A richly detailed article that delves into the French TGV speed record, the extra modifications they applied to what was already a high-speed system, and the lesser-known physical phenomena that set a performance envelope for this mode of traction.
Then, in a switch of tone and pacing, admits that profitability potential is likely most important of them all.
This is why networks -- rather than just individual lines -- are critically important. High-speed rail works best when it connects robust local transportation networks that already exist: between cities that they themselves have robust temporal and spatial transport coverage. It works best when faraway cities can be brought within commuting range, or further leisure destinations within daytrip range. Similarly, it works best when it extends the catchment area of an airport, rather than a service positioned to compete against point-to-point flights.
But major infrastructure projects often suffer from messy political and public relations approaches that play up the project's impressiveness and prestige in isolation, while neglecting to emphasize or champion synergistic improvements to other parts of the network. Frequent and punctual "normal-speed" rail isn't as politically energizing, and local transit networks that serve the specific transport needs of a town are hardly exciting to regional audience, but without it, high-speed rail is just an expensive showpiece that doesn't serve a genuinely identifiable transport need. This is a risk with the California HSR as much as it is with ambitious efforts to bring western Europe's successful high-speed services further into the EU's east.
People still use airports all of the time for regional flights despite the airports having crap local connectivity. The California HSR can still be incredibly successful if it’s as easy to get to as the local airports (including the public transit poor SJC).
What will kill it is terminating in places not even convenient enough for an airport location.
People IN THE US still use regional flights because all sorts of public transport in the US are literally third world crap.
EU and parts of developed Asia use a lot of inter-city trains.
Munich<>Frankfurt (400km) is 3 hours with ICE, much less than going to the airport, wait for check in, boarding, flight, off the plane and to the city centre. It's around 110e too for returns
Interstate rail in Europe is still very far from optimal, and long-distance rail service has been declining due to cheap state-subsidized air travel. Overnight service, a natural mode of longer-distance transport, has been scaled back in recent decades, but is now making a comeback due to climate concerns.
And yet Europe has all those discount airlines that people apparently use. A Munich-Frankfurt route is a lot like a Boston or DC to NYC route, which is indeed popular by train in US. (Though traveling that by plane is also popular for reasons I don't understand outside of some fairly specific circumstances like an early morning meeting.)
Borders. That's the problem in the EU. Cooperation for massive infrastructure project beyond a single line or a tunnel is very hard to achieve.
Discount airlines are discount mostly because of tax incentive to develop small local airport around the EU. Of course they are popular. In the UK, from London, it is basically cheaper to get anywhere in the EU than anything north of Birmingham.
A country in the EU and a state in the US are equivalent (for discussion on transport - in other contexts there are significant differences). Nobody flies between cities in one state, just like nobody flies between cities in one EU country. When going to a different country things change - the distances are now large enough that you fly because it is faster.
Remember, Chicago to New York City is almost the same distance as Munich to Moscow! (Note that rail advocates will tell you that Chicago to NYC is just barely in high speed rail range, anything farther even rail advocates don't pretend to be competitive. Chicago to New York City is not very far on the scale of the US, so of course we fly.
Yes I will agree that our rail system in the US isn't great, but flying doesn't compete with the rail system, driving does. A good rail system in the US would only negatively affect some short flying routes, it would however mean less people drove.
NYC to Chicago is also through one of the continental divides in the US (as well as some fairly densely populated areas). You're only going to get so fast. And even if you could get a trip down to 8 hours or so (which is less than half of the current time), how many people will routinely do that vs. a couple hour flight?
>Nobody flies between cities in one state
With some exceptions. Probably most notably SF to LA although there are probably other smaller in-state city pairs that are a long drive from each other especially in the western US.
There is no technical reason NYC to Chicago can't be done in under 5 hours. Getting the land rights and building tunnels is probably too expensive to pull off, but there is no technical limitation. The continental divide is just an engineering problem to deal with. The cities are actually a good thing as you can make a 1 minute stop in each for more traffic (indeed most advocates suggest that few people will ride the whole route)
NYC to Chicago is over 1000km in linear distance (I-80, a decent approximation of the shortest distance you can route it, puts it at 1200km). Making it in 5 hours requires an average speed, including stop penalties, of over 200km/h. And that's bypassing any other major city. A more reasonable route, that goes via Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia, runs you closer to 1500-1600km, requiring a 300km/h average speed. With the top speed of conventional trains being about 350km/h, that is impossible.
If you bypass every other city between NYC and Chicago, and basically go through a state-long tunnel in Pennsylvania, you might be able to do it with a conventional railroad, but it definitely won't be cost-effective. To hit the other cities, you have to switch to maglev, which makes it cost-ineffective as well.
