A high-speed railway with a speed of 400 kilometers per hour is not the ultimate goal. Our country has a wilder "close-to-the-ground flying" plan!

During the May Day holiday, the tourist army once again occupied the media's focus. According to official statistics, during the May Day holiday, the cross-regional flow of people in the country was about 1.36 billion, with an average of more than 270 million people per day. The prosperous development of the tourism industry is due to the increasingly better transportation conditions in my country. Take the railway as an example. The Fuxing high-speed train with a speed of 350 kilometers per hour "flies close to the ground", which shortens the time it takes to reach many destinations that used to take a day and a night to arrive on the same day. Li Bai's exaggerated "returning to Jiangling in a day after a thousand miles" has become a reality on the railway line.

The "Fuxing" train has become the preferred means of transportation for Chinese people to travel on holidays

Time is efficiency. At present, the "Fuxing" high-speed train with a speed of 350 kilometers per hour is already one of the fastest high-speed trains in the world, but 350 kilometers per hour is definitely not the limit. With the continuous advancement of technology, the world's fastest high-speed train speed held by my country is about to be broken! The record was broken by the CR450, which also comes from my country with 100% independent intellectual property rights.

The full name of CR450 is "CR450 Technology Innovation Project". It includes not only the increase of the original operating speed from 350 km/h to 400 km/h, but also a comprehensive and systematic upgrade. The application of a series of new materials and new technologies has made the high-speed rail lighter and stronger. The braking equipment with continuously improved performance allows the train to stop steadily. The reaction time of starting and accelerating is reduced, and the energy consumption is reduced without changing the noise index and environmental protection indicators, which all show the excellent performance of CR450.

Exchange "time" for "space"

With the high-speed rail network extending in all directions, the media has started to talk about "1-hour", "2-hour" and "3-hour" metropolitan areas. A survey by professionals found that as a traveler, the ideal "rhythm" set by oneself is set within "4 hours" - if your journey time is within 4 hours (including 4 hours), then this trip will basically not disrupt your rhythm of life; and if it exceeds 4 hours, every extra minute spent on the road will reduce your experience by one point, and you will be more likely to have a negative feeling of "running on the road all day".

If we put the concept of "rhythm" on the map, it will be even more significant: in the future, with the deployment of new high-speed railways with a speed of 400 kilometers per hour and the upgrading of related lines, the diameter of the 4-hour traffic circle will be expanded from the original 1,300 kilometers to 1,500 kilometers. Higher operating speed means higher line utilization - at a time when major high-speed railway lines are already running at full capacity, higher-speed trains mean that more cars can be packed into the same section of the line, thereby transporting more people and goods.

Let’s take a vivid example - starting from Beijing, and taking about 4 hours of journey, the farthest you can reach in the south is Wuhan, in the west is Xi’an, and in the northeast is Changchun. In the future, you can reach Changsha, Lanzhou, Xining or Harbin - this is not the linkage of one or two cities, but the linkage of more provinces and urban agglomerations.

The increasing speed of high-speed rail will bring more and more cities into each other's "circle of friends"

Of course, this innovative project, which is written into the "14th Five-Year Plan for Railway Science and Technology Innovation", must also withstand the test of various technical fields and engineering realities.

On the theoretical level, it is necessary to deepen the basic theoretical research on railways, such as the wheel-rail relationship, pantograph-catenary relationship, aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, impact dynamics, vibration and noise control, ballastless track structural dynamics, energy consumption and recovery, etc. of high-speed trains;

In terms of maintenance, it is necessary to develop a new generation of railway intelligent comprehensive detection and monitoring and unmanned fully automated inspection equipment that can adapt to special environments and high-speed operations at a speed of 400 kilometers per hour, accelerate the upgrading of large-scale maintenance machinery, and promote the development and application of new railway lifting machinery and high-speed railway rapid rescue and repair equipment;

In terms of engineering construction, it will deepen technical research on 400 km/h tracks, deformation control of bridges and roadbeds, and optimization of aerodynamic effects of tunnels and ancillary facilities.

