What's Different About China's New High-Speed Trains? We Went and Rode Them

The details inside the cabin have improved a little, but the biggest change is probably the speed increase that starts on October 1.

On July 18, a G10 high-speed train left Beijing South, ran down the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed line and pulled into Shanghai Hongqiao. Unlike every other train working the route that day, it carried no passengers.

Nor did it keep to the current timetable. It ran at a top speed of 350 kilometers per hour and covered the whole distance in 4 hours and 10 minutes — 40 minutes quicker than the fastest scheduled Beijing–Shanghai service. It was a test run for the line's return to full speed sometime after September.

For the passengers who saw it go past, though, the biggest difference was how it looked. This was not a white-and-blue "Hexie Hao" — Harmony — but a new silver-and-red model called "Fuxing Hao," Rejuvenation.

Since early July, the G1/2/3/4 and several other Beijing–Shanghai services have looked unfamiliar. Two new trains with completely different shapes have appeared: one painted silver with red stripes and a sharper nose, the other white with an unusual gold trim. Neither carries the words "CRH" or "Hexie Hao" on its flank anymore. The names have changed to "CR" and "Fuxing Hao."

The trains are new; what they are meant to express is not. It isn't hard to guess who "Harmony," the name picked in 2007, and today's "Rejuvenation" are addressed to. The makeover went further than the lettering: the prototype, silver with blue trim, was repainted in the color of revolution.

China's railways were not always like this. In the quasi-high-speed era the country also ran the X2000 "New Speed," the DDJ1 "Great White Shark" and the DDJ2 "China Star."

At 9 a.m. on July 8 we left Beijing South on the G1 to Shanghai, worked that day by a CR400AF Fuxing Hao.

Standing on the platform and looking along the middle of the train, the clearest change is the base color: white has become silver, striped with red.

The new color started as a design decision, but in daily service it should also do something practical — it won't look dirty as quickly.

Air quality across North China is poor year-round, and the white flanks of the old Hexie Hao trains used to end up streaked yellow and black where the airflow deposited grime. Silver paint will probably hide that better.

The lights and the power outlets will make your trip a bit more comfortable

Inside, the CR400AF's biggest changes are in the lighting and the fittings. Set against the CRH380A/AL Hexie Hao trains that used to do most of the work on the Beijing–Shanghai line, the Fuxing Hao's cabin light has gone from a cool white to a warmer yellow; there are round decorative fixtures on the ceiling, and a band of blue-purple ambient light above the windows.

The older CRH380A series was built on Shinkansen E2-1000 technology, and it inherited that generation's cool-toned lighting along with everything else.

Warm light is a trend of the past few years; one argument for it is that light closer to daylight tires the eyes less.

Ambient lighting is likewise a newer way of shaping the mood of a public space — the "Sky Interior" on the Boeing 737 NG works on the same idea. Next to the CRH380A's direct lighting, the CR400AF cabin feels friendlier and warmer.

For a public conveyance, the older trains' interiors now look too bare.

In the details, the plates that show seat numbers have gone from printed to electronic. The talk is that they will eventually link to the railway's ticketing system and show whether a seat has been sold. On our trips, the electronic plates could show only the seat number.

Not that knowing would mean much. Every passenger holds a ticket, or the order message for an electronic one. And for someone who boards partway along and has yet to buy a seat, knowing only whether a seat is unsold right now is no help either: Chinese railways assign seats for the full journey, so a seat that is empty at this station may already be sold by the next.

The Fuxing Hao comes in a second model as well: the white-and-gold CR400BF, built by CRRC's Changchun Railway Vehicles, which differs from the CR400AF inside and out.

At 9 a.m. on July 9 we took the G2 out of Shanghai Hongqiao, this time on a CR400BF. It is painted white with gold trim; the prototype and the production version differ in detail, but the main scheme is unchanged.

Although both are officially "China Standard EMUs" — electric multiple units — the CR400AF and the CR400BF come from different technical platforms, and the interiors give it away. The light in the CR400BF is yellower, and it does not run as a continuous strip; you can see the separate tubes.

There is no ambient lighting either, just a row of tubes added above the windows. The CR400BF also lacks the ring of light on the ceiling, which makes the whole cabin look plainer.

The seats on both Fuxing Hao models are much as before, but the power outlets have changed a great deal.

The outlet you used to have to bend down to reach has moved to the side of the seat cushion, within arm's reach. Beside the standard AC socket there is now a USB port, which makes charging a phone easier.

Seat pitch is a little tighter than first announced

On both trips we picked second class, which has the most seats.

Our CR400AF tickets were in car 2. The pitch was about the same as on a Hexie Hao CRH380A: roughly 980 millimeters.

That was not the original design. CRRC's first press release put the Fuxing Hao's second-class pitch at 1,020 millimeters. But on the production trains, cars 2, 3, 6 and 7 gained an extra row of seats to carry more people, and the pitch shrank.

The new seats are barely different from the Hexie Hao's, and both are far roomier than economy class on a plane. Both also carry over a design from the Shinkansen E2 that is now almost 20 years old.

The old tray-table problem, in other words, is still there. In second class the table you use belongs to the seat in front, and unlike the one on a plane it does not slide. To use it you have to lean as far forward as you can, which makes eating or working on a laptop awkward.

Adding seats to raise capacity had already been tried once on the Hexie Hao. It produced a fairly serious disaster for passengers: some seats had no window at all, and those travelers faced a wall for the entire trip.

On the CR400 series the wall problem is less severe, though some window seats still face half a panel.

