Huawei has won the bid for the Shenhua Group Corporation’s Shuo Huang Railway (SHR) LTE project.

One of the largest coal supplying and trading companies, Shenhua has developed and implemented the world’s first LTE network for heavy-haul railways. SHR, with an operating route length of 594km, is a critical railway section for China’s West-to-East Coal Transfer project.

Shenhua hopes to expand the railway’s capacity to transfer 350 million tons of coal and needed to maintain efficient and safe operations of 20,000-ton capacity heavy-haul trains. A wireless broadband system was required to communicate between the master-slave locomotives located at both ends of trains, which could be up to 2.5km apart. The railway’s 800MHz and 400kHz communications system would not be able to support the expansion with its limited coverage distance and low reliability.