Your webmaster/editor has been absent mentally and physically from his normal task of keeping this website up-to-date with newsletters and items of interest. Whilst many other activities have occupied my time, a holiday tour of China resulting in photographs and video clips in overwhelming quantities, will be my main excuse for the lapse in progress on the website. Now however is the time to make some use of the material gathered.

China's progress in using electricity is quite phenomenal. When the hydro powerstation at the Three Gorges Dam was first planned in detail it was envisaged that it would cater for 15% of the total electricity needs of China by 2012 but now that figure has had to be amended to 5% - a third of the original though the generation capacity has not been changed.

The application that most impressed me was the Monorail System in Chongqing a city with 33m inhabitants. Here is an extract fom a paper by Hitachi - the Japanese designers of the system.

On the hilly roads in the center of Chongqing city in China, traffic congestion composed of buses, taxis, and private cars is particularly bad, and the exhaust fumes from this traffic is continuing to worsen atmospheric pollution. As a public-transport measure to address this pollution problem, a straddle-type monorail has been introduced. As the first urban monorail introduced in China, the Chongqing monorail was opened to the public on June 18th, 2005. As a major partner in the Chongqing monorail project, Hitachi manufactured and installed two prototype trains (with a total of eight cars) and their mass-production bogies, electrical equipment, and points and crossing equipment. After that, 19 massproduction monorail trains (with a total of 76 cars) were manufactured and implemented by Changchun Railway Vehicles Co., Ltd in technical cooperation with Hitachi. The main features of this monorail train are as follows: large urban monorail cars, completely painted exteriors of aluminum car bodies to protect against acid rain, a VVVF (variable voltage, variable frequency) traction inverter, and fiber-reinforced-plastic seats and stanchion poles used inside cars.

The complete document with technical details is available from Hitachi by clicking HERE