"CR450" may seem to have only increased its speed by 50 kilometers per hour, but in fact, it has raised the upper limit of the entire Chinese rail transit industry to a higher dimension, leaving our international competitors behind a little bit.

More "wild" plans

In the "14th Five-Year Plan for Railway Science and Technology Innovation", you will find something even more shocking - a high-speed railway with a speed of 400 kilometers per hour is actually not the ultimate goal. China's railway plan is much wilder than this - in the "key tasks" section, it is clearly proposed to "carry out research and development of technical reserves such as high-speed maglev systems with a speed of 600 kilometers per hour and low-vacuum tube (tunnel) high-speed trains."

The 600 km/h high-speed maglev can fill the speed gap between high-speed rail and air transport, forming a multi-dimensional transportation framework with a more reasonable, efficient, flexible and convenient speed gradient including aviation, high-speed rail, high-speed maglev and urban transportation. In fact, during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, we have already conquered the core technology of 600 km/h high-speed maglev trains, formed a complete set of technologies and equipment with completely independent intellectual property rights, and carried out high-speed simulation tests and low-speed operation tests. Three years ago, my country's 600 km/h high-speed maglev transportation system was successfully launched in Qingdao, marking that my country has mastered the complete set of high-speed maglev technology and engineering capabilities. The future goal is to rely on the "14th Five-Year Plan" national key research and development plan to continue to support the engineering technology and operation system integration technology of high-speed maglev transportation systems, and study and form a 600 km/h high-speed maglev test line plan and a complete set of commercial operation solutions.

The world's first 600 km/h high-speed maglev train rolled off the assembly line in Qingdao

As an emerging high-speed transportation mode, high-speed maglev has the advantages of high speed, safety and reliability, low noise, low vibration, large passenger capacity and low maintenance. In particular, it has low energy consumption. The average energy consumption per seat is only one-third of that of an airplane and about 70% of that of a car.

The many advantages of high-speed maglev will help cities along the route continue to "trade time for space". Calculated based on actual travel time, within a 1,500-kilometer range, high-speed maglev is the fastest mode of transportation, which can significantly shorten travel time and reshape the concept of time and space. Taking Beijing to Shanghai as an example, it only takes about 2.5 hours to take a high-speed maglev train with a speed of 600 kilometers per hour. This speed is about twice as fast as the current high-speed rail, and even has an advantage over the travel time of airplanes. By analogy, the "five poles" economic circles of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Chengdu-Chongqing, and middle reaches of the Yangtze River city clusters can be reached within 4 hours within a 2,000-kilometer range.

Less "time" can be exchanged for the expansion and increase of "space" for development. From the perspective of promoting urban development, high-speed maglev can greatly improve transportation capacity, improve logistics efficiency, increase resource allocation and flow speed, reduce energy consumption and pollution, help improve the city's image, reduce the pressure of carbon emission compliance, improve the city's resource mobilization ability and market vitality, and make it more convenient for citizens to travel.

However, the construction cost of the maglev high-speed train itself is quite high. According to conservative estimates, the cost of building a high-speed maglev in China is more than 300 million yuan per kilometer, which is twice the cost of high-speed rail.

According to this construction cost, small cities are short of funds and it is difficult to make profits in the short term. In addition, China has a vast territory, large differences in geological conditions, and uneven economic development. These are all factors that restrict the widespread promotion of maglev trains. Therefore, some experts analyze that even if a maglev high-speed train with a speed of 600 kilometers per hour is built in the future, it will basically be opened between first- and second-tier cities.

In summary, although the 600 km/h maglev train has broad development prospects, it also needs to overcome challenges in technology, economy, policy and market. But in any case, with the continuous advancement of technology and the continuous development of the market, maglev trains will still become an important force in the future transportation field.