A final note: the city pair you're trying to link up is Chicago-NYC. Given the relatively diminutive size of the other cities en route (Pittsburgh is #27 and Cleveland #33, compared to #1 NYC and #3 Chicago), Chicago-NYC is going to make up the bulk of your traffic, so partial portions of the route aren't particularly effective. This is one of the issues CA has as well: the full SF/LA connection is where the market is, and the HSR can't justify its costs until it connects those two cities.
>A final note: the city pair you're trying to link up is Chicago-NYC. Given the relatively diminutive size of the other cities en route
One of the reasons that the Northeast Corridor works so well for Amtrak is that people by and large are not taking the train from Boston to DC. (It's doable and I've done it but it really doesn't make sense versus flying in most cases.) In fact, it's usually a longer stop in NY Penn because most people are either getting on or getting off in Manhattan.
Rather, people are going Boston-NY, NY-DC, or otherwise between cities that make up about half or less of the total route.
But that's because the route of Boston-DC contains the following major cities en route:
DC (#6)
Baltimore (#21)
Philadelphia (#8)
NYC (#1)
Boston (#10)
You're connecting 4 major cities, and 1 in-between city, along the Boston to DC route, and the largest city is smack dab in the middle. In fact, as route pairings, it's less a Boston-DC line and more a DC-NYC and a NYC-Boston line that is through-run. Chicago-NYC only has the in-between cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh en route (excluding the already-connected Philly).
The NEC is, quite frankly, extremely unusual in being a very dense, very linear corridor. The only other corridor in the world with similar circumstances is the Tokaido Shinkansen.
>The NEC is, quite frankly, extremely unusual in being a very dense, very linear corridor. The only other corridor in the world with similar circumstances is the Tokaido Shinkansen.
It's too bad the Amtrak NE Regional (and the very slightly-faster Acela "Express") are so horribly inferior to the Tokaido Shinkansen. Riding on an Amtrak feels like a bad joke after riding on any Shinkansen line, in many ways, including both speed and price.
Exactly. Frankly, if the northern and southern legs of the route split to different rail stations as is the case in Boston, I'd guess that would inconvenience relatively few people.
(Of course, Amtrak has limited service going north out of Boston anyway so the fact that the Downeaster doesn't directly connect to the NEC is less of a problem there than it would be in other cities.)
Shinkansen in Japan regurarly does 320 km/h and 360 km/h is being tested, with the main issue being running noise and tunnel boom.
These speeds are really not theoretical and we regurarly made use of them during travels in Japan. For example back in 2017 we traveled 1100 km from Beppu to Tokyo in about 8 hours. This contained a normal speed express train segment from Beppu to Fukuoka (1:30 h, max speed 130 km/h) and two train changes.
Also a maglev based line between Tokyo & Nagoya is under construction, which will be 80% underground with a running speed of ~500 km/h.
Most of the traffic is expected to be between those small cities, which is why you go through them. The full trip only competes with flying if there are enough trips that you don't have to plan ahead.
There is no technical problem getting a train to average 300km/h across the entire stretch. There are lots of political problems though. If we committed to building such a track in 10 years we could get the price of maglev track down a lot - and 10 years is what it would take the get the right of way and dig the tunnels.
Hey? We certainly do, unfortunately. It's still quicker to fly Berlin -> Stuttgart (for example) than it is by train (and much quicker than car - 1:15 plane, 5:40 train, 5:30-8:30(!) car).
Another, more extreme, example: Oslo -> Tromsø: 1:50 by plane, no options for train on Google Maps, and 21:10-22:20 by car.
That's the core issue. CHSRA never had a credible funded plan for building either crossing, and instead chose to tackle the easy part in the Central Valley first. Unfortunately, HSR in the Central Valley is effectively useless without a mountain crossing at at least one end.
The Pacheco Tunnel already goes through the same section of the Diablo Range they are planning to run one of the tunnels. That was built in the 1960's to carry water from the San Luis San Luis Reservoir to Santa Clara County.
I had been doing a similar trip (100km from London) very often in the past and always took the train, over the years the journey time has gone down to a little over 5 hours. I took a flight once two years ago and when you add all the waiting, security, getting to and from the airport it works out almost exactly the same, except you're more tired and can't take as many suitcases.
Now, imagine we had fast trains in the uk.
The poor state of the UK railways is due to a massive lack of investment for most of the second half of the twentieth century. A huge wasted opportunity where the costs of the closures were never properly considered.
Don’t conflate the majority of the beeching closures with a lack of investment. The problem was during the 80s when Japan and France were building new high speed railways, we weren’t.
