JAPAN: Central Japan Railway is to augment its fleet of N700S Shinkansen trainsets with a further 17 units, some of which will be fitted with infrastructure inspection equipment.
Deliveries are scheduled for 2026-28, allowing withdrawal of JR Central’s seven-car Dr Yellow high speed inspection trainset in 2025; another Dr Yellow trainset owned by JR West will remain in traffic. Once delivery is complete in the 2028 financial year, JR Central will have a fleet of 76 N700S trainsets.
In addition to the inspection functions carried out by Dr Yellow, the N700S sets fitted with monitoring equipment will be able to analyse images of overhead line components to detect faults. They will also feature an asset monitoring function that can assess the condition of track materials from images and point cloud data.
JR Central says that the new inspection fleet will be able to obtain equivalent or better data than that collected by Dr Yellow, leading to improvements in safety and reliability. Track and infrastructure inspection by several trainsets in commercial service will provide more frequent inspections than are possible with Dr Yellow.
In addition, some inspection work carried out by staff on the track will no longer be needed, permitting a reduction in the labour force required for track and electrical installations.
Among specific enhancements to the inspection equipment on the N700S fleet will be an image analysis function that monitors the pantograph. If a foreign object on the pantograph is detected, the train driver and staff at the control centre will be notified.
Another enhancement will be the ability to transmit more data via LTE to the control centre in real time should a breakdown occur. This will allow a more detailed assessment of the vehicle’s condition.
The future fleet will also have the ability to deal with voltage drops in the overhead power supply. Thanks to software developments in the main converter of the N700S, it will be possible to maintain the overhead line voltage. Once this function is available on all Tokaido Shinkansen trainsets, JR Central says that it will be possible to reduce the number of substations by 10% and to cut CO2 emissions by about 10 000 tonnes a year.
Passengers will appreciate another advance in the N700S design, which is the ability of the train’s air-conditioning equipment to operate from batteries should the train be halted by a power failure, for example if a natural disaster occurs. In such circumstances the air-conditioning will operate at lower capacity than normal, and operating time will be limited to ‘several tens of minutes’, JR Central says.
JR Central says that the future N700S trainsets will make more use of recycled aluminium from earlier Shinkansen vehicles. In the previous N700S build, recycled aluminium was used in the roof area, but from now on it will also be used in the lower bodyside area.
Some cars on the new fleet will be equipped with an automatic seat rotation device which will be used during maintenance. The device will not be fitted to Green Car vehicles, nor to Cars 3 and 6 in each set.
Four of the new fleet will be delivered in 2026, followed by seven in 2027 and six in 2028. JR Central says that its existing N700S fleet will be modified to include some of the additional functions fitted to the new fleet, including foreign object detection and enhanced data transmission capabilities.
