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The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

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Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#71
post #2

The real *ways (not just rails, also roads) issue is one: evolution. We start a project a day, with a certain set of needs and desires. The project takes time to be complete, let's say 10-15-20 years, at the end some parts of the network are still useful and valuable many others are not. Change them is hard, demand again more time, once done (IF done) we end up in the similar departure scenario. Society does not chan…

Why would we privilege air and water transports when they're the hardest ones to electrify by far? We're in a climate emergency, and should be doing the opposite.

Every time you read general emergency "no time left", TINA, you read "someone want to impose something with an excuse". Yes climate change and that's a disaster, NOTHING we will right now will have ANY significant effect in less than 100+ years and the Green New Deal have nothing to do with the environment preservation, at least for the public and advertised parts.

Air and water means flexibility, when the climate change migration happen, flood happen, permafrost melt etc so we need something that can evolve as needed depending on the kind of change, so far only air and water can. Railroads roads can't be moved quickly nor can't evolve in general beside the fact that in environmental terms are no more friendly than a plane, despite what's advertised.

Similar cities can't adapt, especially dense one, we need spread people avoiding being too spread to have still economy of scale and social proximity.

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#72
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would love the UK. Many cities have steam railroads of similar gauge in public parks. They are also run by clubs of old men, but offer rides to kids all day on the weekend instead of hiding out in the hills!

I hasten to add I'm not a train spotter (that's what you call them over there, right?) I don't have a model train of any gauge.

Trainspotting is like birding for trains. You keep track of which engines and rolling stock you’ve seen, go on trips to see new engines etc.

So it’s a different type of train nerd from railroad modelling.

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#73
post #52
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Agreed for the most part, though I think a startup could overcome the break-of-gauge limitations pretty fast with moderate investment (and less red tape). 2. There are multiple different ways of handling BofG; the holdup is just deploying it effectively. 3. For loading gauge, using EU grain hauling stock with variable gauge (or swapped) bogies would be ideal - this avoids issues with larger cars and heavier axle l…

Just make a startup to fix it is classic HN. Six generations of hackers have been working on the problem of track gauge, but it’s obviously going to be solved with a few million in VC funding. On the last point, some gauges are too close to run dual gauge tracks well. It’s great when you can just add a third rail, but European and Soviet standards are too close and need four rails to run on the same track.

[deleted]

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#74

One clear benefit of ensuring disparity of rail systems across adjacent countries is protection from an impromptu invasion. IIRC for some countries during the WWs, that was a main reason for the differences and was in fact effective. I wonder if the rail systems difference helped avoid Russia using the rail system for the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine have the same gauge. The reason the railroads weren't used to invade is because Ukraine managed to damage the connecting infrastructure enough. Turns out that railroads are a lot better defensively than offensively, in an era of widespread drone usage.

Not sure how drones are related – denying rail use from an advancing enemy has always been easy. A destroyed railroad bridge cannot be replaced with a temporary ponton bridge, for one.

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#75

My suggestion is that we build a dedicated freight network of Soviet gauge and SA3 couplers and leave the existing network for passengers. We're only going to need more capacity for climate-friendly transportation of both passengers and freight, and stronger tracks and couplers for heavier trains is going to help with efficiency of the latter.

The EU already has a project to introduce a replacement for the screw couplings used in EU rail freight today, the Digital automatic coupling (DAC). The "digital" part AFAICT comes from the ability to also connect air (for pneumatic brakes) and data cablings, not only mechanical.

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#76
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we privilege air and water transports when they're the hardest ones to electrify by far? We're in a climate emergency, and should be doing the opposite.

Every time you read general emergency "no time left", TINA, you read "someone want to impose something with an excuse". Yes climate change and that's a disaster, NOTHING we will right now will have ANY significant effect in less than 100+ years and the Green New Deal have nothing to do with the environment preservation, at least for the public and advertised parts. Air and water means flexibility, when the climate ch…

> NOTHING we will right now will have ANY significant effect in less than 100+ years

Where are you getting this from? Some people are estimating the lag to the maximum effect as low as ~10 years [1], with the popular consensus being ~30 years until the peak effects are reached (so probably a lot less time needed for any significant effects to be felt). If the 100+ years were true, it's very unlikely we'd be able to measure any large effects from emissions from 100+ years ago, while the average temperature have increased by 1°C [2]. In that time cumulative emissions have increased 16-fold (1920: 100 bT, 2020: 1.6 tT) so we'd be fucked without any recourse if that were true.

