China Railway Corporation

China Railways (abbreviation: CNR, Chinese中国 铁路( Zhōngguó Tielu ) ) is called the state-owned railway company of the People's Republic of China.

Business

The Chinese railways existed since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the Chinese Ministry of Railways subordinate, therefore highly subject to political influence. For example, all prices of the Chinese central government and the Ministry of Railways are set, so the CNR itself has no influence on it. The CNR, headquartered in Beijing, operates using smaller railway companies of people and goods.

A subsidiary of CNR is the China Railway Express ( CRE). It takes over the tasks of the automotive logistics, ie the transport of cars on the track.

In 2007, the CNR, with the participation of the DB, a French and an Israeli company, a company for container transport (China United International Rail Containers ), the foreign companies operating under other investments for the construction of 18 rail yards.

Infrastructure

The 80,000 -kilometer rail network largely consists of tracks with standard gauge, but also older meter gauge and narrow routes are still available. The signaling systems consist of different systems and are mostly left of the track, as the Chinese rail transport is handled in the left-hand operation. The light signals are similar to the Eastern European Hl signals, but without velocity information, in the form of signals have their origin in the UK.

Until the 1980s, steam locomotives were manufactured. In 2003, the state railway has drawn their last from the scheduled traffic. In the 1970s, the diesel locomotive was increasingly introduced. Electric locomotives were used from the 1960s, but most track electrification took place only in the 1990s and later.

Freight traffic

Freight traffic, which accounts for about two-thirds of total traffic, is mostly from coal transportation, rank behind steel, ore and agricultural products. In contrast, the value of container traffic is very low. Reasons for this are firstly the short transport routes along the busiest east coast, where trucks and barges are clearly preferable, and on the other hand high prices, poor service, still missing electronic tracking ( tracking and tracing ) and the low productivity of the CNR.