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French Train Breaks Speed Record
Josh Fink writes "A French train on the TGV line has broken the wheeled train speed record - again. At a speed of 350 miles per hour, they came close to breaking the all time record of 361 miles per hour, held by a Japanese maglev train. It was last broken back in 1990. From the article: 'The TGV, short for "train a grande vitesse," as France's bullet trains are called, is made up of three double-decker cars between two engines. It has been equipped with larger wheels than the usual TGV to cover more ground with each rotation and a stronger, 25,000-horsepower engine, said Alain Cuccaroni, in charge of the technical aspects of testing.'"
And driving's a joke.
At least someone's working on a project that's beneficial to growing metropolises (metropolii?)
France makes a train going 350mph. What does the US make as it's engineering masterpiece? The H3...
Rail done correctly is by far a better solution for high density traffic than automobiles. No parking problems, accidents, traffic conjestion, or road rage to worry about. No endless stream of internal combustion engines with associated CO2 emissions and other nastyness.
The major problem is being crammed in with a lot of other people, some of whom may not be at all polite or tolerable. Security on such trains needs to be well maintained, and probably different cars with a people density/cost tradeoff. The Dallas light rail system (DART) which opened up a few years ago started on a good note - the major problem was too many people wanting to ride it from too far out. In theory, this might be handled with running more lines in parallel as the rail system gets closer to the center of the city - it's an interesting problem. (Of course, the expense of putting a rail system through a city not designed to accomidate it is non-trivial...)
Regardless, I think the more efficient resource utilization of trains makes them a no-brainer for long term development. The US is lamentably far behind - Amtrack is stuck playing second fiddle to freight trains and has abysmal performance (I'm probably biased as I was once 17 hours late on a train...). Freight rail and passenger rail need different tracks and independent scheduling - freight can move more slowly over rougher tracks, but passenger rail needs to be rapid.
I have always wondered if a properly designed and implemented rail system across the US would be cheaper than air travel (and not all THAT much slower, for bullet trains, particularly given delays airports can introduce...) I guess it's the old bootstrap problem - no money to lay down tracks because there is no guarantee of return on investment, while air travel already has massive inertia behind it and a lot of financial clout to use on the political system.
I hope someday we can muster the political will to build a rail infrastructure the way we have built a highway infrastructure, because there may well come a time when raw materials are too expensive to make building massive car fleets and replacing them every few years economically viable. It would be nice to have a fast, inexpensive way to travel that is actually able to provide reliability.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
High speed trains are definitely a better way to go on that score.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The TGV has an equivalent impact to 1.2 gas liter/100km/passenger , which translates to 196 MPG.
It's by far the cleanest widespread transportation means around. (yes, widespread around here, I live in France and my hometown is now 1 hour away from Paris, down from 2, which is pretty cool )
Sadly, the American Dream includes owning a Home, with a yard and all that fun stuff. This means that we don't have the population densities outside of a few major metropolitan areas to support rail travel.
The other downside is that our population centers are _far_ away from each other. People from Asian or European countries just don't understand how much space lies between American cities.
The United States today does not have the economics going for rail transport that some other countries have. That is why we don't have the rail transport systems that other countries have. It doesn't make economical sense.
The moron-run Federal government won't give Amtrak enough money to improve the tracks, because it's spending it all subsidizing highways (while somehow expecting Amtrak to make a profit) instead.
Don't blame Amtrak for its inability to compete against a subsidy!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
TGV is an intercity train, so in reality the concept of a train station is not really that different from an airport. The big advantage that train stations have is that they take up much less space and there are usually train lines that run into the center of most cities. I'd much rather take a train from city center to city center than make my way to a sprawling airport on the outskirts (probably on a commuter train... oh, the irony).
How many people have been to the moon? Fewer than a dozen?. Anyone can ride a fast train in France. Who's wasting money?
I'll leave the 'blasting money into space' retort for someone else...I'm partial to the space program even though the ISS is the Ford Pinto of space projects...
