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ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

deutschebahn.com

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Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#71

Post by detaro »

prmoustache wrote: post #61
microtonal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West European rail is very full, so rail use is carefully coordinated, since trains of vastly different speeds (e.g. ICE vs a regional train) use the same tracks. If an ICE is, say, 15 minutes late, they cannot just drive faster to catch up. The schedule went on, and at that point there may be a much slower regional or intercity train on the same trajectory. This is why ICE delays tend to cascade. It starts with a sh…

If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. Most time I got annoying delays when I was living in Switzerland was because of a "personal accident" which 99% of the time meant someone had deliberately jumped in front of a train.

It of course happens in other places too, but the Swiss are somewhat standout in how much they have their other operations in order. It's funny in a sad way that international connections into Switzerland actually get limited because the Swiss don't want other operators fucking up their internal schedule constantly.

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#72

Post by lqet »

fjfaase wrote: post #8

I fear that the general public in Germany will not be praising this achievement. The once efficient and punctional trains in Germany have deteriorated severely in the past years due to lots of delayed maintenance causing lots of delays and even regular cancelations of trains. Also the road infrastructure is suffering from delayed maintenance.

> The once efficient and punctional trains in Germany have deteriorated severely in the past years due to lots of delayed maintenance causing lots of delays and even regular cancelations of trains.

The main cause (often somewhat hidden behind the term "decayed infrastructure") is that there are too many trains on too few tracks. There are many reasons for that. I think the main ones are:

* Political pressure to have more trains, without an adequate increase in infrastructure capacity (trains are cheaper than tracks and can be delivered faster). For example, political pressure utterly destroyed the reliability of the local rail system in our area, because the number of trains per hour was increased by a factor of 2-3, with only a minimal amount of new tracks (the majority of the network is still single-track). Apparently, the system worked in simulations under near-perfect conditions (no delays, few passengers, no technical problems). So let's build it! The chaos that ensued during the first few months after the network opened again made national headlines. Another example: the highly overloaded Rhine valley line between Mannheim and Basel was proposed to be upgraded to 4 tracks in 1964. In 1970, the project was scheduled to be finished in 1985. Currently the (ambitious) goal is to finish the project in 2041 [0]. The original line (270 km) was finished after 17 years in the 1840ies.

* On regional and local lines, a tendency to increase train frequency and to decrease train capacity (more trains, but shorter ones). I suspect this is also because of political pressure ("your station now has 4 trains per hour!!"), but it doesn't make any sense. A short train which can hold 150 passengers occupies exactly the same amount of "space" (blocks) on the tracks as a full-length train with a capacity of 1,200 passengers, and they require exactly the same amount of personnel.

* Privatization of DB on the early 90ies, with political pressure to be profitable. Tracks are expensive to maintain, so those parts of the infrastructure that could be classified as "redundant" were dismantled. Now they have a network with little redundancy, which is great from a short-sighted business standpoint, but terrible for reliability.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe%E2%80%93Basel_high-s...

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#73

Post by Kim_Bruning »

cyberax wrote: post #47
Propelloni wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems the network of roads built in the 40s, 50s and 60s just can no longer be done efficiently. Of course they can, we have not lost that capability. It's not a matter of efficiency but effectivity. Road constructions of the 1960s are not effective for 21st century traffic demands. Today's level of traffic far exceeds the anticipated level of traffic at the time of construction. Germany sees this all the time,…

> Road constructions of the 1960s are not effective for 21st century traffic demands. Citation needed. As I see it, the US is still riding on the coattails of 1960-s road construction. We should be doing more of it, in fact, not sabotaging it with bike lanes and road diets.

Naive intuition says adding more roads and lanes would finally solve the bottlenecks, right? And it does, briefly. But after a little while it's back to bumper to bumper. That’s induced demand [1]: when new capacity just encourages more driving.

Counterintuitively perhaps, bike lanes, road diets and public transport actually work better. Give people other ways to move around, and you take pressure off the road system, making traffic better for everyone. And that includes the drivers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#74

Post by kristopolous »

userbinator wrote: post #44
kristopolous wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the US got a network of 250mph trains out of this, almost worth it.

For faster deportations?

If taking a shinkansen-style train from SF to LA requires me to drive to San Quentin, I'm game.

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#75

Post by adev_ »

prmoustache wrote: post #61
microtonal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West European rail is very full, so rail use is carefully coordinated, since trains of vastly different speeds (e.g. ICE vs a regional train) use the same tracks. If an ICE is, say, 15 minutes late, they cannot just drive faster to catch up. The schedule went on, and at that point there may be a much slower regional or intercity train on the same trajectory. This is why ICE delays tend to cascade. It starts with a sh…

If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. Most time I got annoying delays when I was living in Switzerland was because of a "personal accident" which 99% of the time meant someone had deliberately jumped in front of a train.

