Military Railroads
Trains are a key means to transport military personnel, equipment and supplies on a large scale, as it can serve to complement road transport, which is slower but can transport more, and air, which is faster but can transport less. Railroads were long the basis of transportation system. About 52,000 kilometers of track was in operation by 1984, though only 18 percent double tracked and some important lines lacked modern equipment. Ninety percent of locomotives were steam engines in 1979; but by mid-1980s production of diesel and electric models was growing rapidly. Freight cars numbered 280,000, and passenger cars numbered 20,000 in 1985. Railroads were efficient within limits of track system.
Efforts began in the 1980s to streamline the PLA and organize it into a modern fighting force. The first step in reducing the 4.5-million-member PLA in the early 1980s was to relieve the PLA of some of its nonmilitary duties. The Railway Engineering Corps and the Capital Construction Engineering Corps were civilianized.
In the 1990s, having carried out the military conversion program in a planned way, China had converted a large number of the military facilities including military airports and ports to civilian use or for use by both the military and civilian, opened to the society several hundred special military railway lines, and the national defence industry shifted to civilian production on large scale.
The military transportation and delivery system upgrades and focuses on military preparedness. China Railway developed strong modern logistics to resolutely implement the national strategy for military-civilian integration and pledged full support to the building of strategic delivery capability. With the active cooperation of railway departments at all levels, railway transportation and delivery has seen sound progress on the cause of building strong armed forces.
Unit equipment railcars will normally move as a unit train. The number of railcars in a unit equipment train varies. About 89 percent of the railcars used in the CONUS rail deployment of unit equipment during Desert Storm were flatcars. Of these flatcars, 98 percent were the chain-tiedown type. Railcar requirements for the movement of the six Army-type divisions and armored cavalry regiment as of 1992 ranged from 640 flatcars for an Armored Cavalry and 788 flatcars for a Light Infantry Division up to 2,306 flatcars for an Armored Division.
In China, rules required a freight train heading to Europe to have 43 rail cars before it could leave a Chinese city. In the past, that created uncertainties in departure times because it takes a long time for a city to gather enough cargo to fill all the cars. It would be much easier and quicker to reach the required number of rail cars at a single center because cargo would come from all over China. In August 2014, the temporary Urumqi railway port and gathering center was up and running.
China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) started a special project to research high-speed railcars in September 2017. Freight trains with speeds of 250 km/h can transport seafood from Haikou in China’s southern province of Hainan to Beijing in less than one day.
In September 2009, the PLA General Transportation Department and the Guangzhou Military Region Division conducted a trans-regional mobile exercise and organized joint delivery training. With the slogan "Morning drink Changsha water, lunch Wuchang fish", participating officers and soldiers took civil aircraft, railway and took motorized mobility in 3 ways across four provinces. Explored the organizational procedures, measures and measures for the joint air and ground delivery, thry consolidated the integration and integration mode of military and civilian integration, and marked a substantial increase in the strategic mobility of China's military.
Chinese military freight train operations are poorly characterized in the open literature. The Military Transportation Department, Academy of Transportation in Tianjin has studied the battlefield posture-deducing theory and the structure of the posture-deducing system, the requirement of deducing the posture of railway military transportation in the condition of emergency operations. It analyzed the systematic structure of the railway transportation posture-deducing system studied, which may provide a theoretical reference for the study of railway military transportation posture-deducing systems.
By 2010 rail military transport had been raised from 400 km per day in the past to 800 to 1,000 km. Military transport by road had been raised to 500 km from less than 300 km per day in the past. The proportion of high-performance large-tonnage vehicles had risen sharply. The inland water was developed into an ocean. The air and military transport developed from a single one to the transportation of personnel and materials from a single transport unit. From relying solely on the development of civil aviation to the combined use of civil and military forces, the integrated three-dimensional modern military transport system was basically formed.
Opening on 25 June 2021, the first bullet train line in Tibet was a 435-kilometer railway connecting Lhasa with the city of Nyingchi. It takes only about three and a half hours for a one-way ride, cutting almost half the time it takes to travel between the two cities by road. The newly opened Lhasa-Nyingchi Railway in Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region soon hosted its first military transport mission, a move analysts said on 04 august 2021 served as a boost to the capability of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). New recruits at a combined arms brigade affiliated with the PLA Tibet Military Command recently took a Fuxing bullet train on the railway to an exercise field at an elevation of 4,500 meters. This was the first time the Lhasa-Nyingchi Railway, an important part of the Sichuan-Tibet Railway, has hosted a troop transport mission, and marked another step forward on the systematic development of China's military transport.
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