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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.'"
a stronger, 25,000-horsepower engine
25000hp and most of it is used to push air in front of, and around the train. I wonder how much it would cost to build a vaccuum tunnel to run very high speed train in at a fraction of the power required by the TGV...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I watched it this morning, and right around 1:35, there's a shot of the train passing under a bridge. It was really difficult for me to comprehend just how fast 350MPH is until I saw this particular shot. Man, that thing is fast!
So apparently maglev has little or no speed advantage over old-fashioned wheeled trains. I assume there's still an energy savings, but currently that doesn't seem to outweigh the extra cost of maglev infrastructure. Perhaps when energy costs rise a tad more...
One little detail has me curious: TGVs, though electric, still use locomotives to push and/or pull the train, a design feature that's been around since the first steam trains in 1833. I seem to recall "futurists" like Arthur Clarke claiming that the train of the future would use lots of small motors connected to each wheel instead of one big one in a locomotive. Not practical?
A passenger jet, supposedly, harms the environment as much per passenger, as five passenger cars would over the same distance — if you ignore the impact of building and maintaining the roads.
What's the impact of these trains — including the building and maintaining of the suitable tracks?
One must also note, that the overall (door-to-door) speed advantage, these machines seem to have over airplanes at short and medium distances, is due to the much simpler security/registration procedures, the passengers have to go through to board them. It is not the technology, that requires us to come to the airport 2 hours prior to departure...
What upsets me, is that American "Acela" train can also run pretty fast (even if not as fast as these bullet-trains) — but is not, because the tracks aren't suitable for higher speeds. The moron-run Amtrak has purchased these wonder-trains without improving the tracks, so most of the speed you buy on Acela is due to it simply making less stops between, say, New York and Boston, rather than due to it running appreciably faster.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What an amazing train. When I see things like this, or ride the EuroRail or any trains in Japan, and I think of the train system in the US, I become so deeply saddened.
For anyone that hasn't rode trains in the US, I'll sum it up for you. They are a joke. Amtrak is a joke. They cannot get it together to create a train infrastructure that works efficiently and affordably. Most of them barely go faster than 55 MILES per hour. That's right, miles. There is little in the way of luxury or services with some exception and for a high price. There are some new trains coming on line in some areas, but in general they are worse than they were 100 years ago.
You might ask, "What about all those old movies I've seen with people traveling in elegant dining cars and trips on sleeping cars"? We did have more train routes in the past. There were also lots of light rail cars, electric and horse drawn before those. 'El' lines along with subways. We had elegant train stations (old Pennsylvania Station, NYC, demolished in the 60's for the new Madison Square Garden, &c.). The truth is most of these train lines were purchased by subsidiary companies of GM (General Motors) and the oil industry. They systematically dismantled them. Local routes were replaced by buses. Basically they encouraged the movement of every american to purchase their own automobile. At least one. Peoples experience with the public transportation would become frustrating enough that they would simply not want to deal with it. Those lines that were not completely converted to buses (Amtrak), have been intentionally mismanaged to the point that they are completely incompetent.
I would love to see the USA join the rest of the modern world with an intelligent approach to transportation, instead of building more highways, but it doesn't appear to be coming down the 'pike.
Believe it.
Actually, the stratosphere is the very best place to dump water vapor, because it reflects sunlight, absorbs UV, and occasionally even becomes large cloud formations.
The planet got measurably hotter during the days immediately following 09/11, when all of America's airliners were grounded.
Also, you seem to be forgetting that electric trains still create air pollution; they just eject their pollution out of the nearest powerplant.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
That's totally untrue, if you're just a bit careful. Last years, I used to take the train a lot (like 700 kms at least during the week). I did not experienced 8 hours of waiting the trains ! When I went to week end (in a small town in the north east of France) from Paris, it was taking me 4hours45, from my workplace to my home. (4 hours of train, 20 min of metro and 10 min of car, plus 15 min as an insurance) Now, with the TGV, it will take me 1h30 less. That's awesome. To add to this, you have to make a reservation to be able to use the TGV, meaning that apart from being willing to wait a long time or being really unlucky, you don't have to wait a lot, since you know exactly the departure hour and since there are no security checkpoints in stations.
The TGV isn't a commuter train. It's point-to-point transportation. We don't really have anything that's quite its equivalent here in the U.S. (anymore -- we did, once, back in the days of effective passenger rail and high-speed inter-urbans) because Amtrak is so fucked up. But you wouldn't be using this to get in and out of the city center to the 'burbs every day; you'd go into the city to get on one, to go to another city.
The infrastructure you'd need around a major intercity train station in the U.S. would be basically the same stuff you need around an airport; lots and lots of parking for people to leave their cars, access to local transportation, etc. The advantage of trains over planes, however, is that you can put the stations right downtown, hopefully maximizing the number of people who can get there without driving, by using existing public transportation, and also minimizing travel time for people who want to get to the city center as a destination.