> If it is the same as in Switzerland, the solution is in helping people get the health care they need. [...]

Switzerland SBB/CFF and the German DB can not be compared, not even from far.

The Swiss trains are amongst the best in the world in term on punctuality. Delays barely exceed few minutes most of the time. Every connection is scheduled to be done At the opposite, German trains in the eastern part are barely on time and give you an almost Soviet experience for the regional one: The trains are old, poorly maintained, like the track itself and the service suffers of it.

The only place in Western Europe I experienced train to be worst than in Germany is currently in Hungary where there were actual soviet trains.

Even the freaking French SNCF with their legendary strikes tend to be more punctual than the DB.

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#76

Post by prawn »

dmoy wrote: post #26
philwelch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s largely a California problem. Here in Texas we are building highways on top of highways.

The Texas interchange stacks are terrifying if you're not used to them. The first time I went up a five level stack I legit thought I was going off the edge of the road into the sky or something, and was gonna die. I was not prepared lol.

Just out of interest, can you point me towards one on Google Maps? (Curious non-American.)

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#77

Post by chmod775 »

Hojojo wrote: post #67
chmod775 wrote: post #52

This article communicates what this is about very poorly, so I'm not surprised a lot of people are asking "what is so special about this train?". The answer is: Nothing. Many ICE trains have the capability to go that fast* - and some already surpassed these speeds on test tracks decades ago. It's really nothing special to make a train go these speeds. What this test was supposed to show is that the real track (not a…

I feel like the article is fairly clear > DB und Siemens Mobility haben bei Testfahrten einen neuen Geschwindigkeitsrekord für die Strecke Erfurt–Leipzig/Halle erreicht > Der ICE-S der DB Systemtechnik wird hauptsächlich für Test- und Messfahrten eingesetzt. Er dient dazu, neue Strecken zu testen, die Infrastruktur zu untersuchen und verschiedene Hochgeschwindigkeitsprüfungen durchzuführen The latter paragraph explic…

> I think, like usual, it's a case of people reading the title and then going off to write a comment.

Yes, that's poor communication. You need to read the last half of the article to really understand what the news is about. The title should be "405,0 km/h auf Schnellfahrstrecke Erfurt–Leipzig/Halle in Testfahrt erreicht". Note that this omits mentioning a specific train.

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#78

Post by dlcarrier »

chmod775 wrote: post #52

This article communicates what this is about very poorly, so I'm not surprised a lot of people are asking "what is so special about this train?". The answer is: Nothing. Many ICE trains have the capability to go that fast* - and some already surpassed these speeds on test tracks decades ago. It's really nothing special to make a train go these speeds. What this test was supposed to show is that the real track (not a…

Also, the passenger miles per unit of energy drops geometrically, as speed increase linearly. Most of the loss is aerodynamic, so you either need a hyperloop tunnel or wings to take you into the literal stratosphere, to avoid high fuel burn at high speeds, so even if you could run the train at 400 km/hr along the whole track, it would be unlikely that any operator would do so, on a recurring basis.

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#79

Post by Propelloni »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #39
eptcyka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you imply that trains would normally run slower than what they can safely achieve?

Everything always runs at 80% down to even 50% for normal 99% of the time operation. Not just trains, everything.

What was the old chestnut? A traffic jam is a highway at 100% capacity? Something like that, can't remember who said it. Niels Pfläging perhaps?

Re: ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h

#80

Post by chmod775 »

dlcarrier wrote: post #78
chmod775 wrote: post #52

This article communicates what this is about very poorly, so I'm not surprised a lot of people are asking "what is so special about this train?". The answer is: Nothing. Many ICE trains have the capability to go that fast* - and some already surpassed these speeds on test tracks decades ago. It's really nothing special to make a train go these speeds. What this test was supposed to show is that the real track (not a…

Also, the passenger miles per unit of energy drops geometrically, as speed increase linearly. Most of the loss is aerodynamic, so you either need a hyperloop tunnel or wings to take you into the literal stratosphere, to avoid high fuel burn at high speeds, so even if you could run the train at 400 km/hr along the whole track, it would be unlikely that any operator would do so, on a recurring basis.

I don't think cost is too much of a concern for ICEs. They are already a higher-priced option that competes with plane travel for many destinations.

You can take RE trains at virtually no cost between any two cities you can dream of, yet people en-masse still happily fork over a hundred bucks to save 3-4 hours with an ICE train.

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