Hello all ;
since I did not saw anything about the new trains Amtrak will get rom Alstom, here are’ some stuff I collected from the web ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avelia_Liberty
http://archyworldys.com/the-avelia-liberty-this-tgv-alstom-has-sold-in-the-us/
The official video
Being an european, this train looks like rather faniliar. I wouldn’t call it a TGV. It’s more like Alstom’s AGV with a Pendolino tilting system
It does resemble the AGV closely, but due to the sepparate power cars it seems that everyone’s referring to it as a TGV. Maybe because nobody outside fan groups in the US has ever heard of the AGV… We’ll see what the final product is like as it might be substantially different from artist renderings.
That means a some enlughtenment is needed right ?
So here are some infos abiut the AGV ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGV_(train)
Some images os Italos (AGVs) and ETR 500’s at speed, just for the comparison. The look is way too familiar
Let’s differentiate looks from technology. Yes it looks somewhat like an AGV but the AGV was all about distributed power (i.e. EMU). Under the skin this much more resembles a TGV, although the coaches seem longer.
I guess FRA didn’t back off on its requirement that the end vehicles not be occupied by passengers (so many here predicted that they would back off, but I thought not). Amtrak wanted it.
In a couple of instances I notice the catenary bouncing around after the passage of the train.
I think that having those miniature power cars is a good compromise. It’s almost as good as distributed power and the FRA gets the double-ended crash management. The Acela 1 is almost twice as powerful as it needs to be because of the two power cars as it is.
I’m disappointed. It increases maintenance costs signficantly to have two dead-weight cars (whether they contain motors or not.)
The entire world is going the *MU route. I know Amtrak is a long way from going there with its overnight services, etc, but for basic corridor trains it just seems like the FRA is sabbotaging any hope of making passenger rail prove itself here.
Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned so far is that the FRA strongly frowns upon high voltage connectors between cars. In order to not have a pantograph on every car of the train, the power cars can contain equipment to reduce the voltage to traction power levels for distribution across the train.
Are you saying that some of the cars have traction motors? Guess I missed that.
Certainly not a very forward-looking choice by Amtrak and the FRA. Other countries manage millions of miles with power connections between cars in EMUs without problems.
No, I don’t think that the Liberties are power distributed, but it was an option that was considered. I was mentioning it not in the context of this set of equipment but as a reason why power cars might be required on essentially EMUs on HSR sets. I should have been more clear.
The FRA is still a bit behind the times, it’s time for them to get together with the rest of the developed worlds(at least European and Asian) rail agencies to determine what things they could change. Of course the major difference between here(the US) and elsewhere is the mixing of heavy freight and passenger(which still happens somewhat on the NEC, though it COULD be entirely eliminated). That would allow them to change the crashworthiness numbers for the two different types of services/routes…i.e. passenger rail dedicated or mixed use. Dedicated passenger rail routes don’t need the same 800,000 lb. crashworthiness restriction that a mixed use route does.
The only way you get freight totally off the NEC is to put the companies that are located on the NEC and require rail service out of business - not good press, not good economics.
After looking at photographs of European equipment after their serious incidents - the equipment looks shreded like an empty aluminum can and the riders paid the price.
Parallell separate tracks for freight and passenger? Just a thought.
Of course. Or access at night? And how many businesses along the NEC have sidings for rail access of way freights in these days of trainload services?
With Amtrak’s acquisition of the NEC in 1976, all possible freight traffic the at NEC had previously handled was forced off. Only traffic that could ONLY be handled using the NEC remained. NS can only acess some of it’s terminals through using trackage of the NEC to reach them. Most freight service is transacted at night. Other carriers use the NEC for relatively short stretches as a connection between the carriers subdivisions.
There still exist legacy businesss that transact transportation in carload volumes along the NEC, most if not all are acessed during hours of limited Amtrak operation.
Having Passenger and Freight operating on separate but parrallel tracks still presents the possibility of a train on one derailing into the train of the other and the resulting impacts.
Saying there should not be freight on the NEC is easy, devising means to keep freight off the NEC is a much more difficult and expensive proposition.
I’m not sure where this thing comes from that “the rest of the world” doesn’t run passenger and freight together. The idea the two can’t co-exist seems to be mostly a US thing. It’s true that countries that have built dedicated HSR systems don’t generally run freight on their HSR tracks, but that has as much to do with practicality as anything else, the lines themselves being built with less attention to grades than good freight lines, and the routes not serving freight markets any better than the existing infrastructure.
But dedicated HSR lines are the exception, not the rule. With the exception of High Speed One, all UK mainlines (for example) have a mix of both.
This is usually the part where someone jumps in and says “Ah! But American freight is entirely different! It’s heavier!”, which is… sorta true. But does it really make any difference? If an Intercity 125 travelling at 125mph crashes into a train carrying aggregates for making concrete, do you think the results would be any different for a UK train vs an American one? Would it matter much that the American train is a mile long and the UK one only 1,000 feet? The results, surely, will be identical even with the wildly different total loads of the two trains.
There’s no need to remove freight from the NEC for any reason other than to make scheduling easier. If the NEC is managed correctly, with modern signalling and traffic control, there should be no safety issues, even running European standard passenger train sets.
What is a safety issue is an absence of useful train services pushing people into unsafe forms of transportation like road transportation. But the FRA, silo’d into rail, has no way to take that into account.
Yes, of course it should be, with good track that is well-maintained and modern traffic control. Would it be in reality here?
When the will and money magically appear for HSR, that will be time enough to worry about dedicated lines. We would do better to concentrate on passenger trains that run as fast as they did 60-70 years ago, which the railroads managed to mix very well with freight trains that ran a lot slower then than they do today.
Yes, most of them had more physical plant to work with – but also less-sophisticated technology. Let’s walk, and develop the market, before we try to run. That’s what has been done in the Pacific NW, California, NY, Virginia and a few other places that mix frequent passenger service and freight.
Amen!