30 декабря 2017г.
High speed and very high speed transportation have a great effect the development of cities. Better accessibility leads to agglomeration, which leads to the economic boom. High-speed railways united isolated parts in one entity (e.g. the time of transportation between all pairs of cities decreased from 5-12 hours to 1-2 hours). The effect of increased transport availability is enormous: the mobility of population is growing, the redistribution of economic activity is taking place, added value is increasing.
The effect of high speed rail has been experienced by many countries. Unified urban area is forming in the delta of Yangtze by integration of 3 megapolises (Nanjing, Hangzhou and Shanghai) and 20 other large cities. Today more than 100 million of people live there, but GDP is more than 1 billion, not much lower than GDP of New-York. Emergence of this agglomeration is caused by developed transport infrastructure.
In the origin of high speed and very high speed transportation in Japan high speed lines «Shinkansen» connected all the large cities of the country and thanks to big popularity travel with minimal intervals of 2 minutes.
In France Lille can be the example. This city was fading away one time, but it got huge development due to the building of high-speed railways. And the convenient location of the city at the intersection of routes Paris- London and Paris – Brussels made Lille the third largest financial and economic centre of France.
These effects of combined high speed passenger and freight transportation will provide additional growth and development of agglomerations. However, organization of such transportation has some difficulties. No country in the world, has freight transportation with speeds even close to passenger trains. Only some couples of mail trains travel in France between Paris, Lyons and Provence Combined traffic of passenger and freight trains with time intervals is organized in Germany. High speed trains (IC-200 km/h, ICE-250-280 km/h) travel in day-time (from 6 till about 23) and high speed freight trains – at night from 23 till about 5).
This concept of organization of railway traffic exists historically because of changed development programs. Initially it was planned to built high speed mainlines only for passenger transportation (“The Development Program 1970” V=300 km/h ). In 1974 because of the oil crisis the program was changed as a result the speed was reduced to 250 km/h and there was planned freight traffic with V=80 km/h. The idea of combining had 2 reasons: capacity of the existing lines was too low for the forecast development of freight traffic and there was no economic basis of new lines. In 1984 the program was changed again- speed of passenger traffic was increased to 280 km/h and freight to 120-160 km/h. The final view the program had in 1991.
This concept has some disadvantages. For example, higher infrastructure cost, lower capacity of lines and etc.
However, there are more advantages. The owner of infrastructure gains payment for usage of passenger as well as freight trains. Passenger trains are operated at different sections differently, but freight traffic is a more constant factor. In addition to this freight trains don’t travel at weekends and it helps to do repairs at night time. At some lines the revenue per km from freight trains are higher than from passenger ones.
However, combining freight and passenger traffic at high speed mainline «Moscow-Kazan» would increase the pay off period.
At the short lime «Moscow-Kazan» railway traffic is not competitive with road transport even when delivery time is reduced.
The additional infrastructure would be needed for freight trains to give way to passenger trains (extra tracks and sidings).
However, China is showing great interest in organizing freight traffic on the Moscow-Kazan mainline. Its plans include to create a large economic project "Silk Road", which will reduce the time for delivery of goods to Western Europe. According to calculations, the time will be reduced from 60 days by sea to three days by the high speed mainline. Not long ago, a freight train covered 12 thousand km and arrived in London from the Chinese city of Yiwu (Zhejiang Province). The trainset was in transit for 18 days and traveled through the territory of Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France. The large transit of goods by high speed mainline from China to Europe and vice versa will bring substantial income to the owner of the infrastructure.
The main problem of organizing such traffic is the different gauge width. Cargo delivery will require trans- shipment at the border, which takes a lot of time and increases the transport component in the cost of cargo. Recently, plans were announced to produce a freight train equipped with a mechanism for changing the width of the bogie, with a speed of up to 300 km / h. This was reported by the first vice-president of JSC Russian Railways A.
S. Misharin at the opening of the headquarters of the cities of the new railroads of the Silk Road.
References
1)http://www.pgups.ru/upload/sagruski/sagruski_news/lekcija_Mischarin_ 30012015.pdf;
2) http://www.hsrai;
3)https://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2015/02/16/novii-mir-rozhdenie-gigapolisa.
