A new high-speed train has been rolled out by China, one specifically designed to serve the “premium logistics market”. While tempting to wonder at why our parcels deserve such royal treatment, the move is a decidedly sensible one to serve the explosive e-commerce sector.
Last year, for the Double 11 shopping festival, a high-speed train was repurposed to enable even-more timely delivery of customers’ orders. Its seats were taken out and 40 tonnes of crates and parcels were secured inside by belting.
The coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan was chosen as destination for the test run, with the train taking its payload from Beijing to Hankou in just 5 hours.
This laid the groundwork for rolling stock manufacturer, CRRC Tangshan in Hebei Province, to get cracking on a new model of high-speed train which recently came off the production line.
To facilitate loading, the train’s passenger doors have been replaced with pairs of doors that together are 1.8 metres wide.
Like aircraft, the train is equipped with a remote-controlled roller floor, which can accurately position standardised freight containers so that they occupy up to 85 percent of the total floor area. With 800 square metres of available space, the train can carry up top 120 tonnes of freight, reports Railway Gazette.
Being able to operate at up to 350 km/h, the new high-speed freight trains shall be utilised on medium and long-distance routes of between 600 km and 1,500 km.
Why are High-Speed Freight Trains a Smart Move?
With express courier services having taken over from brick and mortar retail in the post-COVID era, so China’s consumers expect their deliveries to arrive sooner and sooner.
Their tastes are becoming more esoteric too; if people are able to order fresh local delicacies from the other side of the country hitherto unavailable to them, they will do so.
High-Speed Freight Trains are also the environmentally-friendly option, as the airline industry battles commitments to reduce emissions.
Then there is the weather. Flights are delayed on a continuous basis but China’s high speed trains are renowned for their down-to-the-minute timing.
And they are a lot cheaper to operate than aircraft.
Feng Hao, of the National Development & Reform Commission’s Institute of Comprehensive Transportation, was reported as saying, “[High-speed freight trains] will be the next growth point for China’s railway transport equipment sector”.
CRRC is the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturer with plants all over China, producing locomotives and rolling stock for both traditional rail and mass urban transit systems. Its subsidiary in Nanjing, CRRC Nanjing Puzhen, has made trains for metro systems in Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Hefei and many more cities, and even for as far away as Mumbai in India. CRRC also operates two plants in the USA; in Illinois and Massachusetts.