That seems to be a sorry excuse to just say "fuck it, we'll just have to adapt when the time comes"

The broad scientific consensus (ipcc) is that just continuing on like we do right now will have significant detrimental effects on humanity and that actions taking today can stop global warming by ~2040 [5].

> beside the fact that in environmental terms are no more friendly than a plane

Where are you getting this from? Or are you conflating environmental impact in general and global warming impact specifically for this argument? (Which I'd also not agree with, but that's a different point).

And why would cities be less able to adapt? They seem to be better suited for adapting, with more indoor spaces and less energy & resource usage. Due to the concentrated nature a lot less area has to be adapted for climate change effects (and there certainly are cities that won't exist, primarily due to sea level rise, but that's also the case for non-cities).

Air travel especially suffers from noise & pollution (not the co2 kind) concerns, which is (at least in europe) stopping many airports from expanding. It's also very limited in capacity.

Water has great capacity, but can only use few fixed waterways, with most inland waterways requiring a significant amount of human intervention to make them suitable. Why would a ship be more flexible in travel & destination than a railroad or trucks?

I also disagree with your hypothesis about the needed flexibility on most infrastructure projects in regards to time. Most railways & highways are by now more than 40 years old (with railways usually being much older) and very few parts have been deemed useless (at least in germany), because human development is pretty fixed in place, with most population centers 40 years age still having at least a significant population now. Usually the worst issue is that capacity is quickly reached in just a few years, but that's more of a nice problem to have.

Climate change will have effects on human living, but if we let it get so extreme that formerly unlivable places in the north become very livable while those built up areas that are currently used by humans become unlivable, I doubt a functional global or large distance transport network will be available or even necessary on a larger scale.

And regarding the Green New Deal: Recommendations from it[3] seems to outline needed actions for emissions cuts and approaches for mitigating climate change[4] in the near term pretty well.

[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/12/12... [2]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal#Green_New_Deal_... [4]: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/AR5_SYR_FINA... P. 27 [5]: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... P 15, P 18

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Variable-gauge trains are things we can build, and as a matter of fact there are a bunch of them crossing the French-Spanish border every day. The high speed lines are all standard gauge in both countries. At the crossing between Puigcerdà and La Tour de Carol the Catalan regional train goes one stop into France on an Iberian gauge line which ends there (English Wikipedia needs to be updated to reflect this). At th…

> The high speed lines are all standard gauge in both countries. This is not what I was referring to. Variable gauge (Talgo) trains go through gauge changers at the border without going to the high speed Spanish lines. This has been done since 1969, and that’s how you can have a single train going from Barcelona to Montpellier (and then Geneva, back in the day). It really is not rocket science and has been done for 6…

Can you please provide a train number that goes from BCN to Montpellier that isn't an SNCF TGV Euroduplex?

I have been on an Intercités de Nuit from Paris to BCN (Estació de França), going through the gauge changing building at Portbou. Alas, that service was deleted when the TGV became homologated for cross-border service around 2013, and AFAIK there is no further passenger traffic which uses it.

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#78
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Variable-gauge trains are things we can build, and as a matter of fact there are a bunch of them crossing the French-Spanish border every day. The high speed lines are all standard gauge in both countries. At the crossing between Puigcerdà and La Tour de Carol the Catalan regional train goes one stop into France on an Iberian gauge line which ends there (English Wikipedia needs to be updated to reflect this). At th…

Renfe also operates some variable gauge trains on the high speed network that radiate out into the Iberian gauge lines to serve smaller cities. That said I don’t believe any cross the border to France.

Why would they put slow trains on the high speed line? That sounds like a great way to make the AVE suck.

Re: The fragmented nature of modern-day railways

#80
post #76
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time you read general emergency "no time left", TINA, you read "someone want to impose something with an excuse". Yes climate change and that's a disaster, NOTHING we will right now will have ANY significant effect in less than 100+ years and the Green New Deal have nothing to do with the environment preservation, at least for the public and advertised parts. Air and water means flexibility, when the climate ch…

> NOTHING we will right now will have ANY significant effect in less than 100+ years Where are you getting this from? Some people are estimating the lag to the maximum effect as low as ~10 years [1], with the popular consensus being ~30 years until the peak effects are reached (so probably a lot less time needed for any significant effects to be felt). If the 100+ years were true, it's very unlikely we'd be able to m…

My sources are simple human observation, there is no need from propaganda and so verbose reports to be simply unreadable AND unread by essentially any humans who generally prefer trusting some executive summary written by some PR instead...

