China’s Metro Development: Beijing To Introduce Unmanned Trains This Year

The capital city’s total subway network is expected to reach 900 km in 2020.

An automatic rail line with unmanned trains is being tested in the Fan Shan District of the Chinese capital, some 50 km from downtown Beijing. The 14.4-km line with 16 trains will go operational at the end of 2017, Xu Ding, the Chief Manager, told journalists recently. Beijing has a population of just over 23 million inhabitants.

Officials say safety and reliability are of the highest order in the fully Chinese-developed trains and systems. Some trains are completely automatic, while others have some level of human monitoring. The unmanned train network will later be extended to the rest of Beijing and to 10 Chinese cities.

Rails for the automatic line are just like those for normal trains, officials explained. The automatic train will run at a maximum 100 km per hour when fully operational, but the trial speed is 80 km per hour because distances between train stations are shorter than in normal lines.

As China transits to a new development era, the capital city’s underground train, subway or metro authorities are also working hard to take the network from 574 km with 19 lines to 900 km with 30 lines in 2020 to transport 15 million passengers a day. Three new lines will go operational at the end of 2017, taking the total distance of the city’s subway network to 610 km.

Currently, 11.5 million people are transported each day in Beijing by the underground train system that employs over 30,000 workers and uses 8,835 tr...