However, a good high speed train would be great down here. LA to bay area...to Vegas... Holy crap, LA - Vegas train like that? Would pay for itself in probably 2 years. More practical than a plane, and more comfortable than a bus, and hella safer than dealing with the nutters on I-15.
Much more useful to have something like that in the US than another Hummer model, at the very least.
And I don't think the financial situation in the US as a nation is on solid enough ground that you can infer to it as better, even to France, but that's just an opinion.
Our rail system is a joke. Worse than a joke. It's not notable enough to use as a punchline.
...the US put men on the Moon and developed the Shuttle. The French have fast trains. Whoopee Dooo.Yes the French have fast trains. They run almost everywhere. Not only are they fast, they are clean, quiet, comfortable, reasonably priced, on time, and have excellent beverage service. This includes all of the SNCF, not just the TGV. An added benefit is that the French are extremely polite about cell phone usage on the trains.
I am certain far more Americans have ridden on French trains than have ever ridden on Apollo or the Shuttle, and probably fewer have been killed.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Lovely.
The problem with passenger rail transport is it's very difficult to run it at a profit - especially if the infrastructure isn't there to begin with. Getting people out of cars and onto trains is much harder than the other way around. So it's not particularly attractive to private companies.
This is a problem in any country which has historically shied away from having the government run services.
I think the other issue is that competing modes of transportation get a lot of their infrastructure handed to them, basically for free or with big subsidies, by the Federal government.
If you're a bus company, you don't have to pay to use the roads, the government has already done all the hard work for you. You just drive on them. Same with over-the-road cargo trucking. This is a huge problem for freight railroads, who would otherwise beat the tar out of road trucking: except for UPS and other time-sensitive parcel-deliveries, there's really no reason to haul bulk goods by truck, when you can take the same containers even, and put them on a train and drag them around for a fraction of the fuel cost. But the freight railroads also have to pay, not only for their locomotives and rolling stock, but also for the right-of-ways, maintenance on the track, keeping them clear during the winter, etc. All the trucking industry pays for is whatever the government adds on as a tax to diesel fuel, plus their direct taxes. (And the fuel taxes don't even start to cover the budget for the Interstate system, which is hugely damaged each year by high-axle-weight vehicles like trucks.)
With aircraft, although they admittedly don't require a huge amount of infrastructure when they're in the air (and good thing, too), things like the navigational beacon systems that IFR relies on, plus the Air Traffic Control system/network, are government-run. Sure, some of it's funded with taxes, but I'll bet you it's not 100% self-funding.
I think we can go either way -- either have the government pick up the tab for maintaining the nation's rail network, and make it available to anyone who wants to use it, in the same way that the Interstate highway system and the Air Traffic Control network is, or make users of the ATC network and the Interstate highways pay for their entire budgets so that they're self-funding without any support (and have them pay back over time the cost already contributed) -- but we're only hurting ourselves with the current arrangement. Anything that encourages an inefficiency to continue is inherently bad, and we suffer as a result of it due to higher gas prices, and geopolitical conflicts that arise due to petroleum supplies.
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I'm wondering how long Americans will ride along on things their parents did in the last century. Are we going to be like the French a hundred years from now? Still rich, but on the larger scale irrelevent, talking about how great we were back then?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
At least someone's working on a project that's beneficial to growing metropolises (metropolii?)
France makes a train going 350mph. What does the US make as it's engineering masterpiece? The H3... This is useless for intra-city travel. The only stretches of track that are going to be capable of carrying trains like this are long ones between major cities with no intermediary stops, not to mention the amount of distance you need to get up to speed and slow down. This will be used for Paris-Marseille and nothing shorter. In most cases, these high-speed trains cannot even utilize the same track as the medium and short range trains; they have to build a completely separate infrastructure to support the TGV, ICE, or what have you. Basically, they are targeting the market space currently occupied by short distance airlines, with business travelers as their primary target audience.
That is actually a major problem across western Europe right now. Train companies are slowly abandoning medium and short range stretches in favor of the more lucrative business traveler market, and investment in the medium and short range track and trains is languishing, resulting in deteriorating quality and frequency of service. As such, people are forced from the trains to private cars, which bring all the problems of pollution and urban sprawl that we Americans know so well. Furthermore, at these speeds trains do not run much more energy efficiently than planes either.
