Recently, China Railways shared a strange train: super long, super slow, and it keeps going in circles. On the circular loading line at Huolinhe Station in Inner Mongolia,An ultra-long train consisting of 110 carriages is traveling at a constant speed of 1 kilometer per hour, and can complete the entire coal loading process without stopping.
Huolinhe Station is located in the hinterland of Horqin Prairie and is the core station for coal export in eastern Mongolia. This circular loading line called the "Light Bulb Line" in the station is 5.2 kilometers long and can accommodate three trains operating in parallel.
Automated circular loading line
The train continues to travel along the ring line, and the coal is transported to the silo through a closed conveyor belt. The staff can accurately inject the coal into the carriage by pressing a button, without stopping midway during the entire process, greatly reducing the technical operation time.
The loading line can fill 110 carriages in just 2 hours, and the fastest loading time for a single carriage is only 50 seconds.
In order to control the error, the train keeps moving forward at a constant speed of 1 km per hour, and is equipped with special calibration weights to ensure that the batching error of each carriage does not exceed 0.02 tons.
In the current cold winter season, these loading lines operate 24 hours a day, giving priority to ensuring the transportation of coal for heating and electricity, and transporting coal to more than 50 power plants.