(Photo/scol.com.cn)

Chengdu, capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, unveiled a train for its first driverless metro line – Line 9, on Feb. 19, scol.com.cn reported on Tuesday.

The train is 185 meters long, 3 meters wide and can run at speeds of up to 100 kilometers per hour. It is made of aluminum alloy and has a maximum passenger capacity of 3,496 people, the largest capacity of all metro services in Chengdu to date.

The first phase of Line 9 has now entered its debugging stage, said Zeng Jian, vice director of the new metro line department of Chengdu Rail Transit Group. He disclosed that 25 metro trains will go into service on Line 9, and besides three which will be produced in Changchun, capital of northeast China’s Jilin Province, the remaining 22 trains will all be produced locally by Chengdu Zhongche Changke Rail Vehicle Co., Ltd.

The trains used on Line 9 will all be equipped with the GoA4 fully-automatic driving system, the world’s most advanced automated urban metro subway system, and will feature functions such as automatic wake-up, automatic operation, and remote control.

The failure detection devices and network control system based on Ethernet enable the Line 9 trains to be both intelligent and safe.

(Photo/scol.com.cn)

The metro trains will also be equipped with online detection systems for storage batteries, running gears and doors. With real-time data gathered from nearly 6,000 monitoring points being transmitted to the ground control center, metro operators can receive real-time vehicle data and improve operational efficiency.

The driverless metro line, built by Chengdu Zhongche Changke Rail Vehicle Co., Ltd, will go into trial operation in the second half of the next year as the city’s first metro line with a fully automatic rail transportation system complete with driverless metro trains.