We’re now trying to catch up with HS2, which is sorely needed to free existing tracks for more and reliable services, but we need to use that as a springboard for 50 years of investment. HS2, npr, midland connect, then high speed Birmingham to Bristol/Cardiff, Cambridge, and Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow
The key is to ensure we have schemes ready to go once construction winds up on the first parts, so the skills and equipment aren’t lost.
Reasonable point. I'm usually traveling to Europe with carry-on or, at most, one piece of check-in wheeled luggage. Even dealing with the single big piece can be a bit of a pain on a crowded train and going beyond that would be pretty inconvenient.
I don't like checking luggage on planes for various reasons but the system is at least set up to accommodate it straightforwardly.
I took that train a long while ago. Walked to the train with our luggage. Got on. Sat in wide seats for 4.5 hours and then got off in London and walked to our hotel.
If when California finishes it's high speed rail line all they need to do for it to be a success is keep the TSA far far away from it.
That line became incredibly cheap since LNER took over from Virgin. I've taken several next-day return trips from London to Edinburgh for less than £100 return.
> But major infrastructure projects often suffer from messy political and public relations approaches that play up the project's impressiveness and prestige in isolation, while neglecting to emphasize or champion synergistic improvements to other parts of the network.
Is this studied or monitored ? something that could give directions to avoid waste or corruption~ for politicians ?
That's likely to be closely related to the same dynamics that make maintenance funding so politically difficult. Big new projects are visible, whereas things like maintenance funding or less obvious improvements...aren't, and that difference in political impact can lead to serious agency problems. A politician accrues easy political capital with big, new projects because they're so obvious.
Most articles and papers I've seen on the subject emphasize much more rigorous project-specific cost-benefit analyses. This 2016 CBO paper[0] covers both the history, current situation, and three potential reforms: charging for actual use, cost-benefit analysis, or carefully linking funding to performance metrics. This is a separate Brookings paper discussing the subject as well.[1] Viewing projects less in isolation and more as part of a connected complex system could be more readily captured in cost-benefit analyses, and be more resilient against perverse agency problems.
So long as people vote for soundbites it will happen. Politicians will look to attach their name to anything that breaks ground so long as it looks good.
> Frequent and punctual "normal-speed" rail isn't as politically energizing
Having lived for 7+ years in both Boston and San Francisco and visited Paris a few times and trains that are 2 minutes apart is life changing in terms overall experience. You've given me a new cause to rally around.
The article is great but it fails to address another main issue with high-speed rail in many locations: Having to network with slower traffic.
I recently took a 9.5h train trip from Berlin to Switzerland, and although the train does travel at the top speed of the section at several locations, we never reached the top speed of the train set (280km/h), and lots of times we were travelling at under 100km/h for switching tracks or whatever else. I didn't log it, but I'd guess we spent less than 50% of the travel time over 200km/h.
That's where Japan's Shinkansen was so groundbreaking. Sure, they also used this opportunity to migrate from a smaller gauge, but the decision to build a new network from scratch that doesn't interact with other networks at all paid off tenfold over the decades as trains started getting faster and faster.
That's true, but the lower speeds in Germany are also what makes it possible to drop you right in the city center. The TGV approach is to make straight lines, and that means for smaller cities, you get dropped off somewhere out in the country outside the city.
If you've got a comfortable seat, wi-fi, power, and a dining car, spending a few extra hours on the train is not so bad. It beats spending that same time on a metro or regional train with a bunch of luggage. It most definitely beats spending the time going through airport security, walking a kilometer through a giant shopping mall with gates, waiting in a departure lounge, or waiting at baggage claim.
That said, there are reasons for each country's choices. France is much less dense than Germany, so acquiring land to make those straight lines is more feasible. France also has its population concentrated more in bigger cities rather than a lot of smaller ones like Germany, so as long as the TGV goes directly into the bigger cities, most people are happy. Japan is long and skinny, so average trip distances are longer and the speed is more important. Japan also has a big infrastructure budget to prop up the economy, so making straight lines that require loads of tunnels and bridges is not as much of a problem.
TGV works just fine on regular lines, and uses them when approaching most cities. In fact classic lines is where most tgv accidents happened. It gets dedicated high-speed lines for the main legs.
Most TGV will stop at city center train stations, if they don’t and drop you in the countryside it’s often for political or demographic reasons, or possibly because the rail lines were really unsuitable (iirc even at low speed tgv is somewhat limited in its ability to bend).
Running high speed trains on mixed mode rails (with commuter and freight traffic on the same lines) leads to one of two things: Either you slow your high speed train down (lowest common denominator) or you severely reduce capacity of slower commuter trains.
This is why the HS2 project in the UK will free up so much local commuter capacity. By taking all high speed trains off the existing lines, you can run many more trains on them.
