141–150 of 192 posts
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I always hear my German colleagues complain about DB but having taken UK trains for a few years I can’t fault DB.
Complaining is just something Germans do though. We have a saying: "Not complaining is enough praise."
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The Beijing–Shanghai HSR train averages 300 km/h over an almost 5-hour ride, two years ago they upgraded it to peak at 350 km/h.
The Beijing-Shanghai line was designed to operate at 350km/h with the plan to upgrade to 380km/h, it was downgraded to 300km/h after the 2011 Wenzhou accident in which 40 people killed.
I really wish we had high speed rail in Australia. I'd pick a 600km/h train over a plane any day.
Why is it boarding a train is 10x easier than on a plane?
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High speed train works well in France (and it's just 300km/h) because the country is small. Australia is huge. And so is the US. This would make sense along coasts though but you wouldn't be able to cross the country from sea to sea in a few hours of course. What's good with trains is that you can hop in at the very last moment (when the bell rings, happened to me a couple times) and the train stops in the center of…
Australia is huge, but everyone lives in 7 cities (within a margin of error). A high speed rail that covered Melbourne/Albury/Canberra/Sydney/Newcastle/Tamworth?/Brisbane would have a huge impact. The distances are (as the crow flies): Melbourne-Albury: 260km Albury-Canberra: 219km Canberra-Sydney: 247km Sydney-Newcastle: 117km Newcastle-Tamworth: 219km Tamworth-Brisbane: 450km That last leg might need another break…
If anyone asks me how long will it take to build the Melbourne to Sydney high speed rail, my honest answer would be 30-50 years.
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The Beijing-Shanghai line was designed to operate at 350km/h with the plan to upgrade to 380km/h, it was downgraded to 300km/h after the 2011 Wenzhou accident in which 40 people killed.
In WA we recently had a deadly accident at under 100kph...
I really wish we had high speed rail in Australia. I'd pick a 600km/h train over a plane any day.
Apart from boarding experience in Airpot Terminal, I prefer flying on plane over train any day. Why is it boarding a train is 10x easier than on a plane?
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Remote control systems can and will fail.
I don't know what's considered a safe speed for moving a train without working safety systems on a European high-speed railway, but it's almost certainly so slow (20-40km/h) that the system is designed such that failure of the control system is extremely rare. Should it fail, the priority will be to restore it, rather than move trains around very slowly.
I was responding to “Why not have people in a control room drive the trains, coordinating the system as a whole”. Infrastructure and timetables are centrally coordinated (or actoss several centers). Controlling a train remotely introduces multiple points of failure:
- connection lag
- connection quality
- remote operators don’t have the full details on a train (unless you have one operator per train)
Remote/automatic control works in smaller systems (such as subways, see e.g. Copenhagen), but the speeds there are usually smaller, the “fleet” is smaller, you can reach the trains in case of failure faster etc.
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Australia is huge, but everyone lives in 7 cities (within a margin of error). A high speed rail that covered Melbourne/Albury/Canberra/Sydney/Newcastle/Tamworth?/Brisbane would have a huge impact. The distances are (as the crow flies): Melbourne-Albury: 260km Albury-Canberra: 219km Canberra-Sydney: 247km Sydney-Newcastle: 117km Newcastle-Tamworth: 219km Tamworth-Brisbane: 450km That last leg might need another break…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by... : it’s actually under 70% of the population in the top 7 cities in that list, with the two giants being Sydney and Melbourne with 20% each. 30% is a fairly large rounding error! :-) I agree with your judgement in general, nonetheless.
Giving mobility to those people would unlock new use cases of its own, but the GP post is actually accurate to commercial reality.