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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.'"
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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
in the united states, we do not need to waste taxpayers hard earned money on useless, socialist, centralized, bureaucratic monstrosities like supersonic trains.
in america, each person is an individual, with their own car. or preferably, SUV, since cars tend to get smashed. also SUVs can go 'offroading', an enjoyable diversion that reddens the blood coursing through the veins of every freedom loving american, alone on the frontier, conquering nature for the benefit of human civilizaton.
enough of these cheese eating wine sipping communards and their piffle trains. let them all get tuberculosis in the over crowded rat cans called 'passenger cars' and wallow in their dying economy as it goes down a black hole to overspent big-government ruin and waste.
au revoir, les suckers!
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 plural of the English word "metropolis" is, indeed, "metropolises." If you want to be pretentious, the Latin plural is "metropoles," and the ancient Greek plural is "metropoleis." "Metropoli" is only used by idiots who don't know Latin but like to pretend they do, and "metropolii" is right out.
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.
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