In fact, the new generation of German high-speed trains (the ICE 4) has had its top speed reduced to 250 km/h, down from 330 km/h for the ICE 3, because there just aren't enough tracks in Germany where you can even exceed 250, and those few can be serviced by the ICE 3.
(Actually, the only one I can think of is Berlin-Munich. I used it last year between Nuremberg and Erfurt and saw a "290 km/h" display on the info screen.)
Cause Laufthansa a while back to stop flying between Cologne and Frankfurt, instead they’ll sell you a seat on the ICE train (code share) with full protection for your connecting flight.
In Germany in the 80s the Transrapid, a maglev train was developed. Sadly, the technology was dropped in favor of the ICE, predominantly because that one could use the extensive existing rail network. The only Transrapid Line actually operating is the Shanghai airport line.
In hindsight the needed new network could have been an advantage, as very little of the current rails is capable of anywhere near the 300km/h operation the ice can do. Would also have avoided all those scheduling problems where slower regional trains are regularly delayed, as they have to let other (also delayed) high speed trains pass.
The flipside is that Shinkansen tickets are fairly pricy. In many other parts of the world they would have been undercut by cheap commuter flights decades ago.
The most limiting factor is the pantograph/catenery contact; as speeds go up the wire has to be kept at a higher and higher tension to prevent the train catching up to the standing wave it creates in the wire. If the tension is not high enough to prevent this, the train will lose electrical contact or even rip down the wire. This is also why high speed trains can only have one or two pantographs to collect power.
In a more practical sense, the limiting factor is curve radii. The higher the speed, the larger the curve radii, and the more property parcels your curve will intersect with, blowing up the cost of construction. At top speeds of 350-380km/h Chinese HSR has a minimum curve radius of 7km. You can't really make curve radii smaller while keeping speeds high, or drinks will start sliding off tables and people may start vomiting.
If you know the approx speed the train will be going, you can curve harder and camber the track at the right angle to compensate. People will feel slightly heavier, but force will still be toward the floor.
Planes do this to the extreme, it's always weird noticing the plane roll 45 degrees and still feeling bum firmly in seat.
> ...it's always weird noticing the plane roll 45 degrees and still feeling bum firmly in seat.
Yes, that is a coordinated turn. It's one of the very first things you learn when you take flying lessons.
Airplanes aren't very good at flying sideways. You can make them do it to some degree, and it is an important technique for landing in a crosswind. But they are better at just climbing or descending - from the plane's point of view.
So the way you turn is to roll the plane in the direction of the turn and simultaneously start "climbing". Climbing straight "up" from the point of view of the airplane, not up according to the ground. The airplane doesn't know about the ground, it only knows about the air.
A coordinated turn is a combination of banking and climbing, such that you always feel like you're being pressed straight down into your seat. And the tighter the turn, the more you are pressed into the seat.
When you make a turn in a car on a flat road, you feel a normal 1G straight down and a force pushing you sideways. But if the road were perfectly banked for the speed you're going, you would feel like you were being pressed straight down in your seat. Instead of feeling a sideways force, that would be added to the downward force you feel inside the car - just like an airplane.
I suspect that making railways perfectly flat for high speed use is hard enough. making them banked at 20+ degrees for several kilometres sounds like a serious engineering challenge
The other caveat is that banking only works if you're traveling at the correct speed. Too fast and you still feel the turn. Too slow and you feel the bank. For airplanes this isn't a problem because there's never a speed restriction on air. For things that travel along the ground there is no end of reasons why they might have to travel slower than normal.
There is / was a train design where the train itself could lean into corners on a flat (legacy) train track. Pretty sure that's not considered anymore because the tilting system adds a lot of weight and complexity.
Mag-lev trains seem to reach 'around' the tracks, so that could work. Of course if the levitation stops in a corner (or anywhere, really) on that one it'll cause major damage.
The tracks are not fixed to the ground. If a train grips the tracks in order not to fall over, it will probably still fall over and also rip the tracks out of the railbed as it does so.
This is not always true, most of Shinkansen track is concrete slab track, which is effectively fixed to the ground. And they actually do have special anti derailment guides build into the track to prevent a train from derailing during an earthquake:
https://www.rtri.or.jp/eng/rd/seika/2006/01/safety_E05.html
True, as we've learned in this article. I guess it will have to grip to something else.
But in the theoretical banking the original comment was talking about (let's say 30 degrees), the track would probably have to be secured to the surface...
Well, how heavy is a bullet train, where is its center of gravity, and how much banking does it need if it wants to travel, say, 300 km/h in a (how sharp?) a curve?
Keep in mind that banking is only comfortable if you are traveling at the correct speed.
