Obviously true - and self-propelled cars exist (see Balthisar’s link).
There’s no reason the front of the “transfer car” needs to be flat & unstreamlined. The rear of the main train obviously needs to be compatible with it.
As on all current high-speed trains.
I think this would need to be fully automated.
It would be rather easy to work out a computer simulation of this process, which would provide detailed specs that the actual hardware would need to meet. Basically, you’d need a self-propelled car capable of X acceleration and a system that can take control the speeds of both the main train and the transfer car. This could be developed, tested and debugged on normal-speed trains before being applied to their high-speed cousins. Seems fully feasible and not unduly expensive.
A detailed analysis might conclude that the process is fully reliable only at speeds below, say, 100 mph. So you slow the main train to that speed for the re-coupling. This introduces a delay, but a much smaller one than would be the case when the train has to stop at each station.
It could probably handle any section of track that a high-speed train can safely use.
To keep cars on the track, high-speed rail pretty much requires very gentle curves. Googling suggests the minimum curve radius for a train doing much above 200mph is something like 7 km.
I’m not familiar with the geography here but surely your desire to go from a particular suburb in Dallas to a particular suburb in Houston is badly served by both train *and * air travel, as any given airport or train station is highly unlikely to be located in the notional suburb which is any given passengers’ ultimate destination. But if you had to locate the station or airport in one location then the best for most people is likely to be the city centre (outside the US this usually has the highest concentration of jobs, retail & tourism) or some convenient transit/road interchange. Hence why most major train stations are located in places like that.
Also don’t forget to take into account the 30-90 minutes you will waste in airport security.
True… if you were unfortunate enough to schedule a flight from DFW Airport to Intercontinental, you’d probably have a 20 minute trip to the airport from Irving, and close to an hour heading south to Pasadena. Even Love Field - Hobby is still a 20 minute drive on either end.
Ultimately my experience and example is based on European high speed rail which does exactly as I describe. Brussels-Amsterdam stops once in Antwerp (or was it Rotterdam?), and Rome - Milan stops twice- once in Florence and once in Bologna. London-Paris is a direct route.
Any way you slice it, you’re going to end up having to find a way from the terminus of your main transport method (airport, train station, bus station) to your final destination, or roll it into the time in your car trip.
Personally, I find air transport to be such a colossal pain- security, restrictions, baggage checking, seat belts, turbulence, nothing to see, no food, cramped conditions, etc… that I’d happily add a half-hour to my trip to avoid those things. And yes, the European high speed rail is comfortable, fast, clean, has no baggage check or security, etc… My very most pleasant long-haul travel experiences have all been European high speed rail, so I’d be ecstatic to see it implemented between Houston (where my parents and family live), and Dallas (where I live).
And if you’ve ever flown the DAL-HOU SWA flights, they’re almost always full or nearly so; there’s certainly a lot of demand for travel between the two cities.
For me the only difference between a normal high-speed train at 300 km/h and riding the maglev at 450 km/h is the number on the sign at the front of the cabin, as far as feeling. The maglev is kind of cool because it’s going that fast in the city. The high-speed trains slow down in urban areas because they’re usually stopping, or passing through a station, and so the normal view is countryside.
One and half hours is my threshold for taking the train versus flying, i.e., the train is so much more comfortable that as long as it doesn’t cost me more than 90 minutes time (including transportation to airport/train-station on each end), then I’ll choose the train 100% of the time.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to imply that if there was an extra hour tacked on, that I’d fly! I was just saying that if the nominal time for Houston-Dallas flights is 1 hour, and taking the high-speed train is 90 minutes, I’d happily take the train- 30 minutes isn’t worth that much.
I’ve found that in all, driving usually takes me somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5 hours in total, 95% of that on the road, flying is somewhere in the ballpark of 2.5-3, with only 45-60 minutes of that actually flying.
So if I could take the train and spend 90 minutes on the train, and another hour tacked on for getting to the station/from the station, the time’s roughly equivalent to flying, but it’s SO much less of a hassle.
Now if in total the train took 4-5 hours, then the comparison with driving would come down to gas cost vs. ticket cost, and the freedom of having my own car vs. mooching off my parents.
The high-speed trains (HSR) typically cruise at 300 km/h, but slow down in urban areas, when passing through stations, and when stopping at a station (naturally). This means that most of the view is rural countryside when at speed. Throughout most of the journey you can see the built-up areas in the distance, however because they’re in the distance you can’t appreciate the speed. At certain sections on my Nanjing-Shanghai route we run parallel to a limited access freeway where traffic flows 100 to 120 km/h. It’s like the cars are standing still, which is actually kind of cool (conversely when driving on the same road, the trains passing by make you think, holy crap, what was that?!).
The Maglev is a lot more interesting because it connects a highly urbanized section of Shanghai Pudong area to Shanghai Pudong Airport, and about two-thirds of the trip is highly urbanized (it’s much more rural out near the airport). The entire track is elevated, which gives you an awesome viewing angle for anything you want to look at. Because you’re passing everything at 430 km/h, and it’s so close to you, you have a much, much better idea of the sheer speed that you’re travelling. Certainly as on the HSR, if you focus on the distance, it’s kind of boring, and not any different really than being in an automobile.
You know, kinematics and the fact that your eyeballs and brain are good at tracking points make high speed travel less visually interesting for speed addicts unless you force yourself to look close. One trick I like to use to see how fast the far landscape is going by is to focus on an imperfection or piece of dirt or dried water drop or some other point on the window. If you “look through” that into to the distance while maintaining focus on the particle, even the far away stuff goes by amazingly fast.
