Running On A Rail

[kevin_standlee]

Much of the news about High Speed Rail in California is about the legions of NIMBYs who want the trains to run anywhere but where they live, or just to go away entirely. Despite a majority of voters passing the down payment bond measure, there has been precious little in the way of active support for the plan. Of course, it's always easy to oppose something -- most of the NIMBYs are actually BANANAs -- Build Absolutely Nothing Anywere Near Anything. I'm happy to see that Californians for High Speed Rail is forming up to make a greater effort to advocate for building California High Speed Rail. I've signed their petition and signed up for the mailing list. I hope to do more once I have more time to think about anything other than shipment databases at work.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not terribly relevant to California politics, but good luck. I'm in favor of trains.

(They got the Northstar Commuter Rail going here! Of course, it's not connected to and the equipment is I think incompatible with the local light rail system that's just getting ready to build its second line.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, of course: heavy commuter rail and light rail ("trolleys" to an older generation or "trams" in the UK and elsewhere) are different technolgies designed for different applications. I wouldn't expect them to be inter-compatible. They're both useful for their applications, though.

One fault of "modern" light-rail systems, however, is that they're usually trying to combine elements of two different systems: streetcars and interurbans. Europeans, particularly the Germans, have done a much better job of this.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

"Streetcars" is actually the name I knew before it became "light rail". I only knew "trolley" as a part of "trolley bus".

Both our systems are covering areas that people routinely drive between. I'm not really seeing what the different requirements are that would drive differences in appropriate equipment. However, maybe there are such differences.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Both our systems are covering areas that people routinely drive between.

That's becuase the definition of "driving distance" has grown considerably. In the early 1900s, the idea that you could live fifty miles from where you worked was absurd. Commuter railroads changed that. But when you got to the destination, you would ride a streetcar to your final destination.

Heavy commuter rail is, generally speaking, characterized as traveling longer distances at higher speeds, and with fewer stops (thus longer distances between stations). Light rail/trams/streetcars are slower speed and have much closer spacing between stops. Also, heavy commuter rail is inter-compatible with the national rail network and can thus share facilities, but you wouldn't want to run an LRV on the main line any more than you'd want to use a streetcar to drive from Minneapolis to Chicago, even though in all cases, the track gauge (distance between the rails) is the same.

Then you have hybrid cases like the Electroliners, which could run on the national network (as long as there was an overhead wire to which they could get their power) and then changed to the streetcar (Loop) in Chicago. That led to some interesting engineering challenges, as a typical heavy rail vehicle could never handle the tight curves of the Loop.

To put it another way: My minivan could run on the racetrack at Indianapolis, and so can a Formula 1 racer, an Indy Car or a NASCAR vehicle. Technically, all of these vehicles could also run down the city street or on the highway (baring legalities; I'm talking about physical compatibility). However, You wouldn't want to commute to work in an Indy car or Formula 1 vehicle any more than you'd want me entering my Astro in the German Grand Prix.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Build Absolutely Nothing Anywere Near Anything"? Are you kidding? That's far too mild. There are even people opposed to the plan for solar panels in Panoche Pass, and that, I can assure you - I've been there - is absolutely nowhere near anything whatsoever.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

btw, a commenter to an SFGate article on why SFO has so many delays points out that a large proportion of its traffic is shuttle flights to the LA area. Now, if many of those people could take a high-speed train to LA, it would ease life for the air passengers to the rest of the world too.

And if that train stopped in San Jose, I'd be so on it. The one thing I hope gets remembered is - put rental car counters in the train terminals.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

(Veering a bit off topic) Did you perchance catch the premier episode of Human Target last Sunday?

The plot contrived to put the main character, and the person he was protecting, onto the maiden voyage of the high speed train from San Fransisco to Los Angeles -- which was fun. But when a key plot point developed requiring that the brake systems in the not quite finished cars wasn't finished, especially after having established that the target was a very safety minded chief engineer (designer, not train-driver), my suspension of belief was a bit blown.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The only television I've been watching has been some Australian Open coverage as I go to sleep and get up in the morning.