There are a whole host of reasons why a train may not travel at maximum speed for a given segment, and the rail line still needs to be reasonably comfortable at all of those.
Planes also require you to strap in and put your tray tables up whenever the seat belt sign is on. There's generally not a meal service happening when the plane is tilting at 45 degrees.
One of the competitive advantages that train travel has over plane travel is that it is significantly more comfortable, and you can get up and walk around or have a coffee on your table whenever you'd like. Train travel would be less able to compete with plane travel if the experience was more akin to sitting in a roller coaster.
Even turns in the vertical direction are a problem, for uncomfortably pushing you into your seat, or lifting the train off the rails. Which results in more bridges & tunnels than would otherwise be needed. Unlike slow trains, there is plenty of power for going up hills, but you can't switch to going down the other side.
While ordinary horizontal curves are cambered, IIRC the resulting train-vertical acceleration is still one of the limiting factors.
Not unless the bank angle is so great as to put the center of gravity outside the wheels. Considering how passenger rail cars are build (a deck/chassis to take the push/pull forces with a tin can on top for the cargo) it shouldn't be an issue.
The solution for this was tilting trucks. As the train rounds a curve, the cars themselves bank to counteract the outward forces, just like an airplane. The track doesn't have to bank, the vehicle does.
This works up to a point, but early tilting trains (e.g. British APT) were scrapped because the tilt was too high and it made drinks spill and people too nauseous.
One quote that stuck with me is "On reaching the 500 km/h mark, the camera controlling the pantograph condition already shows a continuous electric arc" - you can imagine that under these conditions the wire will wear down much faster than with "only" 350 km/h. So, before reaching a physical limitation, you already reach an economic limitation...
It is also possible to travel faster than some waves emitted in the ground. Particularly when going from a rigid to a soft foundation (like coming off a bridge).
The air compression going into tunnels can cause drama as well. Everything gets more difficult the faster you go.
I guess it'd be a big safety headache but perhaps the train could be powered through the rails? To avoid accidents the rails could be split into sections that only get powered when a train is directly above them.
Changing the current system would be prohibitively expensive. I also imagine that you have pretty bad losses at 25kV AC if your conductors are touching the ground and are potentially wet or covered by snow. It would also be a fire hazard I guess.
Plenty of metro rail systems use a third rail today, even outside. Maybe their losses are more manageable because their systems are relatively short compared to long distance rail, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
They do this in South East UK using a dedicated third rail for power. As I understand it, the limit is 100mph for this technology, although I don't know the physics, so it's not even fast enough for classic High Speed
Part of the problem is the low voltage conventional third rail systems use. In the UK, third rail voltage is 750V, compared to 25kV for overhead lines, so third rail currents get pretty high. You already get get pretty good arcs when the contact shoe moves on and off the third rail going through junctions. And you can't really increase the voltage very much before the rail starts to arc to ground, especially when it's raining and the insulators get wet.
While air transport has dramatic challenges to switch to non fossil fuels, if we created vast high speed rail networks we could focus air traffic on the longer distance flights. As the human race approaches peak population (at least for a while) we should figure out what the long term infrastructure should be. Like next 500 years. Once we start branching out to the stars/galaxy, population will start increasing again.
There's no real reason to switch so long as we are using these fuels for anything else. Let air transport be the very last things changed over, we have a ton of much lower hanging fruit that we can work on first.
I agree that there is much lower hanging fruit that we should put our primary focus on first, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be actively working on the problem. It is a much harder problem and likely going to be one of the last things switched regardless.
Is it really so challenging to remove fossil carbon from air travel, or is it merely expensive? With abundant renewable power you can make synthetic fuels that a turbine can burn. It might sound costly but it can be completely carbon neutral.
IIRC (though I'm not a chemist) a challenge with synthetic fuel generation is the continuous high power needed to drive those processes. Most renewables don't provide that yet (with the exception of hydro), at a sufficient level to make aviation fuel. There was a company mentioned here a while back that is trying to do that with small scale nuclear sited at airports, but that has other issues.
I'm not seeing the problem. Synthetic diesel is its own energy storage medium. If the plant was powered at night by burning its own daytime products, and powered in the day by solar, it would still be carbon neutral.
I think the problem is the need for uninterrupted high power input to the Fischer Tropsch process in order to maximize the utilization factor. You could get this in theory from a massive dedicated battery that kicked in when clouds rolled over and reduced solar output. It's doubtful that the economics of that work out.
Another problem is getting an uninterrupted supply of H2 and CO to feed the process. None of the convenient sources for those are carbon neutral, and obtaining either in a carbon neutral way (i.e. renewable electricity powered electrolysis) adds significant additional inefficiencies.
