Domestic standard high- speed trains will save money over time
China Railway Corp ( CRC), the nation’s sole railway operator, can expect operating costs to fall as more next- generation domestic Fuxing ( Revival) bullet trains enter service, but it will take time for sufficient trains to join its fleet to yield economies of scale, an expert said on Thursday.
CRC announced recently that it will buy 104 Fuxing China-standard electric multiple units ( EMUs), after the first order announced in April that involved 50 trains.
The price for each train is reportedly 170 million yuan ($ 25.5 million), putting the total procurement cost at 17.8 billion yuan.
The Fuxing trains will replace the old Hexie ( Harmony) trains on the Beijing- Shanghai highspeed railway and networks serving the region that comprises Beijing, North China’s Tianjin and North China’s Hebei Province, the Beijing News reported on Wednesday. The Fuxing trains are scheduled to run at 350 kilometers per hour for some services starting this September.
Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, said that having the Fuxing will help the State- owned railway operator slash costs, although this will only happen when there are enough Fuxing trains running.
“The current order of 154 trains is dwarfed by the total number of Hexie trains running on China’s high- speed train network, the world’s largest,” Zhao told the Global Times on Thursday. Media reports in November 2016 suggested there were over 2,000 Hexie in service.
“Technically, as there will be segments of the network being used by both the newer Fux- ing trains and the older Hexie trains, maintenance costs won’t fall overnight. That will only happen as the process of substitution takes place,” noted Zhao.
Experts said servicing the Fuxing trains will be cheaper than servicing the current EMUs, which involve four types from Japan, Germany, France and Canada.
Chinese standards account for about 84 percent of the 254 key standards applied in the Fuxing train, according to an article posted on CRC’s website on Thursday.
Zhao estimated that the transition from Hexie to Fuxing will take about 20 years, which is the former’s designed life circle.
CRC’s investment in rolling stock shrank to 92 billion yuan in 2016 from 140 billion yuan in 2015, domestic financial news site caixin. com reported Tuesday.
So far this year, “CRC has spent about 70 billion yuan on procurement of rolling stock and maintenance, and the amount could rise by another 30 billion to 40 billion yuan before the year’s end, which means investment in rolling stock in 2017 will be higher than that in 2016,” a source at CRC told caixin.
An employee in the public relations department of Stateowned trainmaker CRRC Corp told the Global Times Thursday that three group subsidiaries now hold licenses to produce Fuxing trains, and there are no production capacity bottlenecks.
“We can meet the maximum demand from CRC and are now producing as it places orders,” the PR representative, who declined to be identified, told the Global Times.
China’s in- service high- speed rail network is the world’s largest with total track length of 22,000 kilometers.