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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:An example: there are still sections of signalling equipment in use on the London Underground that dates back to the 1950s. Thanks, Thatcher (Local Government Act 1985 dissolving Ken Livingstone & the GLA / Secretary of State for Transport being responsible for LRT). The New York City Subway still has plenty of signalling equipment that's been in place and in use since the 1930s or earlier (if I remember right the last equipment in place and in use from before 1910 was finally removed a few years ago). It honestly doesn't matter much how old it is as long as it works properly. kingturnip posted:Talking about weird infrastructure, the line that's run by First Capital Connect that goes from Moorgate to Alexandra Palace (and beyond) is, I'm told, unique in that it uses both overhead power lines and a third rail. The overhead for most of the line, the third rail for the section from Drayton Park to Moorgate, where the line goes underground. If you sit on the train at Drayton Park, you'll notice the train powering down briefly as the overhead connector (thingy) retracts and the third rail connector (thingy) extends. The weirdness is one of the reasons the rolling stock is poo poo, because I guess it'd cost quite a lot to design a train just for one freaky line. It might be unique in the UK, but it isn't globally. As one example, the New Haven line of Metro-North in New York and Connecticut operates on 700 volt third rail DC power from the terminal in NYC up to the joining with Amtrak lines, where the trains switch to 12500 volt overhead catenary AC power. This is a result of it operating what was formerly two different railroad companies' lines, half a century ago, which had implemented the two incompatible electrification systems. So you have 14 mils done on third rail, and another 60 or so under catenary. Bozza posted:I think it's a bit a bullshit to call the railway a "rich mans toy". Commuting certainly is, but travel in general is not. Far be it for me to defend ATOC, but there are cheap fares out there and it is by far and the way the best method of travel if you are willing to vary your travel time or date. This is why I find it so astounding that the re-privatization of British passenger service ever happened. Despite all attempts from conservatives in the US, Amtrak is still around for intercity/long-distance stuff (and at prices generally 25%-50% lower than the private carriers were charging back in their heyday) and the various regional/state authorities that handle commuter service are still around too.
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May 14, 2012 17:19
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:But MTA have a big advantage over LUL in their subways layouts are much, much more sensible than the clusterfuck that lives under the streets of London*. The most important thing is that more of theirs is four tracked (ours is only two) so if something breaks here everything stops, where as there they can go around. It's also why they get a 24/7 service and we get one that starts at roughly 5:30 and ends at midnight. MTA also has the big advantage over the various London underground authorities that once it went 100% government owned in 1940 it's stayed government owned since then. No loving about with public-private "partnerships". Ultimately that's the important thing. It also has the advantage that a third of the system was built by the NYC government owned Independent subway, and that much of the other two-thirds of the system, while built by the IRT and BMT (and the BMT's predecessors, with some parts of some routes dating back to 1870s steam railways) private companies, was done under city contracts mandating various things that result in better interoperability then and now. There's tons of stations in NYC that consist of stations built by 2 or 3 entirely separate companies originally, but the government authorities in control have managed to make them work together now - though even today there's station complexes that aren't fully conected. And hell, you'd think a system that shuts down every day would mean they'd have the ability to do things like lengthen platforms system-wide and all that. Or that they'd have the brains when building the Jubilee line in the 70s to make that use normal size trains and 4 track it, since it wasn't just another existing private line from the late 1800s that needed to be small tunnels and 2 tracks.
