Chinese Rail Transport Appreciation & News
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Are the current major HSR lines rated for this speed? Wasn’t too long ago when they had trouble with them and had to downgrade the speed on some stretches.
There's some HSR lines that can physically reach 400 km/h and beyond but can't because of the economic and technological limitations of available rolling stock. For example, the Lanzhou–Xinjiang high-speed railway was designed with operating speeds upwards of 350 km/h, but China Railway currently runs 250 km/h Hexie series EMUs (CRH2G and CRH5G) on the line despite specialized variants of the 350 km/h Fuxing series EMUs existing (CR400AF-G, AF-GZ, BF-G, and BF-GZ) because of operating costs.
First of all train is the whole set that includes both powered towing unit (locomotive) and powerless carriages/wagons. In morden passenger train, the power is distributed to multiple carriages along the whole train, there is no dedicated train head. The distiction between locomotive and carriage/wagon is obslete.
A metro system is fundamentally a train system operating within a metropolitan area. In some cases the metro system uses the very same track, EMU and signalling system as the inter-city trains.
From the perspective of construction standard, the curvature of the tracks and signalling standard, I think most if not all lines are capable of this speed.
However in real life, there are always sections and times that the train runs at much lower speed such as departing and arriving stations. Another factor in real life that limit the top speed is wind. For example, the Lanzhou-Xinjing section has made into a news when a HSR was forced to stop due to strong sideward wind that threaten to tip over the train. This kind of scenario is something out of the hand of engineering and will remain to limit the speed regardless the capability of the train or track systems.
What you refer to as train is locomotive or the powered wagon. It is an old style metro equipment. China does not operate or produce such equipment anymore. So the 791 from China are units, some are powered, some are not. The concept of powerless "wagon" can not be used on this deal. It is not 791 powered train-head, neither 791 powerless carriages.
This is what I have been saying in my post 178, it is wrong to apply the terminology of "locomotive and wagon" on this 791 deal. It is also wrong to use the word train to refer to the train-head.
Also I must point out that the wiki page is misleading in saying "217 trains and 1514 wagons" instead of total units. If you look at any metro line you will see that all carriages are the same except one in the head and another in the tail that have driver's cabin. The motors are all under the floors and can be located anywhere along the whole train set. Metros have to travel up and down due the tunnel system, so it has to place some powered carriage in the middle. Which carriage is powered is not visible to passengers, only the operator knows. In a deal of 791 it is impossible that all of them are powerless which would demand that Chinese wagons being connected in a train set with powered unit from other vendors which may not be technical possible or create extra cost of modification instead of using Chinese powered units.
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