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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."
The TGV holds the record with 575 km/h! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record
A TGV test train reached 574.8 km/h in April 2007. The new record is the average speed of 350 km/h.
Jan
Here in the UK we're lucky if our intercity trains get much over 200km/h so I'd be happy with a mere 300km/h on the regular London to Glasgow route.....
But the Shinkansen made 443 km/h in diverse tests, still about 25 km/h faster than the chinese train.
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.
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.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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.
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 ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
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
As long as we're talking test runs, the Chuo Shinkansen hit 581km/h in 2003.
Judging from the picture in TFA I'd say it's a Siemens train. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro .
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.
Beijing does not have a Maglev train line. Probably you are referring to the Shanghai Maglev.
Computers can reverse entropy.
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.
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.