I observed a significant climate change during my life WITHOUT a significant changes of similar entity in human emissions, the simplest conclusion here is that the antropic part of responsibility is not "for current emissions" but for at least a century of emissions and even if we rush now we equally see results in a century. Gaming about "mean temperature" etc is simply a meaningless game sold as science. Not only: Green New Deal proposals completely miss the industry part, all concentrated in pushing modern homes and EVs without saying how we can produce them from renewables how we can recycle them. Try all McKinsey propaganda (sold as "study" in general) and you'll see ONLY "results" return values of functions without their source code.

Where did you see infos on how we can source "green lithium"? Where you see how we can produce solar panels or recycle them with energy from solar, wind and hydro? Where you you see how we can produce inverters? There is exactly NOTHING public. Only pictures of "smart cities", EVs etc in a rendered landscape, how to arrive there is opaque at best. Just for instance try see the Toyota advertisement for it's own PRIVATE smart-city they are actually built on mount Fiji: https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/34827717.html and https://youtu.be/p-9X8Z2kJt8 now try to see an actual implementation like https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/why-greeces-ex... did you stop an instance to reason about how can be such cities built? What you imaging? A plan to create a New New York aside the original one? A plan to destroy and rebuilt, since that's technically needed, tall buildings of existing cities to rebuild them with modern concepts? If so: where and how you source raw materials for such immense task? With what energy and tech? Not only: how many decades will likely be needed for such IMMENSE rebuild? Once hypothetically done how old is the original design at that point? Also what we can do to apply such monster change to countries like India, Indonesia etc?

If you think we can get for 2030 such McKinsey scenarios: https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... you are just swallow dreams and propaganda without thinking on scale. We might be able to build such vehicles, probably, how many? To serve then how many people? 1% of actual western population? The 99% of the rest and all the rest of the world?

There is no grass-green in the Green new deal, the green color is the stereotypical color of chemical wastes going out of rusty abandoned barrels and dollar-green for some.

- IF it can be realized it demand few orders of magnitude today's emissions for few decades in the most optimistic scenario, IF of course we have such tremendous amount of natural resources;

- IF we try to apply such scenarios on scale NO ONE of them can ever work for more than few thousand people in the entire planet.

So, or the green new deal is a desperate gamble to save the human spice, planning a HYPER-big genocide mr. adolf from Austria-Germany would be scared of since it's something he can't even imaging in his most crazy dreams or nightmares, with anyway very little chances to be realized simply because the big mass of humans planned for extermination will not agree with that plan and in any case once realized we simply can't sustain it or it's just an excuse to push social changes thanks to emergency excuses.

Said that, ships and planes can go anywhere on water or air to a certain range. So if today we need to move let's say grains from black see to middle-east we can move them with the same ship that few months after can move other grains from Brazil to China, we need harbors and local infra of course ships does not born out of the see, like the green new deal above, but they are flexible. Similar thing is for planes. Let's take the arctic as an example: with global heating is now a frontier, unfortunately the land part of the region is melting permafrost, witch means we can't build more than small buildings, no roads, no rails etc. Airplanes and ships however can go there almost issueless, and they actually do so also now. Did you see recent images of Yellowstone flood with a demolished road in many place? Well. To rebuild this road they will need at least one year and seen the actual flood and likeliness of another one various part of it should be moved with enormous efforts. How can you go there now? Well, just take a chopper and there you go. That's why in a climate changing world no one know exactly how and when things changes to significant enough extents we simply can't relay on fixed infra on large scale. That's why we can't even in ecological terms start to build massive new roads and rails network with the immense amount of resources they demand.

Cities can't adapt simply because there is no room to evolve them. Did you ever tried to compute how many raw material you need to build let's say 100 individual homes, nowadays typically wood frame + glass wool + some implants and equipment vs a 100 apartments building? Try to compute.

Individual homes demand far more land, so land owners are not happy: they can sell a handkerchief of land for big money to build a skyscraper, they can't do the same for few single-family homes but a single-family home on the ground does not destroy soil humus, it's relatively recyclable and can be upgraded and rebuilt once in a while. So far NO PLANS exists essentially for any tall building for when their concrete became simply too old to stay up. An individual home can easily add a small geothermal heat pump, solar, ... it's a small job easy enough. A tall building can't. Beside that why build such big stuff? For what purpose? A hospital certainly need space, a factory idem, but homes? Did you just try to compute how much resources a metro demand? How it must be inefficient because to serve people you need good coverage but in most cases trains will go nearly empty?

Instead of reading executive summaries and recommendation try the math yourself.

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