> Synthetic diesel is its own energy storage medium. If the plant was powered at night by burning its own daytime products, and powered in the day by solar, it would still be carbon neutral.
Yes, but why would you power it at night with the syn diesel you created during the day? You'd end up with at best 25% of the syn diesel you started the night with, because the Fischer Tropsch process is only 50% efficient, and running a diesel generator is at best 50%.
I'm not a process engineer of course, but my feeling is that abundant free energy changes these equations. It simply does not matter what the efficiency is when the energy input is free. Also you wouldn't burn the fuel for electricity, you'd burn it for direct heat. A lot of petroleum refinery equipment is heated by burning things that have just been made in the refinery itself. That doesn't seem very different.
Afaik the problem with air travel is not only the CO2 released from burning fuel, it's also the various byproducts getting deposited in the higher atmosphere. Synthetic fuels avoid the net CO2 Release but still have those impacts.
Yes, we approaching peak population, but local population density will change over time. Currently, the population of cities is increasing, but it can change if remote work will be more accepted(outside of IT).
I'm not sure I agree with the notion that the sole reason for continued urbanization is employment access.
I think we've reached a point where a large and growing portion of the population wants a level of amenities/services that can only be realistically provided in areas of sufficient population density.
Now, there could certainly be some shift that changes that, but I'm not sure what it would be.
> Now, there could certainly be some shift that changes that, but I'm not sure what it would be.
As I said: remote work.
You are right we need "sufficient population density". I wouldn't want to live in the country side for long term. I want to access things that only cities can provide, but I only moved to London because of job opportunities. I would happy to live in a small city if I have access to the same jobs.
If remote work would be more widespread the countries would be more decentralized.
This article sent me down the rabbit hole reading about the current state of the art – the recordholding L0 series. This eliminates the limiting factor that is the pantograph and instead gets its power through induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0_Series
The first thing that springs to mind is how amazing smooth the rails were in the V150 test. The lines I use the most, here in the UK, are way too bumpy and that’s at a mere 70mph. I understand the legacy of the rail network but it would be embarrassing to get to the 22nd century without any improvement.
On that note, for the price of HS2, I’d rather see:
1/ smoother tracks
2/ a strong, unified, national brand
3/ dead simple smart phone ticketing
4/ tickets checked when you get off the train, not on
5/ tickets purchasable on the train you are actually on, lower prices, and an end to the railcard / discount / split ticket confusopoly
6/ simpler utilitarian rolling stock, again with unified branding, no adverts, and simple monochromatic signing and buttons all following a unified design language
Perhaps a simpler list though would be:
1/ fire everyone
2/ hire from scratch and completely rethink the rail network in terms of being 100% focused on the passenger, instead of an internal market of contracts between infrastructure, train operators, and unions.
> The first thing that springs to mind is how amazing smooth the rails were in the V150 test.
High speed lines are necessarily extremely smooth and with very small tolerances.
French lines come out the factory in rail pieces 200 to 400 meters long and are thermite-welded together after adjustment. They have no expansion joints except around bridges (and even then not necessarily)
So how do they handle thermal expansion? Just let the whole system build up huge pressures in the summer? Special alloys that don't expand so much in the heat?
I learned recently that rail (especially continuously welded rail) is generally kept under tension (I don't understand how it is secured at the end of the line, though). So when it heats up in the summer, it is simply under less tension.
Unless it heats up too much, and then it buckles and you get derailments.
> Just let the whole system build up huge pressures in the summer?
Pretty much yes, that's why the rails have to be adjusted very precisely, otherwise they're going to kink / bend in summer (if pressure gets too high) and crack in winter.
Lobbiests for commercial interests who are potentially undermined by effective rail have long managed legal strangleholds on significantly improved rail infrastructure.
A glaring case in point, all passenger rails connecting East and West must go through Chicago -- far north of southern states. (There is one claimed southern line, but it never appears to be available for transport.)
Worse still, the Republican party has bamboozled their members into actually believing trains are not cost effective and therefore just a give-away to the undeserving lazy jobless welfare recipients who use them, because they can't afford cars.
> A glaring case in point, all passenger rails connecting East and West must go through Chicago -- far north of southern states. (There is one claimed southern line, but it never appears to be available for transport.)
This is a matter of geography. Your main eastern market is the DC-Boston corridor--as populated as all of the other states on the Atlantic seaboard combined. So that means that you're mostly looking at terminating there, no matter where on the West Coast you originate. If you start in the Northwest, you have to cross south of Lake Michigan to reach the NEC, so Chicago is en route. If you're in Northern California, you'll emerge from the Front Range near Denver, and you can pick whichever hub you want--might as well pick the one everyone else is using and choose Chicago. Even as far south as Oklahoma City, going to DC via Chicago only adds 100-200 miles to your route. It's not until you get to Dallas that reaching the NEC via Atlanta/Charlotte/Raleigh-Durham makes sense.