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May 14, 2012 18:28
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Part of what is now the Jubilee used to be the Bakerloo though so there would have been all kinds of fun problems with bridge clearances and so on. Yes, but a different route could have been used. At the very least the new parts of the line could have been built to a size that larger trains could run through, even if they'd still run small trains through to start, you know? As it stands now, to put through a normal size train on any part of the Jubilee line would require complete shut down for months at the least to build bigger tunnels. Again to compare with NYC. To this day, the former IRT lines use narrower, shorter train cars than the rest of the subway in NYC. However, a lot of that trackage was built with the provision that in the future, all that would be needed to convert those lines and portions of lines to using the same, larger, rolling stock on the other parts of the system is platform shaving and moving the rails slightly - no need to dig/drill out to widen the stations and tunnels. Bozza posted:Lengthening platforms is actually pretty bad for capacity, you're better ff just making trains more frequent, especially on a metro. It's worked great for New York City, though? I certainly don't see how any of the lines I use every week would be better off with shorter platforms and trains, and waiting 3 or 4 minutes between trains hardly seems too long! Edit: The Jubilee Line in London runs trainsets about 4/5 the length of the usual trainsets used on IRT sections of the NYC subway. Each 1996 stock trainset on the Jubilee line is rated to carry 817 people, each R142/R142A trainset used on the various IRT lines can hold about 1800 people per train. With the Jubilee line running at about every 2-3 minutes at peak and the Lexington line (for an example IRT line) running every 3-4 minutes at peak - well there's just no way around it you can fit a lot more people in the latter before you add on that the Lex is 4 track. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 20:06 on May 14, 2012 |
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May 14, 2012 19:50
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Bozza posted:False equivalence I'm afraid. Making trains longer increases your headway distance thus buggers your capacity. This is particularly key in platform reoccupation times. It's not a thing where its a linear tradeoff though. 1000 foot long metro trains would just be silly, but it doesn't seem unreasonable at all to lengthen stations to fit say 500 or 600 foot trains. The Lexington Avenue Line itself, is carrying a bit over 1/3 the total daily passengers of the entire London Underground (LAL carries 1.3 million per day, the Underground carries 3 million), along its 4 track approximately 10 miles length. It's doing that with 10 car trains of 51 foot cars, running as often as 3 minutes apart during rush hour. When I say 3 minutes apart, note that I mean on the same track, same direction; you have a train on the express track going north every 3 minutes, and also on the local track going north a seperate one every 3 minutes. Zephro posted:Aren't all the New York lines cut-and-cover? That's a lot cheaper than building a double-wide deep line. They're not all cut-and-cover, just mostly. It's cheaper to do, but, honestly cheaping out upfront just causes huge problems forever after. misguided rage posted:Maybe I'm missing something but if the train is 80% of the length but only ~45% of the capacity, the capacity difference doesn't seem to have much to do with the length of the train. Switching to cars which are able to carry more people might be worthwhile, but just tacking on more of the low-capacity cars doesn't seem like a great plan. The London "deep level tube" train cars are rather small in order to fit the narrow width tunnels they run in. Sadly they've kind of got no real chance of expanding the tunnels for larger cars (which would be ideal), running longer trains and expanding the stations some is really the only sane thing to do. Compare the room in average tube stock in London to the room in the NYC one i mentioned (which are also the smaller variant in that system):  
Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 21:36 on May 14, 2012 |
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May 14, 2012 21:30
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surrender posted:Here's the blog of an Austrian rail worker that took a trip from Vienna to Pyongyang, through Russia: On this blog, the author describes her trip around the world, which includes traveling from Shanghai to Croatia by train, as well as Rome to London by train after an interval of travel by watercraft. http://www.verysmallarray.com/?p=145 That's the first post covering that (the Shanghai to Beijing leg specifically), you can follow the next post things or go to their travel tag for the rest: http://www.verysmallarray.com/?cat=14
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May 24, 2012 22:35
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notaspy posted:I would love to take a bullet train from London to Beijing via India. How long would that take using modern trains? A week? Shame it'll never happen. I looked into what this might actually look like if there were bullet train lines capable of doing this route. The fastest bullet trains in Japan right now go about 199 mph, and with a reasonable route from London, passing through India, and on to Beijing, it would take about 47 hours 30 minutes nonstop at that top speed. A more direct route that doesn't pass through India would be 34 hours 30 minutes nonstop at that speed. Note to do this, would pretty much require thousands of miles of brand new or heavily upgraded routes to handle the speeds. You'd also not maintain the top speed all the way through, due to stops for major stations and possibly for border control purposes.
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May 25, 2012 15:34
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Gat posted:Larger carriages (ie an increase in loading gauge) doesn't necessarily require an increase in track gauge (compare a deep level tube train which will be less than 2.7m wide, to an american passenger train of width 3.2m). Broader gauge obviously increases the theoretical upper limit and trains will generally be larger -Russian trains which have widths of 3.6m -but the largest loading gauges of the world are actually standard gauge, such as the Channel Tunnel (4.1m). The main problem with crowding on British trains is the height anyway, making it so we will never have double-decker trains outside of High Speed. What are the height limits like anyway (outside of the obviously low deep level tubes)? Over here in the NYC area, they've been able to squeeze doubledecker train cars into only 14 foot 6 inches high to fit the century old river tunnels.