I've just about given up on dramas about runaway trains, because nobody knows how trains work. For instance, there was one where the plot pointedly showed the hydraulic fluid leaking from the train's brake system. Trains don't use hydraulic brakes, and generally speaking, if you cut the brake lines, the brakes apply because the air in the system keeps the brakes open -- it's more or less the opposite of how your car brakes work, as the normal position of a train brake is closed.

Not that you can't get runaways. There was a notable one coming down into Southern California a few years ago where the train was overloaded and the brakes weren't enough to hold it back. The engineer (train driver) tried everything he could, including putting the engines in reverse (which more or less melted the motors, turning million-dollar locomotives' hardware into slag), but it wasn't enough, and the train piled up at the bottom of Cajon Pass.

You can also get situations like the runaway of the French Metro caused by the driver not understanding how the brakes worked and accidentally throwing the manual cut-off, isolating the front and rear brakes. The rear portion of the train stayed "brakes off" because of the manual cut-off, and only the front three cars answered the controls when he called for brakes. That wasn't enough, and the car plowed into the station with some loss of life, including that of the driver.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I loved "BANANA" and hadn't heard it anywhere before, thank you!

And as someone who takes a train to work every morning (and home every evening), I'm very much in favour of trains!

Including walking from my house to the local station, and from London terminus to work, I can commute in under 60 minutes ... by car that's at least two hours.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's the sort of situation where a train is a huge win. AND your time on the train isn't as constrained as time in a car, either.

Unfortunately, around here using the public transit generally takes significantly longer than driving, plus isn't available at the necessary hours.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

If I had many changes to make, then the choice might be closer ... but for my commute to work it's pretty good.

The first train in the morning will get me in to work before 6am, the last train leaves London at 23:58.

If I catch the 9:35 train in the morning (gets me into the office at 10:10), then my return fare is £6.40. The "congestion charge" for driving into London is £8, and my petrol cost would be about £10/day. Parking around here is around £10-£15/day. Luckily my office has spare spaces so if I want to drive in I can grab one of those for free. I can get a weekly "any time/any number of buses, tubes and trains" pass for £45 which reaches out to my house near Heathrow (15-20 miles from the center of London).

So the train is faster, cheaper, and I can sit and read or do sudoku and not suffer road rage and the dangers of other drivers. So it really is pretty much a no-brainer.

The only times I'll drive in is if I'm going to be going straight from the office and off to a convention and need both my car and my luggage with me, or if I'm going out to an event in the evening that might go beyond midnight.

I have worked and lived in other places where the car commute was much cheaper, quicker and more sensible than trains and buses. So I've tried it both ways ...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

the legions of NIMBYs who want the trains to run anywhere but where they live

Isn't this what happened to BART, to stop it going all the way around the Bay?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

In fact, I'm opposed to BART's further extensions, because it's an overbuilt, incompatible system. It's like trying to extend the London Underground to Brighton or the New York subway to Schenectady -- a misuse of the technology. Especially because in the Bay Area we have a perfectly good railroad line between San Jose and San Francisco, which could provide BART-like service (trains every 20 minutes, faster, electrified) for a fraction of the cost of a Peninsula BART line.

BART is actually another case of trying to use one type of transit technology (heavy metro, like the Underground or NYC Subway) for two different purposes -- in this case, it's being used as a commuter railroad for suburbs 30-plus miles away.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Ah, right. See, that's the thing about being a drop-in visitor, you're likely to come away with one side of a story. Thanks for being the other side: what you say makes perfect sense to me. Tho' what we did over here in a similar situation was to run Newcastle Metro trains (the BART equivalent) on the established railway line to Sunderland (the SF-San Jose railroad equivalent); all they had to do was electrify the line, and lo: fast, efficient, every ten or twenty minutes depending on time of day, and they can still run trains on it too...

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

And indeed, that solution (which I know about from reading RAIL magazine works well there. It wouldn't be allowed here because trains built for the Metro systems won't meet the tank-like crashworthiness standards required of anything that runs on the main line. It's not so much engineering as regulation -- see my analogy about running an F1 car on the freeway.

American railroad engineering standards are built around crash survivibility and an assumption that every train will be involved in a crash. European standards are mainly based on crash avoidance.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

I hope High Speed Rail does happen in California. IT would be something that can really help that state.