Construction of a test site for the Moscow — St. Petersburg high-speed railway is nearing completion on the Sablino — Tosno section in Leningrad Oblast. According to the HSR Information Center, the almost 1200-meter long section is designed for comprehensive testing of the entire track structure — from the subgrade to ballastless slabs.
The slabs are installed with an accuracy of one millimeter using robotic total stations. There will be 263 of them in total. The structure is three-layered: a reinforced concrete foundation slab, a factory-made rail slab with an integrated elastic layer, and a self-compacting concrete layer connecting them. As Nikita Terentyev, CEO of NPS "Skorostnye Tekhnologii", explained, the elastic layer allows for track inspection and alignment during night windows without stopping traffic.
A separate test object is a 118-meter long turnout with eight electric drives. It allows trains to pass in the straight direction at speeds up to 400 km/h, and in the diverging direction at up to 120 km/h. Such turnouts have not been used in the country before. The infrastructure status will be monitored by more than 1500 sensors installed underground and on above-ground elements. Before the arrival of the first HSR train, tests will be conducted using "Sapsans".