About the only place in the U.S. where you can approximate this right now, is in the Northeast Corridor, going from say Washington, DC to New York. If you want to fly, you have to get from downtown DC out to one of the airports: if you're lucky, Reagan (practically downtown), if you're unlucky or flying on a discount airline, Dulles or BWI. Then you have to go through the usual security checkpoint rectal-probery, find the gate, board the plane, fly, get off the plane, find your luggage, and get to downtown NYC from JFK or LaGuardia. Total PITA. Amtrak, when it's not running late (granted, almost never), lets you walk into Union Station in downtown DC, walk onto the train, sit down for a few hours, and walk off at Penn Station. Platform to platform, the Acela is about three hours, and it's slower than molasses compared to the European trains.
Now, really the only reason that the Acela is borderline competitive, is because the airlines and the FAA seem to be trying as hard as possible to make the flying experience like getting in a boxcar bound for Auschwicz (but without the efficiency, and probably more lost luggage). If you got rid of all the security checkpoints and just compare travel time, the Acela barely scrapes 100MPH on most days (which is actually slower than the big 8'-driver steam passenger locomotives of a generation ago were capable of), so a jet going 400-500 MPH is obviously going to be faster. But if you can push the train up to 300+MPH, and realize that the airplane is always going to have more "overhead time" because of the distance you have to put airports from cities (to keep them from running into the buildings, noise, etc.), they become a lot more competitive.
Commuter trains are always going to be hobbled by low population density. However, high-speed inter-urban trains operate according to much the same business principles that airlines do. They just need to be much more careful in laying out their routes, because unlike airlines, it's tougher for them to just re-jigger flights when they're not making money. However, there are a number of routes that are probably almost guaranteed to be profitable in the U.S. if you can get the times down to within 100-150% of a plane flight: LA to San Francisco (and then SF to Seattle) is probably a good one on the West Coast, and maybe even LA to Las Vegas. The Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC corridor is already profitable with current technology, and would only get better. Extending it down to Atlanta would complete the "BAMA" corridor, and you could hit the high-tech areas in NC along the way, probably.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We need an underground transport system, that works like IP packets.
You sit in a little metal pod in your house, and are accelerated into the main "backbone". Bluetooth/RFID/something that broadcasts your final destination enables the "routers" to switch your travel onto the routes that get you to where you're going.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Easy: Toll the bloody bejeezus out of the freeways between good train routes. Truckers get a discount.
Also, are airlines really running a profit right now? Maybe Southwest, but oy...I just don't like them...
Plus I think if it was marketed properly, to the jetsetters in a local region, it could really pay off.
Who wants to spend 5 hours driving or waiting in an airport through delays and the security? Take the train. Gets you there just as fast and you won't lose your luggage, be hassled by an apathetic TSA lacky or lose your rental deposit.
Yea, I'm pipe dreaming here, but it makes logical sense...which, of course, is why it'll never happen.
OK, here are few fact about the TGV:
1) It's electric. It does not run on fuel. 76% (IIRC) of the electricity produced in France being nuclear, this did not burn fuel to produce either (although nuclear power has its drawbacks as well that I won't comment on)
2) Nobody has ever been killed in a TGV. At most a few minor injuries. The way the cars are linked on a TGV makes it pretty resistant to twisting. When the first cars come out, they can't fall on their side because the ones still on the rails hold them (at least that's what I understood). The few times such a train has derailed showed what happens: the first cars just get out of the rails.
The tracks themselves (and that's the expensive part) are a dedicated system with
- No roads crossing them (every road goes over or under the rails)
- No access (most of them have barriers around to prevent people and animals from going on the track)
- Specific limits on the bend radius
- An electronic signaling system that sends the maximum attainable speed to the train for each portion
That makes it pretty fast and secure indeed (although it has its price).
On the application to the US, you have to take certain thing into account. The longest TGV track in France must be about 500 miles (Paris to Marseille).
In the US, I'm not sure what distances would have to be spanned, but remember that it's ELECTRIC. You need to be able to line those electric cables reliably from end to end.
France does not enjoy the same kind of weather as the US. There is no hurricane and the minimum temperature is usually quite higher than in the US.
France enjoyed (and still does) a state monopoly on the rail, Just as with the Telecoms, this brought a very good infrastructure (no need to be profitable, so let's spend !), and a very shitty consumer service (you would not believe what French people put up with from the guy handling their requests...)
Getting such an infrastructure, especially in the states where it would need to be massive, would have a prohibitive cost. And getting it slowly is not really an option. You need lots of tracks to be meaningful and have a chance to become profitable.
I'm not sure it would work in the US. Then again, it might, who knows.
That's not a nick, that's my NAME.
Actually, in France, there are three steps to taking a TGV:
1) You buy your ticket.
2) You get your ticket stamped (in an automatic machine).
3) You board the train.
It's that easy because some joker with a bomb in a TGV wouldn't do any more damage than, for example, some joker with a bomb in any other crowded area. In planes, it's different, because a relatively small amount of damage will cause the plane to fall from on high, killing everybody.
Also, it is generally impossible to hijack TGVs and crash them into major buildings.
Le français vous intéresse?
For a few months now, smoking is banned in most public places in France. Bars and restaurants have a grace period until 2008, when they too will not legally be able to allow smoking. Believe it or not, the French seem to be respecting the new restriction, for the most part.