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.'"

Comments

Physics is a bitch isn't it

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Re:Physics is a bitch isn't it

[Kranfer]

I saw something on ITunes... Maybe Extreme Engineering or Modern Marvels or something along those lines having to do with that for a tunnel going between NYC and London... Vacuum sealed and mag lev. They said the train could travel at close to 5000 mph IIRC... Its a very interesting idea. The episode is worth purchasing on ITunes.

Re:Physics is a bitch isn't it

[Rei]

I'd sure want to ride it. Having traveled around Japan by train for three weeks, I've grown quite fond of rail travel. It's a nice way to get around. Especially those Shinkansen. Picture your typical airplane trip: you drive a good distance to the airport, drive around in it for a bit, get to some overpriced pay parking, check your baggage, go through security, wait (and hope you didn't miss your flight, because you'd have to reschedule because they're so infrequent), board, wait, taxi, wait, takeoff... now you can finally relax and use electronics in your cramped seat with the loud engines roaring. You land, wait, taxi, wait.. and if you have to change planes, repeat. And so on.

Here's how a shinkansen ride with a rail pass goes in Japan. You take a subway straight to the train station. You walk a very short distance. The trains arrive every few minutes. No security checkpoints -- you just wave your pass as you walk past the counter. You take any seat; they're all the equivalent of an airplane's business-class, or better. Use your electronics right away if you want. It pulls out of the station and accelerates quickly, quitely. You even get the pretty countryside scrolling right past you as you go. What's not to like?

Oh, and to the people (further down) who suggested that the trains would cause "smoke" -- at least in Japan, the bullet trains (and almost all trains, except those in very remote places) are electric -- "densha" (electric-car). Electric trains are so prevalent that even the few non-electric trains are still called densha.

Re:Physics is a bitch isn't it

[Coryoth]

I'll put in another vote for the desirability of high speed rail. You do need a fairly densely populated rail corridor to really make it really worthwhile, but the east coast of the US would/should qualify. I'm now living in Canada and would kill for rail service through Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal that is even comparable to the "limited express" service in Japan (which still rattles along at a healthy 120-180kph). The passenger rail service here is terrible -- the tracks are owned by the freight rail company so you end up with the already far too slow passenger trains having to pull off for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to let freight trains past. You should be able to do Toronto to Montreal in about 2 hours with high speed trains, and even less time for Toronto to Ottawa. Instead the scheduled times take over 4 hours, and the trains are consistently anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour late. In all my travelling in Japan by rail I have once seen a train that was late, with the board announcing it would be arriving precisely 3 minutes behind schedule (which it duly did). The rest of the time you can (and in fact I did) set your watch by when the train pulls away from the station. I loved rail in Japan -- it was simple, efficient, comfortable, and took you city centre to city centre. I wish we had anything even vaguely comparable in North America.

Re:Physics is a bitch isn't it

[Coryoth]

Yeah, if all out population in the US was situated with very high density in an almost straight line, rail would be an option.
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. While it is true that overall the US population is spread over a very large area, there are certainly regions of the US that are sufficiently densely populated that a rail system would be reasonable. In particular there is the east coast, particularly the Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Baltimore corridor. It is sufficiently dense that they already technically have a "high speed train" there -- its just that they never upgraded the tracks for it, so the train doesn't actually go very fast, and the service is poor and always late. If The US and Canada could cooperate there's also a good potential corridor along Chicago/Detroit/Toronto/Montreal/Quebec.

Re:Physics is a bitch isn't it

[init100]

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.

I do (I'm Swedish). I once visited California, and going there was an interesting experience. We changed planes in New York. The travel time to New York from Sweden was about eight hours, which isn't so strange, as the Atlantic is a large ocean. The interesting part was flying to San Francisco, which took six hours. In other words, we had only got about half the way when we arrived in New York.

From that experience, I'd say that the main problem in covering the entire US with a HS rail network are the vast expanses of (comparably unpopulated) land in the Rocky Mountains and surrounding area. After taking off from New York, We reached the Detroit area after less than one hour IIRC, and Chicago less than one hour after that. But then, there were a lot of nothingness, first an endless grid of farms, and then mountains and desert in the rockies before finally reaching California.

California could probably have a HS rail network, and so could the east coast. But the land in between is probably too large to hope for a HS rail network anytime soon. Maybe if/when the costs of maglev go down it could be done, but before that I don't think so. Besides, I don't think people would be willing to spend 24 hours on a high-speed (250 km/h, about 150 mph) run from coast to coast. A speed of 500 km/h (300 mph), cutting the trip to 12 hours, would be more tolerable.

Watch the Video

[StaticEngine]

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!

What's the environmental impact of these machines?

[mi]

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.

USA Trains: Sad State of Affairs

[CranberryKing]

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.

Not for commuting.

[Kadin2048]

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.