikipedia.org] so I'd be happy with a mere 300km/h on the regular London to Glasgow route.....

Re:booyah

[Sique]

But the Shinkansen made 443 km/h in diverse tests, still about 25 km/h faster than the chinese train.

Re:416.6 km/h isn't a new record.

[Sique]

And even this is not a record, as the spanish Velaro E has made 404 km/h in regular operation.

Re:416.6 km/h isn't a new record.

[Chrisq]

It appears that the Chinese record is for trains that will be used in service, not experimental vehicles [wikipedia.org].

Re:416.6 km/h isn't a new record.

[Sique]

To complete this: 350 km/h is the regular speed for the Velaro E on the relation Madrid-Barcelona.

Re:Wrong!

[Joce640k]

Yes ... but the average speed of the TGV on real journeys is a lot less - 279 km/h (173.6 mph) according to Wikipedia.

Re:Wrong!

[AJWM]

That TGV record is for a test train on a specially prepared track with customized power feed and tensioning on the catenary. It's not clear from TFA, but I believe the Chinese are claiming the record for a production train on production track (ie equivalent to scheduled runs).

See e.g. this from the Wikipedia TGV article: "A TGV service previously held the record for the fastest scheduled rail journey with a start to stop average speed of 279.4 km/h (173.6 mph),[2][3] which was surpassed by the Chinese CRH service Harmony express on the Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway in 2009."

Re:Not a chinese train

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, china has a long history of stealing things and then taking credit for it. For example, they claim that they have the fastest maglev. In reality, it is Germany that does. The problem is that China has come up with a new one. What does it look like? JUST LIKE GERMANY's.

Re:Wrong!

[Malc]

The article's full of errors:

A first-class train ticket to travel between the two cities is estimated to cost more than 100 yuan ($14.90), which is twice the existing fare, Jiefang Daily reported.

I've done this journey a lot of times, the last time being three weeks ago. The current high speed trains (hitting about 170kph) cost Y54 (2nd class) or Y64 (1st class). More than double the price of the existing first class would be in excess of Y130, which is bordering on exageration. The trains are always full, and there are a lot of rich Chinese and Western businessmen on this route, so I doubt they will have trouble filling seats.

Travellers believe that the high-speed train between Shanghai and Hangzhou make take longer than the two-hour drive on road if the train stops at all the nine stations along the route, seven of which are newly built in suburban districts of Shanghai and some cities of Zhejiang.

What bullshit. The current high speed trains stop maybe once or twice between Shanghai and Hangzhou - why would this one stop more than that? It'd blow the average speed, and anyway, there are already slower regional trains. Trying to claim it's a two drive to Hangzhou is again exageration... especially trying to get in to Hangzhou with its absolutely abysmal traffic problems.

I wonder though, what has happened to the maglev link between the two cities that they were building. I saw an elevating track by the highway a few weeks ago which was either the maglev line, or maybe something else.

Re:I'd be happy if our intercity trains did 300kph

[Dynedain]

Lucky bastard, here in California we get 120km/hr. And anything faster is going to be 9 billion dollars, and over a decade, just to build the first 25 mile stretch along existing right-of-ways.

Re:booyah

[Anonymous Coward]

You should also note that the Shinkansen has to travel over curves with a much smaller radius than either the TGV or the Chinese bullet train does. Reality is that unless you have very long stretches of straight track, the Shinkansen is still the fastest. Neither the TGV nor the Chinese bullet train can come even close to the speeds the Shinkansen does around those curves. Of course, if the Shinkansen would simply build straight tracks (not exactly as easy as it sounds, considering the geographic location) then yes, both the TGV and Chinese bullet train would rule in both test run and service speeds. But then again, the Japanese Railway company will start building a super conductive mag-lev line in parallel to the Shinkansen soon. This is NOT the same technology as seen from the Shanghai airport, by the way.

Re:Wrong!

[shikaisi]

Please remember there are no such things as "1st class" and "2nd class" seats in China. This is a classless society ;-) You can buy "soft seat" or "hard seat" tickets, however.

Re:I'd be happy if our intercity trains did 300kph

[JasterBobaMereel]

In both cases the problem is the track ...

In the UK the track goes around a lot of corners and is far from straight, and to take out the bends would cost huge amounts (especially through towns/cities)

In the US your track is very poor quality (a legacy of the speed it was built and the huge extent of the network) and the cost of upgrading is huge ...

The very fast trains in Japan/France/China all benefit from the local governments simply forcibly buying the land required at cost (or less) and getting on with it ...

Re:booyah

[AC-x]

And the French TGV reached 574.8 km/h in a special test run. However these were specially modified trains, while this Chinese train broke the speed record for an unmodified train

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehicles#Conventional_wheeled [wikipedia.org]

Re:Wrong!

[Malc]

Yes, you're absolutely right. I was translating for occidental type people, and trying to avoid the dumb jokes some people on this website come out with

Re:416.6 km/h isn't a new record.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. 350 km/h was the estimated regular max speed for the AVE in Spain, but it seems that it is slower due to problems with the track ballast, so now it's going to max speed of "only" 300km/h to avoid damaging the trains.

news in spanish [eleconomista.es], yahoo translation [yahoo.com]

That's wrong, too

[achurch]

As long as we're talking test runs, the Chuo Shinkansen [wikipedia.org] hit 581km/h in 2003.

Re:Not a chinese train

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from the picture in TFA I'd say it's a Siemens train. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro [wikipedia.org] .

Based on the wikipedia listing for the rail record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_railed_vehicles [wikipedia.org]), the train is a variant on the CRH2.

The original trains were produced by Kawasaki, but "Starting from 2008, all CRH2 trains were designed and manufactured under key technology developments made by Sifang without Kawasaki. In fact, the vice-chief engineer of Sifang stated that their latest models "have nothing at all to do with Shinkansen" except that they share a similar exterior shape." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railways_CRH2 [wikipedia.org].

The re-engineering of a joint venture may be questionable, but the claim is that this is now a Chinese train.

Re:booyah

[rchh]

Beijing does not have a Maglev train line. Probably you are referring to the Shanghai Maglev [wikipedia.org].

Re:Not really

[Timmmm]

No, the net horizontal force on the wheels would be the same. The vertical force should be equalised between them though.

The only way you can decrease the horizontal force is to camber the actual track, which they do.

Re:Wrong!

[Idarubicin]

Actually, the obvious (and cheaper) solution is simply to make sure the front of the train is fairly sturdy and won't get dented by morons walking along the track looking for their Darwin award.

While this is a real design consideration, and modern high-speed trainsets incorporate deformable sections ('crumple zones', in automotive parlance) to absorb the shocks of a high-speed collision, it's still preferable to avoid impacts altogether. Even if the train isn't damaged by a collision, it's still delayed -- the line gets closed for hours while there's a police investigation, nobody can use the tracks, the passengers get grumpy....

And hitting a live person is hell for the train drivers. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not uncommon among the drivers of trains that hit people, even if they were not at fault in the collision.

Re:I'd be happy if our intercity trains did 300kph

[glatiak]

And I think this is a Bombardier production, a Canadian company with high speed train installs almost everywhere except in Canada. Here we are still ripping out track and degrading passenger service even more by routing it over old freight lines and making passenger trains wait on sidings so the freight can go through. And the fare for regular service across a distance of roughly 200km is $95 one way -- takes 2.5 hours vs 2 in the car or $50 on the bus. Passenger service to a whole raft of cities was discontinued and the passenger trains routed by an old freight route that makes a wide swath away from population centers. So passenger train travel is still declining here -- but we read about what the rest of the world is doing and have severe envy.