Rail industry speeds toward success in Hunan

Growth of sector raises status of province to international level

A speeding China Fuxing bullet train bolts along the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, known as "the roof of the world", at its maximum speed of 160 kilometers per hour. It is a test run on the high-speed railway in an arctic-alpine area, with a maximum altitude of 5,000 meters.

The core power equipment, traction motors and traction transformers are typical examples of the "China-made brand" of rail transit equipment.

Hunan, as the only province in China that has a pilot zone for the development of the industrial cluster for rail transit equipment, is a key rail transit base with the largest industrial scale, the highest degree of agglomeration, and the strongest innovation capability.

It has demonstrated a great deal of strength in the international arena as the cradle of China's electric locomotives.

In recent years, Hunan's equipment manufacturing industry has achieved remarkable feats.

As the country's largest industrial base for research and development and the production and export of rail transit equipment, the overall market scale of the sector in Hunan exceeded 150 billion yuan ($23.55 billion) in 2020, and the province's market share of electric locomotives ranked first in the world.

On Dec 8, the 2021 China International Rail Transit and Equipment Manufacturing Industry Exposition opened in Zhuzhou, with more than 800 domestic and foreign companies participating online and offline, from 16 countries including the United States, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates. Officials from embassies and consulates in the region and representatives of business associations organized delegations to attend the event.

He Jian, chairman of the Hunan Provincial Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said that Hunan has a solid industrial foundation. Holding the rail transit expo in Hunan will bring new opportunities and inject new impetus to the high-quality development of the province's rail transit and equipment manufacturing industries, and will further promote industry and technology.

CRRC Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive, located in Zhuzhou city, Hunan, is known as the "living history book" of China's railway locomotive development.

In the company's electric locomotive assembly workshop, many records have been made, such as "China's first electric locomotive", "China's first alternating current drive electric locomotive", and the "world's most powerful electric locomotive".

In 1958, China's first mainline electric locomotive was successfully put into operation; in 1961, the 6Y1 No 1 electric locomotive was officially completed; in the spring of 1968, the No 8 electric locomotive, independently developed by the company, was rolled off the assembly line and was finalized, being named Shaoshan Type 1.

In 2008, the number of the company's locomotive production stations increased from nine to 18. Since then, the company had made Malaysian intercity EMUs, Ankara stainless steel subway trains, and energy storage light rail vehicles.

For more than 40 years, CRRC Zhuzhou has developed more than 50 types of mainline electric locomotives, and produced more than 10,000 units, which has promoted China's electric locomotives from direct-current to alternating-current, from regular speed to high speed, and from general load to heavy load.

The leap from import to export has supported the rapid growth of the "cradle of electric locomotives in China" into the "capital of electric locomotives in China" and provided a strong traction equipment guarantee for all major speed increases of Chinese railways since the late 1990s.

According to the market needs of different countries, CRRC Zhuzhou has developed products such as "meter-gauge EMUs" and trams.

Its electric locomotives, intercity EMUs, urban rail vehicles and rail transit equipment derivatives have been exported all around the world. In more than 20 countries and regions, the market share of electric locomotive products ranks first.

Core competitiveness

On July 20, CRRC launched the world's first high-speed maglev transport system, with independent intellectual property rights, designed to reach a speed of 600 km/h.

The core power equipment of the high-speed maglev system-linear motors and electromagnets were developed by CRRC Zhuzhou.

Also, in CRRC Zhuzhou, home to the world's first intelligent manufacturing workshop for rail transit bogies, 11 production lines are fully operational. The automatic transportation trolley fetches materials from the three-dimensional material warehouse and transports them to the corresponding workstations. The intelligent manufacturing equipment automatically manufactures according to the material two-dimensional code parameter information, and generates a new two-dimensional code and enters the next step.

"Compared with the traditional manual operation mode, personnel are reduced by 50 percent and operating costs are reduced by 20 percent," said Zhou Qinghe, chairman of CRRC Zhuzhou.

In Hunan, a total of 27 projects, including the intelligent manufacturing of bogies of CRRC Zhuzhou, are included in the special intelligent manufacturing projects of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 18 of which have been completed and passed the inspection and acceptance of the ministry.

Sixteen enterprises have been identified as national intelligent manufacturing pilot demonstration enterprises, and 60 enterprises and 100 workshops have been identified as provincial intelligent manufacturing demonstration enterprises and demonstration workshops.

These companies not only reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also use new-generation information technologies such as the internet of things, cloud computing, and blockchain to realize real-time online operation monitoring of products and provide customers with online working condition monitoring through mobile smart terminals and information-based value-added services such as fault warning.

A large number of high-end equipment products in Hunan, such as the large-scale shield machine of China Railway Construction Heavy Industry, have successfully entered the European and American markets. In recent years, companies such as Sunward and CRRC Zhuzhou Research Institute have given full play to their advantages in technology, capital, and labor, and have continued to win large overseas orders and accelerate their "going out".

Feng Zhiwei and Zhu Youfang contributed to this story.