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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.'"
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
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 )
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.
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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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.
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