China’s Humble-ish High Speed Beginnings: The CRH5 Trains
China’s Pendolinos were a rough ride but made the network faster
Article A66 | 22 August 2019
Medium readers are going to pry their eyes wide-open for this. Didn’t we have three CRH trains on this list before? Yes, we did: they were the CRH1, CRH2, and CRH3.
And China decided to get lazy and skip the 4? So there’s no CRH4? Right — here in China, for a reason that’s unfathomable by a Swiss Yours Truly, “4” is just not “on”. The exact same number we in the West associate with stability (four legs in a table or stool, etc), China associates with “death”. Train crashes are horrid enough; thus the decision not to go with CRH4 high speed trains. So what we got instead was the CRH5.
(Although, in retrospect, we did have many “4” locomotives, including the widely-used Dongfeng-4 locomotive, and the heavy-duty-ready Shaoshan 4 electrical locomotives. But I digress.)
Enter the CRH5, the Pendolino for China (yes, think of it this way, if you will). (It comes in pretty much the same form and style as seen in Alpine countries in Europe.) However, despite its sharp nose, as seen perfectly here at Baotou East station (Inner Mongolia, Northern China), it’s still not super-fast. It goes upwards of 250 km/h (157 mph) and that… is it…
The inside of the train was absolutely horrible, especially on the older trains. Some seats could not be rotated, and even on the slightly newer ones with slightly improved First Class seats, they were absymal. Yours truly once dozed off with his left arm “depressed” by his butt (don’t ask why), and when he got up by his destination, his left arm felt funny for the next few week. Call it ergonomics gone wrong…
These trains are usually seen headed northeast into the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, as well as Inner Mongolia, where temperatures as low as -40°C aren’t unheard-of! During these long hauls, they usually come in twos, with two CRH5 sets combined and linked to make a coupled trains 16 cars in length altogether.
These trains are also seen as the mainstay for slower lines, with speeds going up to 250 km/h. They’re seen on many intercity routes as well, and the province of Shandong in eastern China has a fair bunch of these. They in fact were in charge of running from Beijing to Qingdao before “true” HSR services on the main line from Beijing to Ji’nan (part of the Beijing-Shanghai HSR) were live in 2011.
Unlike their European counterparts, these trains don’t come with a tilting function on. (Also, they started off life in China as blue-and-yellow, and eventually become white-and-blue.) These trains are one of the few trains which have door buttons which are at times operable by the passenger. They also come with foldable stairs by the door, a feature only occasionally in use (such as here, at Luan County station in northern China).
A newer generation of CRH5 trains are starting to supplement (and probably eventually replace?) the ageing CRH5A trains. Known as the CRH5G trains, they will pick up where the old 5A trains left off mostly on journeys to and from northeastern China.
For me (and I’ve never been on the 5G trains — yet!), my biggest bit of my wish list is for better seats. 5A trains sometime featured such abysmal First Class seats I’ve come to “reterm” them more as “Second Class Plus Light”…!
One last thing: if you’re lucky, you’ll catch a CRH5A train in yellow livery. That’s a very techies train, mostly for technical and track inspection people!
