If you think about it, those are the places that need high speed rail more than Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Here on the St. Louis-Chicago run, if I need to get between those two cities, I can choose from more than three dozen flights. Looking at the intermediate stops, Springfield, three flights to Chicago, none to St. Louis; Bloomington (the busiest intermediate stop on the route), one flight to Chicago, none to St. Louis. And the other stops - Alton, Carlinville, Lincoln, Pontiac, Dwight and Joliet - don’t have any air service to anywhere.
Of course, adding even five minutes per each intermediate stop means that you’re making the trip between STL and CHI probably 1/3 longer, but why should anyone in Illinois care about even more high speed trips to St. Louis, without any benefit to Bloomington?
I think we may be thinking about this fundamentally differently. I’m thinking of it as a direct competitor to air travel, where the main draw isn’t solely speed, but convenience and comfort. It’s NOT a traditional train service where you have a bunch of stops along the route, but rather a point-to-point service, that may have a stop somewhere between.
That’s the thing I think a lot of people miss- it’s not just a faster version of the same old passenger train service we had back in the day; it’s more like a rail-based version of airline routes.
To use the Texas Central Railway proposal as an example, you can take SW Airlines and be in the air for a hair less than 60 minutes, you could drive, and it takes somewhere in the ballpark of 4-5 hours, depending on stops, traffic and where you’re going and coming from. Or you hopefully will be able to take the high speed train and do the trip in 90 minutes.
90 minutes between Dallas and Houston is not as fast as Southwest Airlines, clearly. But you don’t have to go through the same level of security, you don’t have to wear seat belts and aren’t as constrained as you are on a flight. No stupid carry-on/luggage restrictions or fees either. And you still get there a LOT faster than driving.
But if they stopped in Ennis, Corsicana, Huntsville and the Woodlands/Conroe, that would likely add 30-45 minutes or more to the trip, and start slowing it down considerably for what amounts to microscopic marginal gain, because at the extreme end, Corsicana to Huntsville are maybe 2 hours apart- you’d be making it really convenient for the people taking that trip (a tiny number) at the expense of slowing down the Dallas/Houston crowd (probably 95% of the number).
That’s the kind of thing that kills the profitability of the service, even if it’s convenient.
Seems to me it should be possible to make stops at stations along the way without slowing down (much). Approaching the enroute station, the last car of the train detaches and is directed onto a siding where it slows and finally stops at that station. The rest of the train remains at high speed on the main track; it slows just a bit to receive another car from the enroute station that is carefully accelerated to join it at the rear.
Passengers would need to shift into or out of this detachable rear car depending on their destination.
This presumes sophisticated computer control (should be no big deal) and sidings long enough to accommodate the braking and acceleration (which my back-of-the-envelope calculation says should each be ~4 miles long for a train doing ~240 mph).
It should be doable. The catcher car would have an extension about 30 some feet long that would latch onto the incoming tail car and draw it in slowly. With a system like that, you would be able to use lower speeds on the train (sub-100mph) while still making pretty good time. The key thing is that the train would use a fair bit less fuel, not having to keep accelerating up to speed from every station.
The trains that I use quite frequently do use regenerative braking. These models aren’t in system-wide use yet, but they’re used quite often on routes that I personally use.
Is MAGLEV worth it? Those countries that have built MAGLEV lines-are they significantly costlier to operate? I suspect that the cost outweighs the value.
Just about every train I know of is electric. Most of the freight trains, though, use pneumatic braking, not regenerative, unless the locomotive does some amount of regen. Still, regenerative braking is not quite as efficient as not stopping. The difference may be pretty small, but maintaining speed would allow a slower train to cover a run in less time than a slightly faster train that stops a lot. And I suspect not stopping would be psychologically more pleasant for the riders.
I did some math. Assume 800mi trip with 21 stops, that’s 40mi between stops. Speed is 200mph, and takes 2 minutes to get up to speed.
From a stop you have the following steps:
0-200mph - 2min (2min @ 100mph avg is) - 3.3miles
200mph for 10min - 33.3 miles
200-0mph - 2min (2min @ 100mph avg is)- 3.3 miles
Idle at Station 1min
Total time 15min, total distance 40 miles. 40 miles in 1/4 hr is an average speed of 160mph
Straight thru at 200mph takes 12min. Each stop is an additional 3min to the trip
Straight thru 800 miles @ 200mph is 4 hours
19 additional stops @ 3min per stop is 57 minutes, so the “local” train is about 5 hours end to end.