Historically, by the latter half of the 1800s, the railroad industry already settled on using Chicago as the main termination of every major railroad, and thus the major transshipment point. Geographically, the logical point is bounded by the southern tip of Lake Michigan and northern bank of the Ohio River (as you have prairies to the north and hills to the south). In principle, a city like St. Louis or Indianapolis could have grown up to be the major transshipment hub instead of Chicago, but you'd still be complaining about the lack of southern East-West lines in that scenario.
> Worse still, the Republican party has bamboozled their members into actually believing trains are not cost effective
It's even crazier than that. It turns out that Amtrak would be profitable were it not for being required to run long distance passenger rail lines through sparsely populated states, usually represented by the senators you mentioned.
(Note that regional state co-financed Amtrak lines like the Capital Corridor in California aren't part of the profitability problem)
The same senators from those low population density states who demand that Amtrak cut losses in order to become profitable also raise hackles when the obvious solution of cutting the unprofitable long-distance routes through their states routes is raised. It turns out that many of their constituents like those unprofitable routes.
The democrats have done no better, approving overpriced projects constantly. Competency in management is needed before anything else, and nobody has seriously done anything about that. (though Amtrac seems to be finally doing things right - I'll wait a few years to pass judgement on that though)
tl;dr
HSR can go up to 570 kmh as evidenced by French testing, but limitations such as the wheel, power delivery from the overhead lines, and changes to the track mean that meeting or exceeding this limit would be very difficult.
Magnetic Levitation can exceed this speed limit. From the FTA:
> a Japanese maglev had set a speed record at 581 km/h. The French managers considered it pointless as well as prudent to force the experiment to exceed that speed, as they could have entered a kind of “international race” that they did not have much chance of winning. Time would prove them right: in 2015, another L0 series maglev reached 603 km/h on the Yamanashi test line.
Chinese maglev seems to run at 431 km/h and brings in losses of more than 1 billion RMBs[1]. So these trains may not be economical.
When the Shinkansen was built, it was criticized for being a fancy train that would never make its money back, in a world where the automobile looked like the future. The project managers resigned due to the project exceeding its budget and schedule.
Fast forward to today, and the network is practically printing money for JR, while forming part of the backbone of Japan's infrastructure.
It takes a long term vision to make this kind of thing work.
Japan's unique situation is probably the only thing that makes the Chuo Shinkansen pencil out.
- Unlike most rail networks, the Japanese conventional rail network is narrow gauge while the Shinkansen is standard gauge, eliminating any chance of network effects from speeding up conventional trains on the high speed network as well.
- The Chuo route is extremely mountainous, so most of the route is in tunnels, and in tunnels there isn't really an increase in land acquisition costs as you increase curve radii for higher speeds.
The issue in Japan, though, is that they already have a high-speed network running on the same route, meaning that the extra gain from the maglev will be marginal.
It's a bit of a lost opportunity that neither China nor (so far) India tried leapfrogging directly from regular rail to maglev. The costs involved are admittedly staggering, but both countries would have the economies of scale to make them tolerable eventually.
> The issue in Japan, though, is that they already have a high-speed network running on the same route, meaning that the extra gain from the maglev will be marginal.
Tokyo-Osaka in an hour vs the current 2.5h, that's far from marginal, especially if you do a round-trip.
Having done that trip a couple of times recently for business, I can't wait for the Chuo Shinkansen to open.
Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka—the big three cities in Japan—will be within an hour of each other. It’s a big win for business activity, I think. Especially if you're comparing to air travel, which has some gnarly trips to and from the airport in all three cities.
That has a major danger of being another Concorde situation, where the second best option is still acceptably fast and much much cheaper. At the end of the day the market for people who are willing to spend an extra $2000 or $4000 to shave an hour and a half off of their travel time isn't very large.
Concorde had the issue of extremely high operating costs and low capacity. I don't think maglev has anywhere near the same problem, at least in terms of operating cost.
Nobody has built a maglev system that doesn't have very high operating costs yet. To be fair all of the extant systems are short haul or prototypes but there's still the question of if they will be able to reduce the costs with scale or if they're fundamental to the technology.
The current Nozomi Shinkansen is about $130 each way from Osaka to Tokyo. Not out of reach for a few meetings per month, but a big stretch for a daily salaryman commute. I haven’t seen any pricing for the Linear yet.
