CRCC Flourishes in Innovation amid Pandemic

China Railway Siyuan Survey and Design Group Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC), developed smart railway products amid the COVID-19 outbreak, supporting resumption of high-speed railway construction and laying a foundation for the company's participation in new infrastructure construction.

During the pandemic, a new generation smart rail inspection locomotive passed trial operation on a railway managed by CRCC's Shanghai bureau and is ready for service.

The company also installed a railway monitoring system on the Yuxi River Bridge, the ballastless track high-speed railway bridge with the world's longest span.

The bridge is a section of the Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou High-Speed Railway linking Henan and Zhejiang provinces.

The inspection system, based on optical fiber sensing and vision measurement technologies, is capable of millimeter-level rail deformation identification, collection and transmission of data and risk alerts.

With the system, real-time supervision of the railway is maintained at the supervision center.

So far, the system has been used in 92 percent of high-speed railway monitoring stations to guarantee safe operations.

China Railway Siyuan Survey and Design Group Co., Ltd. also adopted high-speed railway technology in its development of the fabricated ballastless rail system of subways.

Easy to be transported, the light weight tracks are expected to become a popular green product in rail transit.

Contractors of several subway projects in Changzhou of East China's Jiangsu province, Wuhan of Central China's Hubei province and Zhengzhou of Henan had shown their intention to use such products.

The company also made a breakthrough in development of a robot specialized in fine adjustment of rail lines on the basis of automatic control, artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things. The robot is expected to debut this May.

Research on high-speed railways with a designed speed of 400 kilometers per hour is now progressing.

A smart double-block ballastless track operation and maintenance platform that can help improve rail pavement quality is also being upgraded to support intelligent high-speed railway construction.

Such smart applications as wireless fine adjustment devices based on AI, the internet of things and automatic control are to be promoted in many projects including the Ganzhou-Shenzhen High-speed Railway connecting East China's Jiangxi province with South China's Guangdong province and the Changde-Yiyang-Changsha High-Speed Railway in Central China's Hunan province.

It's worth mentioning that the CFT sleeper which can be used in all kinds of intercity rail transits and urban railway systems has obtained 20 patent licenses and is a solid technological support for the export of China's high-speed products.

A staff member of the CRCC's Shanghai bureau tests the new generation smart rail inspection locomotive during the COVID-19 outbreak. [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]

Installation of the smart railway monitoring system on the Yuxi River Bridge, the ballastless track high-speed railway bridge with the world's longest span, is completed during the pandemic. [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]

The fabricated ballastless tracks developed by China Railway Siyuan Survey and Design Group Co., Ltd. undergo dynamic testing at the laboratory. [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]

(Executive editor: Zhang Tianyuan)