China has tested a rail system that links multiple freight trains through a wireless system rather than physical coupling.
On Monday, a test conducted on the Baoshen Railway in Inner Mongolia saw seven freight trains with a combined cargo capacity of 35,000 tonnes – 3½ times the weight of the Eiffel Tower – running together much more closely than would be usually required when they travel as single units.
The technology could increase China’s railway freight transport capacity by more than 50 per cent without the need to put down new rail lines, state broadcaster CCTV said on Monday.
The group control system was developed by the state-owned coal mining enterprise China Shenhua Energy Company and other domestic organisations.
China has been expanding its railway cargo capacity over the decades and moved more than 3 billion tonnes of cargo in the first three quarters of this year, according to state-run newspaper China Daily.
It is also boosting its rail links to other countries, with services such as the China Railway Express offering connections to dozens of nations in Europe and Asia as well as carrying goods.
Building new rail lines to meet growing cargo demands is costly, so measures such as increasing the length of trains or shortening the intervals between train running times could save money, according to a paper published two years ago in the journal Mathematics by researchers from Central South University in Changsha, Hunan province.