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May 28, 2012 18:48
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And stuff like this is why I'm glad America only has government owned passenger train service. Well, technically there's a few private companies left who do niche stuff, but they're mostly like "excursion" tour stuff.
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Aug 15, 2012 03:13
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Gat posted:Any major improvement in long distance rail travel in the US would require a new network of rails, which would be in the form of High Speed rail these days. I think the perception of Amtrak over the last 50 years means that there is not much public demand for rail there, especially when they love cars so much while being so spread out. Most people in the US never go on a train in their entire lives, its just this thing that will make them wait for 5 minutes at a level crossing as a endless freight train slowly rumbles past. Long distance (400 miles or more) is pointless to encourage anyway, other than as a scenic vacation mode of travel. It can never be time-competitive with plane travel (although shorter ones, especially under 150 miles can easily be. You don't need to arrive an hour early at the train station to do security checks!) and is rarely price competitive (though in America there's weird cases where it can be). Certainly once you get past 600 miles there's not even a chance. And further, the money you'd spend to make long distance better would be FAR better spent building commuter/local services, which is what are really needed - any given person might take 2 or 3 long distance trips a year, but they're commuting every workday and going into the city on a lot of weekends. And it's all even more reason to keep private carriers out of the business of passenger rail transport.
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Aug 15, 2012 17:56
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How are jobs and stuff handled when one franchise is being passed from one company to a new one? If you're a conductor on Company A and Company B buys out the franchise you're in, do they shuffle you to Company A in another franchise area (if A has one) or does B have to hire you, or do you just get fired?
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Aug 15, 2012 19:11
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Train travel shouldn't need to be profitable anyway. Public transit in general should be far more focused on serving the public than being profitable.
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Aug 16, 2012 17:53
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High speed rail is ALWAYS a red herring. The majority of travel in any country is relatively short distance commuting and shopping. And you can't maintain high speed speeds when you have to have your train stopping every 5-15 minutes for the next station, which is what you need to adequately serve the majority of travel. Say you live 30 miles from the city you commute to. If your train averages 80 mph on the way there, then hell that's already a lot faster than it's legal to drive probably, and you're there in 22 minutes. Drive that in average traffic and you'll probably take twice as long if not more. Building out a total of say, 200 miles of new routes for service in and around a city is a much better use of resources than building or upgrading 200 miles of route to a high speed standard. You'd get way more people using that than the high speed intercity route. Like consider Japan, they have the Shinkansen which is of course their absurdly fast and extensive high speed rail network. But out of 22.24 billion passenger trips taken in a year on their whole rail network, only 151 million of them were on the high speed rail. That's about 0.6% of the trips taken. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Aug 16, 2012 |
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Aug 16, 2012 19:24
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Bobstar posted:This is interesting, but in a country this size couldn't a good, affordable high speed rail network effectively eliminate internal flights, with all the benefits that brings? It depends. Let's say we built a Shinkansen-quality line from London to Glasgow. To ensure the best speed, there's no stops along the way so you can stay cruising at 186 MPH all the way through. The train trip would still take 2 hours 10 minutes minimum, longer if the route was built so that there was other cities stopped at along the way. To compare to the schedules you get in Japan where they actually have these trains, and stops along the way, the Tokyo to Osaka route, which is 50 miles shorter than direct London-Glasgow, takes 2 hours 20 minutes. Flight London to Glasgow meanwhile is apparently 1 hour 10 minutes. And I'd have to think that if the for-profit private operators got to run the high speed trains, there's little chance of them costing less than the flight would. Whether they're full would not necessarily be a good way to judge use. As long as you schedule less seats available than there are people who want to get somewhere by train, you'll have fairly packed trains. Jonnty posted:I think the reason people focus on HSR in the US is because the suburban sprawl makes commuter rail in a lot of the country totally infeasible. Much easier to set yourself a relatively achievable goal like eliminating some domestic air travel than to attempt to challenge 50 years of received town planning wisdom. The ironic thing is that you also need dense or at least reasonably continuous and compact development for the high speed rail to work. When everyone's spread at all over it's inconvenient to go to the nearest high speed rail, and you need to build a lot more of it to get to all the various spread out places. Like again, to go back to Japan since they have the best system in place for it, notice the way the routes are laid out:  It's mostly one continuous route following the most developed areas of the country, with a few branches here and there There's lots of missing connections, like how if you want to go from Nagano to Osaka, you have to go all the way to Tokyo and then back out. There's plenty of Japanese cities and towns that don't have access to the system without taking other transport.
