91–100 of 140 posts
"And other countries, like India, are moving much faster toward electrification." Well a lot of countries are almost fully electric, and have been for decades?
Where? Switzerland is 100% but most of continental Europe, Japan and Korea is in the 60-70%s. Then we got USA with 0.84%
They're better for the environment. They're better for the environment. THEY'RE BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT! also.. they're less comfortable and less rider friendly than the old trains.. so if your goal is to get more people onto them you're probably going to fail.
what? the article was literally about how they are more comfortable and they are more convenient because they accelerate and break better allowing more stops without taking longer.
Seriously? The article plied on about supposed environment benefits but only leaves this _single_ sentence on rider comfort. That tells me something, that either this person is being dishonest, or the people who deploy these trains don't have a clue.
> Because the trains are now quieter both onboard and in adjacent neighborhoods, it also might mean that more people are willing to live near the tracks.
Or they're just high.
Wait a minute, aren't these tracks shared with commercial trains?
I'd be very interested to see how much of a bottleneck boarding from the lower level of these trains is, in sydney we have double deckers where you board from the middle level from high platforms[1] and the stairs are already a flow limitation in the city section, I can't imagine how bad it would be with people going up two flights of stairs
[1] here's a pic: https://railgallery.wongm.com/sydney-trains-bits/F112_6364.j...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
*Building the line* has a massive environmental impact, so they're not wrong as such. The risk of course is doing what has been done with HS2 in the UK, all the environmental damage before killing most of the project and thus no end benefit*. * Unless you count enriching your tory donors by selling them the cancelled land secretly within hours of cancelling the project.
All the reasonable alternatives pollute more long term. Nobody will accept the idea that they should become a subsistence farmer that never goes farther from home than he can walk (sexism intended).
Being from the EU for me all trains are electric (except many in Germany only) so I do not feel any special excitement but observe a thing: the idea of all wagon individually powered is ancient, very ancient, like monorails. Both ideas never get spread simply because they are too expensive instead of cheap, in practice. Electric motors are not expensive as diesel one, they are much more compact etc etc etc but are st…
>Meanwhile a larger electric locomotive it's still fast (for instance France TGV, Japan Shinkansen etc)
What are you talking about? The shinkansen doesn't have any locomotives: all the cars are powered.
>all other countries tend to scale back (while formally state the contrary).
Japan is constantly scaling up their train service. The shinkansen is usually at full capacity, or more, which is why they're busy building the new maglev line from Tokyo to Nagoya (and later Osaka). The shinkansen system is quite profitable.
I’d be interested to hear about how these trains (and others) would behave in an earthquake. I remember a work colleague who lived through the Loma Prieta going from Berkeley to San Francisco and I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. PS.: huge fan of trains and public transportation here, hopefully other places in North and South America would follow suit!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trenitalia has entered the chat. Deutsche Bahn is orders of magnitude better. One time my wife and I were taking the train from Venice to Munich and they (Trenitalia) simply forgot half the cars somewhere.
FWIW Deutsche Bahn is just one of many train operators in Germany. On my recent trip back from Köln to Berlin, I experienced a whole lot of delays in the Rhine-Ruhr region (on trains not operated by DB) and no meaningful delay on the enno, Abellio or DB Regio segments from there on.
I know but they're the only German operator I have significant experience with.
As a European, this article is outright bizarre, and makes me appreciate what we have much more. I will complain less about trains from now on.
As a European, this article is outright bizarre, and makes me appreciate what we have much more. I will complain less about trains from now on.
Same! Glad to see it wasn't just me. Trains here have been electric since 1920… EMU units have been a staple since 1990, though some routes still have locomotives of course. There is no lack of stupidity, however, at the system level. The state owns the rails and procures service from private actors who then manage the traffic more or less successfully. The booking systems are chaotic, the prices are high. It is some…
The Chicago area (where I live) is serviced by electric train lines that go back at least 100 years.
The issue that the US faces is that Americans prefer private travel and that the demographics make that hard to overcome. Our tax policy doesn’t make it easier but frankly there is no economic reason to extend our electric train infrastructure further than it exists.
[edit] that’s without mentioning that the US has the most highly developed rail infrastructure in the world. We choose to put freight on it…
