Railway Gazette reported that completion of the latest phase of the Beijing to Guangzhou Passenger Dedicated Line was marked with simultaneous departures of 380AL train sets from each end of the Zhengzhou to Wuhan section at 08.59 on September 28th 2012.

The 536 kilometers long route links Wuhan in Hubei province with the city of Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, to the north. The alignment is designed for 350 kilometers per hour operation, although trains are currently running at 300 kilometers per hour. The line has a minimum radius of 7,000 meters and a maximum gradient of 2%. During testing 1,534 trial runs covered more 500,000 kilometers.

Journey times between Wuhan and Zhengzhou have been cut from 4 hours 28 minutes by the fastest conventional train to just 1 hour 56 minutes. A connection with the Zhengzhou to Xi'an PDL enables direct high speed services from Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Changsha and Wuhan to Zhengzhou and Xi'an, reducing Guangzhou to Xi'an journey times by 12 hours to 8 hours 35 minutes.

In Wuhan, trains arrive and depart from the existing Wuhan PDL station, but Zhengzhou is served by a new dedicated Zhengzhou East station. There are 24 pairs of G trains per day on the route and one pair of slightly slower D trains; seven pairs serve Zhengzhou's conventional station, the others using Zhengzhou East.

Construction commenced on October 15th 2008. There are stations at Zhengzhou East, Xuchang East, Luohe West, Zhumadian West, Minggang East, Xinyang East, Xiaogan North and Hengdian East. At Wuhan passengers can connect with other high speed services to travel to Hefei and Shanghai, or continue south to Changsha, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Testing of the final Zhengzhou to Shijiazhuang to Beijing section of the Beijing to Guangzhou PDL has now commenced, and it is expected to open by early 2013.

Source - Railway Gazette

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