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Aug 16, 2012 20:42
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Iohannes posted:Bollocks. France's TGV system would like a word with you. The TGV system that only carries 9% of rail passengers trips in France, and actually doesn't go to very many places you mean. The integrated public transport network must be built first, high speed rail is useless without it. That's why it is in fact an argument against building high speed rail.
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Aug 17, 2012 02:32
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Moving a discussion about disabled accessibility on the Tube from the Olympics thread to here as the better place for it. Ok, here, this is the map from TfL, which marks all stations that are "step-free" from street to platform:  For each station, and each line at a station if neccesary, they mark off step height with Green being in the zone considered "no step", Yellow considered step, and Red considered a high step. Meanwhile, A is a gap that's considered short enough to roll across safely, B is less safe, and C is a severe gap. Additionally, when there's a circle, without a letter, but multiple colors, that indicates either transfer to another underground line's platform at that station is possible without steps, or transfer to a mainline/overground train station is possible from the platform without steps. Any station marked A and Green is considered fully accessible by TfL. Now besides those, there's 33 stations/parts of stations with accessible route to the surface, "A" rated gaps, but Yellow or Red step height from the platform. That is, these stations, for at least one line going through them, would become accessible by simply raising or possibly lowering platforms. In some cases you might add the access by only raising or lowering certain parts of the platform, with appropriate warning signage for them. And again, I'm not saying, "add new surface to platform access", I'm talking about "add train to platform access in stations that already have surface to platform". Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Sep 2, 2012 |
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Sep 2, 2012 04:54
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FISHMANPET posted:As an American I occasionally read this thread with morbid curiosity. As to the question raised a while ago about passenger rail in America, one of the problems is the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) and their train strength requirements. From what I've heard on the issue, foreign (European and Asian) trains are safe because they have systems in place to not crash into each other. In America, trains are safe because we can full balls crash into a freight train and be OK. All this extra buff strength is expensive, both in initial capital costs, and in ongoing running expenses. When we built the Acela, only three companies even tried to bid because nobody wanted to double the weight of their rolling stock to sell it in America. So as the only country in the world (that I know of) with these kinds of buff strength requirements, we're essentially the only market in the world for these trains, and it's a pretty small market at that. You also have to realize that with all the already heavily built trains in passenger use, any lighter built stuff would have to be able to withstand collision with them! And that'd require being about the same strength as if they hit a freight. No system for preventing crashes is fool proof, so it's really important to mitigate the damage when crashes inevitably occur. Even if America stopped requiring trains be built as tough, you still couldn't use the new American trains in Europe - they're too wide for the loading gauge in many countries. With the Acela for example, it's an inch too wide and 4 inches too tall for the loading gauge along most of the French TGV system, and too wide for parts of Germany. And then you have the rail cars used for commuter rail systems , like this one currently being used across America and Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_MultiLevel_Coach which is 10 foot 10 inches wide. Apparently the only places in Europe that that will fit is Scandinavia, the Betuweroute, and the Channel Tunnel and its approaches. As far as being the only market here's also Canada and Mexico at the very least. And it's not actually a small market.
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Sep 5, 2012 17:56
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Bozza posted:Um. Well I don't like bold claims, but we solved this in the UK by using something called TPWS (Train Protection and Warning System) whereby all stop signals are fitted with overspeed and overrun sensors that jam in the emergency brake as if the signal is at red, thus vastly lowering the consequences of a collision if it will occur. There's still the potential for derailments and collision with stuff next to the tracks though isn't there? Of course, most collisions on American railroads involve some moron or their vehicle on the tracks where they shouldn't be. Did the TPWS rollout involve needing the existing trainsets in use needing to be modified or was it done in a way that "just worked" with everything that was already on the rails? Incidentally, systems like that are being tested or planned to be tested in some areas in the US where currently both freight and light rail passenger trains run on the same tracks, but are currently required to have time separated operations. Can't crash your lightweight light rail vehicles into a freight train when the light rail runs from 6 AM to 10 PM only, and the freights run from 10:30 PM to 5:30 AM only, hence they get a partial FRA waiver on crash standards.
