China will add up to nine magnetic levitation railroads of over 1,000 kilometers in total length in the long term to boost regional connectivity and high-end equipment manufacturing. They will include a tourist railway line in Yunnan province, and intercity passenger lines and urban mass transit lines in Shanxi, Xinjiang and Sichuan. China aims to run high-speed maglev trains at 600 km per hour by the end of this year. Zhejiang province announced it will invest CNY100 billion to build a maglev railroad connecting Hangzhou and Shanghai. It will take about 15 minutes to complete the 162-km journey, said Feng Hao, Researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission’s Institute of Comprehensive Transportation.

Compared with standard bullet trains, the high-speed maglev trains have advantages which include reduced noise and vibration, and lower maintenance costs because they do not use wheels but hover centimeters above the track through the use of magnets, avoiding friction. Aside from the Yangtze River Delta region, the Development and Reform Commission of Shenzhen plans to introduce maglev rail lines to the Second Guangzhou-Shenzhen High Speed Railway to ease the operational pressure of regular and bullet trains in the area. The Second Guangzhou-Shenzhen High Speed Railway is to be built in 2025 and is expected to be completed in 2030. Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, also intends to launch maglev services between the city and Chongqing in the future.

China Railway Rolling Stock Corp, the country’s largest rolling stock manufacturer by production volume, is also developing wheel technology-based high-speed trains. The Europeans and Canadians have failed to compete with China in this field in recent years, said Chen Jian, Professor specializing in railways at Chongqing Jiaotong University. Japan remains a strong rival though in developing regular bullet and high-speed maglev trains. It has successfully tested 500 km/h and 603 km/h maglev trains with cryogenic superconducting technologies in recent years. Japan plans to build a high-speed maglev train line between Tokyo and Nagoya in 2027 or later. In addition to three existing maglev railroads in Beijing, Shanghai and Changsha, two short-distance low-speed maglev railways are being constructed in Qingyuan, Guangdong province, and Fenghuang county, Hunan province. Both are scheduled to be operational in 2021. China laid a total of 1,178 km of new railway lines, including 605 km of high-speed lines in the first half of this year. The country plans to lay at least 4,400 km of new railway lines in 2020, including 2,300 km of high-speed lines, the China Daily reports.

In other railway news, China plans to invest CNY200 million to build China-Europe railway distribution hubs in five cities to better use railway resources and reduce costs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s top economic planner. The five cities – Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Chongqing, Xian and Urumqi – are all major cities for China-Europe freight train services or key logistics channels. As more cities start to run freight trains between China and Europe, intensive competition has emerged in transportation prices and railway resources, said Wu Jingyu, Director of the Asia-Europe land bridge international freight train coordination service center, at the China Communications and Transportation Association.

The construction of transportation hubs will enable cities to share resources, cut costs and improve efficiency. According to Wang Guowen, Director of the Center for Logistics and Supply Chain Management at the Shenzhen-based think tank China Development Institute, most China-Europe freight trains pass through Urumqi without stopping, and the establishment of the new hub will enable domestic and foreign goods to travel on the trains at the same time to reduce costs. Wang also suggested that part of the CNY200 million in funding be used to build platforms for information sharing and coordinate trains running among the five cities, the China Daily reports.