The CR400BF's toilet and washing area are also very different from the AF's. The CR400AF has a generous open washing area, and a toilet compartment of at least two square meters that holds a full washbasin counter as well as the toilet itself.

On the CR400BF the compartment is cramped — one person can just about turn around in it.

Both Fuxing Hao models share one step backward: the window blind is a single large panel again, so two passengers sharing a window cannot set it separately.

Later Hexie Hao trains had already fixed this, with a blind split into two halves that move independently.

Two models of the new train — already far simpler than before

The Fuxing Hao currently comes in the two models mentioned above, the CR400AF and the CR400BF. "CR" is the new brand name of China's high-speed rail; "400" is the speed class, meaning a maximum operating speed of 400 kilometers per hour; "AF" and "BF" are the builders' codes, for Qingdao Sifang and Changchun Railway Vehicles.

At Chinese New Year in 2007, the Fuxing Hao's predecessor, the white Hexie Hao, carried passengers for the first time. But "Hexie Hao" was in fact the name given to at least six different types of train.

• The CRH1 was built by Qingdao Sifang-Bombardier Railway Transportation Equipment, a CRRC company, using technology bought from Bombardier Transportation's Regina C2008, designed for Swedish railways.
• The CRH2 was built by CRRC Qingdao Sifang Locomotive & Rolling Stock using Shinkansen E2-1000 technology bought from Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries.
• The CRH3C was built by CRRC Tangshan Railway Vehicle using ICE-3 technology bought from Germany's Siemens.
• The CRH5 was built by CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles using technology bought from France's Alstom Pendolino and Italy's ETR600.
• The faster CRH380A was derived from the CRH2, and the CRH380B from the CRH3C.

Running several types of train in one country is perfectly normal. Japan, the first country in the world to operate high-speed trains, currently runs 500, 700 and 800 series sets on the Shinkansen alongside the E2, E3, E5, E7 and others. All were designed to a single standard by Japan's national railway, and although several companies build them — Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Hitachi, Kinki Sharyo — in principle any of them can be coupled together and driven as one train.

Because the Hexie Hao trains were built on technology from different countries, however, different types cannot be coupled and run together, and the equipment for rescue, training and the rest has been duplicated many times over. That has been the situation for nearly ten years.

The Fuxing Hao's biggest significance for the industry is that it cuts the railway's operating costs and raises its efficiency. Trains from different builders can now be coupled into longer formations to carry more people, and driver training can go from five or six types down to one or two. Because every train is built to one standard, when one breaks down any spare set can be sent to rescue it, with no worry about mismatched seats or incompatible equipment.

The number of companies building the trains has shrunk considerably too.

Fifteen years ago, when the Hexie Hao was being prepared, Qingdao Sifang, Tangshan, Changchun and a crowd of other train builders belonged to two separate state-owned groups, CSR and CNR. In 2015 the two merged into CRRC.

The biggest change is still speed

The biggest argument about China's high-speed rail has been the slowdown.

On July 23, 2011, one Hexie Hao high-speed train ran into the back of another on the main line of the Ningbo–Taizhou–Wenzhou passenger railway, in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, killing 40 people. The investigation afterwards found that human error was the main reason the signaling system failed to work in extreme weather.

Three weeks before the crash, on July 1, every high-speed and EMU service in the country had already been slowed down: 350 km/h lines to 300 km/h, and 250 km/h lines to 200 km/h.

The railway authorities never explained why. It took a sudden crash to make the slowdown a public question.

Running slower drew more doubts than it settled. For one thing, the newly built passenger lines and high-speed lines had all been designed to standards of 250 km/h and 350 km/h and above, with room to go faster built in from the start. Curve radii and the other parameters of the track were all set for high speed, so slowing the trains did nothing for technical safety.

Slower trains also meant fewer of them. High-speed operations must stop before midnight each day so the track can be inspected and repaired, so the lower speeds cut the number of daily services sharply.

The plainest argument — fast is dangerous, slow is safe — does not hold for high-speed rail. At 300 kilometers per hour a train needs more than a kilometer to stop; taking 50 km/h off that does not change how much time the crew has in an emergency. High-speed rail is kept safe by its signaling system, not by its braking distance.

On July 18, after the Beijing–Shanghai line's speed test, Jia Limin — a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and one of the leading technical figures behind the localization of China's high-speed trains — was asked in an interview what he made of the slowdown. It happened, he said, "for certain very absurd reasons at the time." Asked about the argument that slowing down saved money, he first denied it, then swore.

From October the Beijing–Shanghai line will be the first to get its speed back — which at last puts both the new Fuxing Hao and the line itself to full use.

The new trains are plainly still being run in.

On QDaily's two trips the WiFi was still being adjusted. The hotspot was there, but on one train we could not connect at all, and on the other we connected and could not reach a single website.

More than once we heard the crew complain that the equipment on board was not up to the job — the refrigerator, for one, was too small. On the CR400BF back to Beijing South, the crew did not seem to have mastered the public-address system, and let the passengers listen in on their private chat for a good long while.

At 2 p.m. on July 9, the G2 arrived at Beijing South. Two CRRC technicians in uniform, the last to get off, seemed to notice something as they passed the gangway between cars 3 and 4, and pulled out their phones to photograph a bulge in the roof panel.

Above that panel is the pantograph that draws the train's power; below it sit the air conditioning and other equipment.

They took the pictures and muttered to each other, apparently unimpressed with the CR400BF's workmanship: "This train's only been out of the factory a few days. How is it bulging already?"

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by QDaily.