Guizhou, China:
According to local media, two bullet train coaches were derailed in China’s Guizhou Province after a mudslide killed the driver and injured 7 passengers.
The bullet train D2809 ran from China’s South Western Province Guiyang to Guangzhou.
Two coaches of D2809, a bullet railway from Guiyang in SW. China to Guangzhou, S. China was stranded at Guizhou station after a mudslide occurred at 10:30 AM on Sat. The train driver died. One car attendant and seven passengers suffered non-life-threatening injuries,” reported China’s local media outlet, the Global Times, in a tweet on Saturday.
A train carrying people from central China’s Hunan Province was thrown off the tracks earlier. The incident resulted in four people being severely injured, one of them fatally, and 123 others mildly hurt. Continuous rain and landslide were the causes of the accident.
China Railway announced on May 13th that the speed of the high-speed train linking Beijing and Guangzhou in South China’s Guangdong Province will increase to 350 km/h (km/h).
According to the Chinese Railway, this will be the fifth high-speed railway in China operating at this speed.
The section connecting Beijing and Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei Province, will be operating at 350 km/h starting June 20. This section was successfully tested on May 13th, during the construction of the safety-standard demonstration line for the Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed rail.
A Fuxing bullet train was used in the test, as well as a high-speed integrated vehicle. A comprehensive inspection of the overhead, signal, bridge, and up-down tracks was done. The train reached 385.1 km/h during the test.
The minimum travel time between Beijing and Wuhan will be cut to 3 hours 48 minutes after the speed-up. This is a 1,330 km journey.
Current speed limits for the Beijing-Guangzhou rail are 310 km/h. The Wuhan-Guangzhou section opened in 2009 at 350 km/h. Since 2011, the speed has been reduced to 300 km/h. The section Beijing-Wuhan, which was opened in 2012, runs between 300 and 315 km/h.
The construction of the Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed rail, which has a total length of 2,300 km, was completed in December 2012. To date, the rail has carried 1.6 billion passengers.
There are currently only four high-speed trains in China that operate at 350 km/h. They are mostly used for short-distance travel. These are the Beijing-Shanghai intercity rail, Beijing–Tianjin high-speed railway, Chengdu–Chongqing high–speed rail, and parts of Beijing–Zhangjiakou hi-speed train. In terms of travel distance, the Beijing-Guangzhou rail also has the longest.