> The issue in Japan, though, is that they already have a high-speed network running on the same route, meaning that the extra gain from the maglev will be marginal.
Which is already at capacity. From this March the Tokaido Shinkansen will be able to run up to 16 trains per hour (up from 14 tph right now), which only 4 of them will stop at non-major stations. Tokaido Shinkansen runs roughly along the pacific coast, which is also prone to natural disasters.
To add some more context - the trainsets can have up to 16 cars with a capacity of up to 1300 people. So basically up to 20800 people per hour.
Also 16 trains per hour means 3.75 minutes between trains. This is actually not that remarkable & we saw that in action last years in Hiroshima, with three trains scheduled from the same platform with departures 3 minutes apart.
This is doable due to a couple of factors:
- passengers are usually quite disciplined and know what to do, eq. people queue at the door before a stop for quick departure
- the trains stop exactly in the same place on the station, so the are markers for each card & door on the platform - due to this people can queue on the platform for their car right where the car will be once the train arrives
- the are marked areas near the door location on the platform for disembarking passengers, so they don't mix up with people waiting in the queue to get in - no chaotic "fan" of people around a car entrance with some trying to get in and others trying to get out at the same time as you often see on European train stations
- all Shinkansen are EMUs with all wheels powered, resulting in rather high yet still comfortable acceleration speed - due to this the tran can quickly stop in the station and the n rapidly speed up again
The end result is a train that comes in rather quickly yet manages to stop on the spot with centimeter precision. Then people disemabark, then people get in and the train can leave & pick up speed again. We timed it once & it all took about 90 seconds.
>the trains stop exactly in the same place on the station, so the are markers for each card & door on the platform
They do this on Japanese subways too, because many stations have gates that the train has to line up with.
This would be completely impossible in America. Anyone who's ridden the DC Metro would know this: there is absolutely no way you could get American train operators to stop the train that precisely. Trains here stop with variances of many car-lengths.
I think it's helpful to remark just how amazing 16 bullet trains per hour is. That's practically a train every 3 minutes. Each train has 16 cars, with a seating capacity of 1320 -- that's like three 747s. And they depart more frequently than a downtown metro subway. It's amazing.
China was more interested in developing something that they could use to build national rail champions that other countries would buy from. No other country has ever built maglev, or really needs to, so it's not export-friendly.
The Changsha HSR-airport maglev is actually useful, but is very much a local transit option. It still doesn’t go into the city, but I’ve had to make that connection before. The Shanghai maglev doesn’t connect to anything more than a subway station.
This. They originally wanted to make the maglev line all the way to the other airport (Hongqiao) with a stop in downtown (People's Square). If they just went to People's Square, the amount of people using it would be MUCH greater.
There were actually complaints about the the dangers have maglev magnetic radiation or something like that. I don’t think they were valid, but even China has to cave into public pressure sometimes. Also, it was just too expensive to build more, so I think they decided to make it a dead end.
I took it once (back in 2006) just to experience it. It is fast, just not when compared to the whole trip being made by a taxi.
The actual cost of running the line versus ticket revenue generated is an extremely poor way of analyzing the situation. High speed, frequent, and reliable transportation can be a massive multiplier of economic activity.
Great. In general it is a great acheivement as a lot of people can move a lot quicker cheaper and easier. Going through airline ...
But as china situation unfold, the arrangement of such ease to connect has a price to pay. Even airline would have the same issue one may say. But in 2003 when sars did it’s tolls it is mainly via airplane and slow train.
The speed one held the current chaos. No one can stop progress. But are all progress great. Wonder.
Some just minor but important barrier. The join border of the high speed between hk and china meant when the case is found (or at least high temp symptom) instead of sending the patient or blocking him, he comes the index patient in.
Then, in a switch of tone and pacing, admits that profitability potential is likely most important of them all.
This is why networks -- rather than just individual lines -- are critically important. High-speed rail works best when it connects robust local transportation networks that already exist: between cities that they themselves have robust temporal and spatial transport coverage. It works best when faraway cities can be brought within commuting range, or further leisure destinations within daytrip range. Similarly, it works best when it extends the catchment area of an airport, rather than a service positioned to compete against point-to-point flights.
But major infrastructure projects often suffer from messy political and public relations approaches that play up the project's impressiveness and prestige in isolation, while neglecting to emphasize or champion synergistic improvements to other parts of the network. Frequent and punctual "normal-speed" rail isn't as politically energizing, and local transit networks that serve the specific transport needs of a town are hardly exciting to regional audience, but without it, high-speed rail is just an expensive showpiece that doesn't serve a genuinely identifiable transport need. This is a risk with the California HSR as much as it is with ambitious efforts to bring western Europe's successful high-speed services further into the EU's east.