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Sep 5, 2012 19:50
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Bozza posted:It was a retrofit but was done incredibly rapidly (plus was cheaper than rolling out ATP everywhere) because it's just cut into the existing safety systems and just dumps the brake pipe. The UK also has a system called AWS which has been manditory since the 1950s I think on stock. Ah that's interesting then, sounds like there's also been a lot of time to put it into effect, as well as a previous system that managed some of the same stuff to "hook into" as it were.. Bozza posted:As for the stuff on the tracks argument, this is an interesting point about UK vs US railways, in that ours are totally surrounded by a boundary fence (which you can report if it's damaged and someone will be out to fix it pretty sharpish). Oddly, they were mandated not to keep people off the tracks, but to keep railway workers ON the tracks, and therefore not in the 5th Duke of Devonshires back garden. But a boundary fence doesn't stop people from doing stupid thing at level crossings, like have a car or truck break down and abandon it, or deliberate suicide attempts, or just "I can totally get across here before the train does". And that's the most common collision type. Stuff like this happens a decent amount http://www.kget.com/mostpopular/story/Amtrak-sues-trucker-for-train-accident-two-years/hQrh8UpLikiPeI3rdnMi4Q.cspx Hezzy posted:Also regarding stuff on the tracks, there's a national police service dedicated to the railway and they will always attempt to prosecute trespassers. Well it's also very very illegal here and the government passenger transit agencies all have their own police to patrol. But, again, it doesn't stop people from doing stupid stuff at or right near level crossings, or just attempting to cross on foot. Though that latter doesn't tend to do much damage to the trains. Here's an example of a place where people have been killed or nearly killed crossing around commuter trains doing 80-100 mph and Acela trains doing 135 mph, even though it's got fairly difficult barriers to go around http://goo.gl/maps/bkMGB
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Sep 5, 2012 21:22
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Whether a line is deep level or sub surface has literally nothing to do with its suitability to automate. The big thing is whether the physical line has multiple services using it, and if those services go outside the physical line and so on. A line with 0 revenue services that switch onto and off the line is the most suitable to automate to start. Paris Metro Line 1 is isolated from other lines, with no connecting revenue services, so it's ideal. The other Paris Metro automated line, 14, was built to be automated from the beginning - and incidentally has plenty of its route in deeply bored tunnels not cut and cover! It is similar in automated subway conversions in other cities. The only automated service (and it isn't even full time automated yet iirc) in the NYC subway is the L which is a 2 track route that is completely isolated in revenue service, the next one will be the 7 which is similarly isolated from revenue services but has some three track stretches for expresses. The best candidate for automation in London would probably be the Waterloo & City route, what with it being the shortest and fully isolated and all. Though whether automating it would accomplish anything is a different question entirely.
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Oct 8, 2012 22:02
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Ardennes posted:Ultimately, 9 dead and 80 injured, there are many reasons for why it happened (maintenance) but there is a point that automatic systems are only usable if you have an extremely safe system to the point that an major accident is impossible. But a major accident is never impossible? You simply can never guarantee that in any system.
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Oct 9, 2012 04:11
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:What do you do when the master computer crashes and the train you're on is stranded on a concrete elevation 30m above the ground? Or when it's icy and the ATO system can't compensate for icy rail conditions and your train slides past a station? Or when engineers leave a spanner on the track and the computer driving the train doesn't know it's hit an obstacle? In most automated system they just shut down the trains and send out personnel to escort passengers to safety. In some others they can send out personnel to use normally concealed controls, similar to this on the JFK AirTrain:   For clarity this is what that area of the train normally looks like  There is literally no driver on these trains, and many other systems also completely lack a driver. Some examples are on here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Advanced_Rapid_Transit Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 00:03
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sweek0 posted:We've got quite a lot of automated rail in this country including the whole of the DLR, the Victoria Line, the Jubilee line and a bunch of airport shuttles. The only thing a Victoria line driver does is open and close the doors... and the only reason that's not automated is to avoid them not paying attention at all I believe? Sounds a lot like the Morgantown "Personal Rapid Transit" in West Virginia. Though that system only runs choose-your-destination part of the time, during peak it runs fixed schedules.
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Nov 4, 2012 19:14
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Jonnty posted:Yeah, but I can't imagine it's too pleasant and I'm not sure the detection system is foolproof. Plus, at very busy times drivers are needed to slowly draw into the station in case somebody is pushed onto the track. Those detection systems have been around a long time, you ever try to get into an elevator just as the doors are shutting? Same principle at work there. There's 48 year old subway cars in NYC that have doors that auto-open if they close on something after all. Also what exactly are these places where drivers know ahead of time someone's going to be pushed on the track? Are criminals issuing threats to push people off the platform direct to the driver?
