When in Russia real high-speed trains will start running

To date, the most high-speed trains in Russia are the Sapsans, which run between St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow. They are capable of speeds up to 250 km / h. But at the same time, a full-fledged high-speed railway was never built for them, and they move along the same routes as ordinary trains. But soon everything can change: in Russia they promise to build a full-fledged high-speed railway, however, it will connect not the capital cities, as expected, but Moscow and Kazan, and faster trains will run on it.

The development of high-speed rail services in Russia is not going as fast as in many developed countries. The Sapsan high-speed trains mentioned above were manufactured in Germany by Siemens, and even their maintenance is carried out by foreign experts. At the initial stage of cooperation, it was planned to build a joint plant for the production of such trains in Russia, but then Russian Railways refused the project.

To develop a system of high-speed trains, it is necessary not only to have the trains themselves, but also to build high-speed highways, which requires considerable costs. Even the Sapsans currently available move at a speed of 200-250 km / h between Moscow and St. Petersburg and at a speed of 140-160 km / h between Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. But, for example, similar trains in Germany, which run on special high-speed routes, reach speeds of up to 330 km / h, although in this country there are road sections where the speed does not exceed 160-200 km / h. The leaders in the development of the network of high-speed railways are the countries of Europe, as well as South Korea, Japan and China, which today has the most developed network of high-speed railways in the world - over 25,000 kilometers.

But let’s return to Russia, where the prospects for the development of high-speed rail transport have recently been actively discussed. Oddly enough, the first high-speed railway, if it does appear in our country, will connect Moscow and Kazan, and in the future they plan to extend it to Yekaterinburg. This road will become part of the Eurasia High Speed Highway international project, which will unite Beijing, Astana and Moscow into a single transport corridor. An important feature of the project is that not only passenger, but also freight trains will be able to move along the road. The Eurasia HSR project was introduced back in 2015, and the Chinese side has already built its own section of the road from Beijing to Urumqi.

The construction of the Moscow-Kazan high-speed highway is currently at the design stage. More than $ 150 million has already been spent on the development and approval of project documentation, and they plan to begin construction in 2019. In this regard, the question arose about which trains will run on the new line. It is assumed that these will be all the same compositions of domestic production. In the meantime, the manufacturer of this type of transport has not been determined, Russian Railways has presented its concept of a new model of high-speed passenger train that will run between Moscow and Kazan at a speed of 360 km / h.