CHANGCHUN, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) – China’s high-speed trains that will travel across the country’s frigid northeastern regions are designed to withstand sharp changes in temperature, a chief engineer said Wednesday.
The country’s first cold-proof high-speed trains are expected to run from Saturday and any problems with sharp changes in temperature that once forced Eurostar to halt services in 2009 look to have been solved.
The trains, to withstand minus 40 degrees Celsius temperature, will travel 921 kilometers between Harbin in Heilongjiang Province and Dalian in Liaoning Province.
It sounds better than a coal stove in the rear of the car by the restroom.
Replacing steam with head end power to heat passenger cars come to mind? What else has been developed over the last 50 years to help North American freight and passenger trains keep moving in extreme cold?
Actually china is building train cars to survive -50 C. They are for interchange service with russian railways to Moscow. Note don’t knock coal stoves the back up heating will be provided by some kind of coal heating.
China’s first rail to ‘sea of death’ starts operation
On Nov. 29, with the freight train moving slowly from Hami to Lop Nor, the former lake that is known as “the sea of death,” in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region enters a new era.
It may take more than new, cold weather resistant rolling stock to entice passengers to make the “Sea of Death” their destination. The photo spread touts freight service to the region.
Frozen passengers and toilets are not a freight concern. What about condensation in air brakes, frozen lubrication, etc.?
LOP NUR, Xinjiang, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) – A train entered Lop Nur in remote northwest China on Thursday, marking the operation of the first railway connecting the sparsely-populated region to the rest of China.
Lop Nur still holds the mystery of the disappearance of Loulan, an ancient Silk Road civilization, in the third century. It was also the site of China’s first atomic bomb test in 1964.