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Nov 4, 2012 20:44
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Jonnty posted:They go in slowly and stop if they see anyone fall. I don't think it's a particularly hard concept to understand - it's how cars work all the time. So why wouldn't you just set the automatic train to always slow a lot going into a station? It's not like trains barrel in at 50 mph or anything in the first place, they need a good distance to stop to avoid overshooting the platform. Like I'm not understanding how what you're saying is being done different then any other train coming into a station?
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Nov 4, 2012 21:05
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Jonnty posted:Have you ever seen a tube train coming into a platform? They're long enough that they're pretty much doing full speed when they hit the station. Even if you set the ATO to go slowly, you still need the driver to actually look for people falling. Tube trains are usually a lot shorter than consists on other systems, in tandem with the platforms being shorter. Also where is the driver looking for people who are falling and how the hell are they going to stop in time? You can't go from full speed to stopped in such short spaces very easily. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Nov 4, 2012 |
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Nov 4, 2012 21:45
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You don't need driverless to have ATO though. There's plenty of systems that have ATO and also a dude in the cab or whatever sitting there looking out for things.
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Nov 4, 2012 22:05
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Jonnty posted:They don't go in at full speed. That's the point. Did you watch the video? But you just said Jonnty posted:Have you ever seen a tube train coming into a platform? They're long enough that they're pretty much doing full speed when they hit the station. Is that supposed to mean the opposite then? The video shows a train coming into station... slowly. Jonnty posted:Although at Tube train speeds you can often stop within sighting distance, so there's still a chance that an accidental fall won't result in a death at full speed. So if it isn't actually a danger then why are you painting it as a special danger of an automated train? I seriously do not understand in the slightest what you're saying. Is it that automated trains can't be told to slow? Is it that you think automated trains means there's no staff onboard and it'll just steamroll people? What was the video supposed to show? Help me out here.
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Nov 4, 2012 22:31
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Jonnty posted:I was saying that train drivers can explicitly go much more slowly into stations when they feel or are told there is a risk of people falling onto the tracks due to overcrowding, as opposed to the high speed they usually go in. I'm just trying to illustrate how drivers still have duties on ATO trains beyond "just being kept busy." Ok, so you're just saying what they've been doing with ATO systems since the 60s then.
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Nov 4, 2012 23:05
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Cerv posted:Urrgh. There are plenty of models of toys that use batteries http://www.kindertrains.com/brio-wooden-railway-battery-powered-engines.html (The Brio brand train sets use wooden track pieces with grooves for the wheels to run in, it'd be impossible to supply current)
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Feb 3, 2013 19:09
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goddamnedtwisto posted:These make a good stop-gap while electrification goes on - certainly better than the current plan of trains equipped with both diesels and pantographs/shoes for electrified lines. Dual-mode locos work fine in the United States and Canada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALP-45DP http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/passenger/commuter-regional/njts-alp-45dp-enters-revenue-service.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_DM30AC These are "full" dual mode vehicles which are capable of operating for hours and hundreds of miles on either power mechanism. One of them's been in revenue service for a decade or so and the other just started. There's also the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Genesis#P32AC-DM which is capable of running on third rail power only for about 30 minutes or so at a time; which is enough to allow them to travel through tunnels where diesel is otherwise prohibited due to emissions issues.
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Feb 3, 2013 19:29
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Weembles posted:What prevents them from running for longer than 30 minutes on third rail power? They're simply not designed for it. I'm no mechanic so I can't tell you why but they're rated to only remain moving on third rail power for about 30 minutes; which is more than enough time to move them out of the NYC train tunnels where running a diesel engine is banned except in case of emergency or repair works with passenger service shut down. The other two designs can run on either power mode as much as they want however.
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Feb 3, 2013 21:12
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That isn't bizarre language, it's merely antiquated.