Anyway, yes, it’s technically true that most modern locomotives use electric traction motors, but the implication of the last post is that the railways are electrified, which is totally untrue.
Most modern locomotives are diesel-electric, meaning that the wheels are powered by electric motors, and that electric power is generated by a diesel engine onboard the locomotive. The main reason for this is that direct-drive diesels are limited by the difficultly to design and maintain gearboxes to handle the forces involved; it’s more efficient and reliable to use electric traction motors and power them via a diesel engine and big alternator.
Electrified rail lines are either the famous “third rail” kind, or overhead wires/pantograph, and it is true that most rail mileage in the US is NOT electrified.
This is almost implausibly over the top. At a minimum, you’d need every tail car to be an engine capable of reaching hundreds of miles per hour on its own. You’d have to somehow counter the massive aerodynamic inefficiency of having basically a flat door instead of a streamlined windscreen at the front of the car. You’d have to develop a system of permanently sealing the doors at both cars and have a somewhat automated detachment and reattachment system at hundreds of miles per hour. This proposal would necessitate untold sums money into developing new and unproven technology. It’s almost like it was intentionally created to be overly costly and complex.
That’s certainly a thoughtful response and a reasonable argument. But to me, it calls the practicality of the whole enterprise into doubt.
Let’s say I need to go from Dallas to Houston with no intermediate stops. But I don’t actually need to go from downtown Dallas to downtown Houston – what I* really* need is to go from Irving to Pasadena.
That means I’m trading a suburb to airport leg for a suburb to downtown leg. Not much of an advantage there. And I still have to arrange for transportation from the train stop to my final destination, so there’s no advantage there, either. And there’s no way you can convince me there will be a cost advantage compared to flying Southwest.
So it comes down to 240 minutes in my car vs. 90 minutes on a relatively comfortable train vs. 60 minutes on an uncomfortable plane. The car is more convenient, the plane is faster. So is a comfortable ride worth the expense of building an entire infrastructure – especially one that doesn’t serve the suburbs, much less rural communities?
Actually, maybe not. If you want to have 200mph trains that are safe and efficient, you would want to have a fully-enclosed right-of-way, to keep animals, small boulders, tree branches, birds and general clutter from creating potentially deadly hazards from getting in the path. For most of the run, this might not be more elaborate than a mesh, not much finer than the one on the Diamondback pedestrian overpass in Tucson. But near stations, where coupling would take place, a full tunnel would allow the train to create a strong, persistent draft, which the tail car could use to facilitate its own acceleration.
And hell, why not an engine on the back? It has been done before. Once a good, reliable live-coupling mechanism is designed, it only need be built a bunch of times, not designed over and over again, the expense is only up-front. I suspect it might be feasible.
It seems like this isn’t particularly well thought out and your solution to any problem is to throw money at it. A thin mesh isn’t going to be airtight and thus isn’t going to be helpful in terms of the train sucking the car forwards. Moreover, since the car starts from rest it needs to begin accelerating well before the train enters the station. Finally, you’d need a complicated evaporated vacuum just to have any draft suction effect. An engine on the back would increase the cost of the system and decrease the reliability. You also say “once a good, reliable live-coupling mechanism” is developed like such a thing is possible with today’s technology at a reasonable cost. Are there even any surefire attachment systems that work at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour and can handle hundreds of tons of stress?
I mean, creating pie-in-the-sky technology projects is always fun (cf. Elon Musk). But what you are proposing isn’t particularly possible.
Having one train car catch up to the rest of a train, couple, and then have a safe passage for people to walk back-and-forth seems like it would be technically possible. I don’t think it would be particularly easy, though. I’m sure there are issues we haven’t even contemplated in this thread. Maybe a single car wouldn’t be as stable at speed as a full train set. Maybe the coupling could only happen on a straight section of track. Maybe the electrification can’t handle two current draws that close together.
Besides which, if the goal is to decrease travel times, you could accomplish that by just increasing the speed of the trains. That seems to be where the research is being done these days.