That is what happens when you privatize things that should be public services.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Both Switzerland Germany have a very extensive rail service that makes a profit.
...
It can be done, but clearly it won't work if it's not done right.
Think about it, a train from LA to San Diego / North California, no need to stay in traffic for hours, save on gas, save on car maintenance, save on traffic accidents, save on nerves getting stretched while waiting in traffic,
It makes so much sense, what doesn't make sense is the american people's love for traffic.
The whole argument of population density here in the States is a load of sheep. The United States has roughly the same land area as China, and likewise, has a majority of high population density tilted on the East coast.
When I was in Shanghai, a maglev train from Pudong airport to our ex-pat section was roughly 15 miles and cost around $5, traveling about 450 Km/H (250 mph). With 20 million+ people in Shanghai, there's no reason this cannot be done similarly in New York, LA, or Chicago. Imagine a $60 trip (or less) from Boston to New York. Better yet, at $5/mile, a straight shot from Dallas to Houston is around 250 miles (about 50 miles more distance). I was around when they were still expanding the I-45 corridor from Dallas to Houston (it helped provide an economic boom between the two). In 2005 alone, our Texas highway systems accounted for over 100 billion into our overall economy (feeder roads, tractor-trailer delivery, exports, new construction, efficiency, etc). Think about long hauling regular cargo over this rail instead. Also, all you Texans out there imagine a 250 mph rail from Dallas to Houston for a commute. It's normally a 4 to 5 hour trip. Now, with maybe 3 to 5 total stops, it would only be an hour and a half or so (which somedays, believe it or not, takes almost that much time for just a traffic commute of 20 miles from one end of Dallas to the other). In a capitalist country, we could easily drop that $5/mile cost even further.
The article mentions China is interested because they will replace the 10 hour train ride from Shanghai to Beijing. I've taken that trip as well. It was a non stop overnighter on a "old" style bunk cab that cut through several small rural cities (much like we have here between major cities in the States). I thoroughly enjoyed that ride, since it was quite nostalgic and peaceful (except for the smoke filled cabs, squeezing past people sleeping in chairs in the aisles, and a hole in the floor for a shitter). The Pudong maglev was pure luxury, and at 250 mph was so smooth I could drink a cup of tea without spilling a drop. You do get something like a sonic boom vibration when the other maglev passes the opposite direction as yours.
Either way, for all you Americans who buy into this notion that it's not reasonable or economical to implement high speed rails here (or use some population density as an excuse), well, quite simply, from the mouth of a native proud Texan, that dog just don't hunt. There is ripe economic potential to be had from these high speed rail interconnects, much like the I-45 corridor provided here over the last 30 or so years. The rest of the world makes us look second rate. And that's quite hard for this 'ole boy to swallow. I think in part we subsidize the airlines way too much here. In over 30 years, we've already floated the note for several and some still can't get their crap together. We need desperately to make a gradual transition away from our reliance on airlines. High speed rail is the answer, and is already proven worldwide to be quite economical and beneficial in so many ways.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
you can keep your smelly, loud, packed, expensive, long and dangerous train ride, thanks!
Ah, never been on a real train I see.
Something like the shinkansen is far more pleasant and convenient to ride than a typical plane (especially these days). Due to the speed difference, the plane is probably a better bet for LA-NYC, but for any kind of medium distance travel (e.g. up/down the coast, NYC-Philly-Chicago), I'd kill for a US system like the shinkansen/TGV.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Nice numbers... here's some others.
Florence, Italy -> Rome, Italy: 275km
Houston, TX, USA -> Austin, TX, USA: 162miles (260km)
Everybody who keeps comparing the EU to the USA and saying how cities in Europe are so much closer are only thinking about things like LA to SF, or even from either of those to New York. Nobody in Europe is going to take a train to get from Oslo to Lisboa either (well, some people do - just as some in the U.S. take roadtrips from coast to coast).