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Feb 11, 2013 05:01
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pointsofdata posted:I think the point is that the "Eco boat" was more a publicity stunt than everything else. If this were a comparison of fuel usage per ton-mile of freight I'd think you see cargo ships way up there alongside rail transport. But for passenger boats, you usually don't bother to go for efficiency when you make them. Though if you look closely there's a "SeaBus" entry which does quite well - that's the passenger ferry system for Vancouver whose ships are like this:  Strict ferries like this or the NYC Staten Island Ferry tend to be quite efficent because you pile on 400 people (in the Vancouver case) with little more than some chairs to sit in and a bathroom or two; or gor the NYC Staten Island ferry you're loading on 1000-6000 people per ship (and they decide which size ships are available for each crossing in order to maintain proper fuel consumption, you don't want to send out the huge 6000-passenger class ones for the 3 am crossing that'll have 500 aboard)   Of course neither of these would be really suitable for long haul travel. Edit: remember with cruise ships: This ship holds the same number of people (about 6000) as the first NYC SI ferry I linked:  It is 362 meters long, 47 meters wide at the waterline, and goes 9.3 meters under the waterline. The Barberi-class ferry vessels instead carry 6000 people within 94.5 meters long, 21.3 meters wide and 4 meters under the waterline. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jul 15, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 16:18
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Actually British rail companies used to do this too. The most famous example of course is the Metropolitan Railway, which bought up swathes of land along its route and built entire towns (Nesaden, Wembley, Willesden) for the new commuters to live in. The Southern Railway used to own loads of hotels along the South Coast as well as pubs, clubs, and ferries, and the LNWR owned shitloads of coal and iron mines. They only abandoned them after nationalisation. Well if you count that, almost all the private railroads in the US, once they started expanding outside of the already settled areas, built and ran thousands and thousands of towns and coordinated stores and hotels along their routes. Atlanta, Georgia was originally built by a railroad as a company town for instance, before the railroads were built to it there was no one there!
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Jul 16, 2013 18:59
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The HS2 requirements include right of way and stations being built to a more normal and larger structure gauge as compared to the typical british narrow and short one, right?
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Oct 1, 2013 18:52
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In the US at least, problem level crossings that aren't worth installing better warning equipment at do typical involve the crossing being blocked, or in rare cases restricted to immediate local access only.
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Oct 31, 2013 19:21
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thehustler posted:It was "simply outright closure" that was confusing me as an option along with the other things you stated. Tends to look like this: http://goo.gl/maps/LEclp Sure that's in America, but just plain blocking the path works great.
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Oct 31, 2013 23:33
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Metrication posted:How will engineering works happen on the '24 hours tube lines'? In cities with system-wide 24 hour service, many trackside projects can be handled in the headways between trains in the dead of night when service frequency drops significantly, before you even need to start shutting down sections for extended times. Surely that can be done here. (The NYC subway has been known to handle replacing tracks during 20-30 minute headways in the very early morning, and sometimes even redoing signaling in similar circumstances)
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Nov 21, 2013 18:41
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Metrication posted:Aren't the ones that run 24 hour in NYC 4 tracked? All lines in NYC run 24 hour whether 1, 2, 3, or 4 tracked (except for one or two short stub and shuttle lines that sometimes shut down at night). The routine overnight work gets done on not just the heart of the city 4 track mainlines that have multiple nearby paralleling lines to take the load, but also the outlying lines that have no nearby replacement services. The only line that currently shuts down completely overnight is the 0.8 mile long 42nd street shuttle, which is exactly paralleled by the 7 line running underneath it between the two stations it serves. In the past, the "north end" two stations of the 3 frequently lacked late night service, but that's back on again. The primary advantage towards maintenance that the frequent interconnections and extensive 3/4 track mainlines have is for routing around things that need major uninterrupted work done, or for retaining an acceptable level of service during weekend and late night times reserved for major projects. There's a whole system detailed track map set at http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Track_Maps which shows all the individual tracks and connections between them, including detail maps of complicated areas. Needless to say, there's a lot more built coherence there. (when reading the maps, remember that the numbered lines are built to a much narrower structure gauge, so trains that run on the lettered lines would be too wide to fit into stations and most of the tunnels, while the ones that do fit would be dangerously far away from the platforms for passenger loading if brought onto the lettered lines. so there's some connections available that could not be used for revenue service)  Some areas get quite complicated. And yes this does show that a portion of the platform is moveable at Times Square on the shuttle tracks to allow train movements through (which cuts off one of the exits when that happens). Because the shuttle platforms are built on top of old mainline tracks when the routing was different.
Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Nov 21, 2013 |
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Nov 21, 2013 21:05
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 18:57 |
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It's best practices to have those anyway, because something's always gonna end up hosed on one track or the other at the worst possible time. 
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Nov 22, 2013 17:13
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