Continuing our discovery of high speed logs I’ve thought about coming to the present day with a run about as high a speed as possible on steel rails.
Unfortunately I’ve yet to find a speed log of any Chinese HSR which top out at 350 km/h (215mph) but the French have second fastest at 320 km/h (200mph).
This speed log was from 2023 and runs from Paris Est (East) to Strasbourg. Total distance is 439km (273mi) done in 105 minutes. Average speed station to station 251 km/h (156 mph). That’s cooking!
It was done on one of the newest doubledeck TGVs. Originally all TGVs were single deck but ridership is so high that most TGVs built today are doubledeck. It’s like a Superliner in that you board the lower level between the trucks and then proceed to seats on the lower or upper deck. The interconnections between cars are only on the upper decks, so as to clear the wheels/trucks.
I also included a cab ride video but could not find one from Paris Est to Strasbourg so had to settle for Paris Est to nearby Luxembourg.
At the start of the cab ride at 1:11 you’ll see below the signal and centered between the rail a ramp of about 10 feet long. Look closely and it will resemble a crocodile. In fact it is called Le Crocodile.
It’s France’s version of our US ATS (automatic train stop) but predates it by half a century. This in itself is interesting. Invented in 1872 by the Compagnie du Nord (Northern Railways of France) which ran from Paris Nord to the north. Note the crocodile only operates on the low speed lines. The TGV high speed segments are all cab signaled only.
The crocodile functions the same as our ATS. If a signal is anything other than green/clear an alarm sounds in the cab and the driver (they’re called drivers there) have to acknowledge the alarm or the brakes are applied automatically and brings the train to a stop.
By 1914 it was installed by the Compagnie du Nord on all of their 1392 miles of double tracked lines, 410 miles of single tracked lines and on all 2906 locos, all steam at the time. After WW1, France mandated the crocodile on all RRs in France after several nasty wrecks during the war.
For more details on this fascinating early use of a form of automatic train control I attach a couple of pages from an 1878 article in The Engineer. I apogogize in advance for the poor copy. This first crocodile installation was done on the suburban section between Paris and Creil about 30 miles away.
In the article at that time the officers of the railway didn’t call it the crocodile. Only the track workers called it that at first. But by the 1880s even the corporate brass relented and it’s been called the crocodile ever since.
Note the results of the testing of the crocodile in the 3rd column specifically the two No. 2 test stops at Villiers le Bel and Goussianville where they let the driver ignore the caution single and the crocodile stopped the train. This was purely by electical singal. There was no mechanical component to the system except a Hughes electromagnet to pull the vacuum brakes.
Bon voyage!
