Hello all ;
Here’s a video depicting a high speed running in Europe. It’s probably not new to most of you, and back here in a short time conventional trains just like these running at high speed will increasingly became a rarity, with all the high speed ‘TGV’ type lines being built and/or projected. Here’s the video. Enjoy
I think we might need to point out that lots of track in the US already supports 100-mph running, but it’s the signalling that is crippling it to 79 mph. This month’s “Ask Trains” treats this problem in some detail. Sometimes the signalling costs as much, or more, than the track does.
Wow! I wonder how fast we were going? It is most impressive that in 6 minutes and 10 seconds we meet three other passenger trains and go through 6 stations, all modern and some in a rural area. There seemed to be an adjacent track on the left at a lower elevation during the second half of the video. Could that be an old main line or an industrial track? It seemed to be electrified.
I think this could be in Portugal. The “wrong line/direction” signal backgrounds had a rectangular background while the “right line/direction” signals had an oval background. This is characteristic of signaling in Portugal. Also, the YouTube channel is maintained by someone from Portugal.
High-speed trains like that in Europe usually do not have wayside signals. That’s probably why we don’t see that many.
Over the movie, track speed varies between 112 and 125 mph.
The Adjacent track (there used to be two, and yes it’s the old main line) is a sort of long (7 miles in lenght) siding, with some suprs connected. It is normally used by frreights and it’s limited to 37 mph. It is electrified since it’s quite frequent to sideline mainline freights over there in order to let the faster passenger trains running smoothly.
Indeed it is, in the North main line some 30 miles from Lisbon (the train is running southbound).
About the ‘wrong line/direction’, I must state that there isn’t a normal circulation way, since tracks are banalised. There are howevrer some limitations involved if, for istance, a train will have to be routed in the ‘abnormal’ way, such as as speed limit of 100 mph.
Also in the ‘normally used’ line - the one at the left, signal blocks are much shorter.
To be true, the train that we see doesn’t need to rely on the wayside signals, since it’s ATP equipped. However, there are still some trains - freighters - in wich the engines are not qequipped with it, hence the wayside signals.
The ATP is used in such a mandatory way, that if for some reason a faster train gets its ATP device out of order, a speed restriction os 100 kmhr (62 mph) will be de rigeur. Logicaly, in the lines with ATP, there are no speedboards indicating speeds higher that that.
For what it’s worth, in the Northeast Corridor, Commuter Rail is mixed with Amtrak HST trains.
Often, while riding a north bound MBTA Commuter Rail at 80 mph between Providence and Boston, a double track line, the dispatcher will “fleet” the south bound track for Amtrak northbound service. The dispatcher radios the our train that we will be overtaken by train # *** about at MP **** .
We’re moving north at 80 when an Acela “booms” by us in the same direction on the next track at 150. A real “waker upper”.
Ahh! I didn’t think of the conventional trains using the European line. Of course they use the wayside signals, silly me.
Don, is it required for the dispatcher to warn you of the HST or do they just do it as a courtesy so you brace yourself for it? I’ve always wondered about it since I nearly hit the ceiling when I first experienced a Northeast Direct overtaken by a Metroliner II.
When i’ve been on-board, they always called it in (this was several years ago)(security is much tighter now even tho I had gone through there safety training). You know, don’t hang your head out the left side of the train to look.
Cab Signal Overspeed control is a regulation problem easily solved with money. The real key to high speed on existing rail lies in minimizing unsprung weight which in turn reduces Vertical Dynamic (P2)Track Forces. These are deep disturbances in the substrate that literally distroy the tracks. All European motive power has been designed to Pe Forces for years. None of Amtrak’s locomotives, with their axle mounted motors, come anywhere close to being suitable for speeds above 79 mph. The exceptions are the Acela and the Turboliner Trains.(No longer in service). Much has been written on the subject going back as far as 1973. In 1993, Gordon Campbell and I presented a paper to the Transportation Research Board Committee on Intercirty Passenger Transportation titled, “High Speed on Existing Rights of Way, The Significance of Vertical Dynamic (P2) Forces”. Body-mounted motors are best followed by truck mounted. The Acela has truck mounting and the Turboliners,with hydraulic drive, have only the partial weight of the cardan shafts and the axle gear boxes…
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Maybe not so much. Most 79 mph track is FRA class IV, which is good for 60 frt, 80 passenger. That’s what most of what’s out there for the Class one RR. There may be some decent stretches of class V track, 70 frt/90 passenger, but there is almost no Class VI track outside of the NEC, Harrisburg and Hudson Line. The alignment of the ROW might be conducive to faster speeds, but that’s a whole 'nother can of worms.
Does truck mounted include any differentiation between axle hung (nose suspended) and not? If I remember right, the AEM-7s have frame mounted motors that are not nose suspended. I would think this would be almost as good at body mounted - having the motors between the primary and secondary suspension.
Reaching back 15 years, Metroliner Service pulled by AEM7 locomotives cruised at 125 mph. I’ve been onboard when a Metroliner streached out to 129 mph (fudge factor). 10 years ago, with track work complete between New Haven and Boston, but without the Catenary ready, F40PH diesels were geared for and ran at 110 mph.
The fellow in the office next to mine is doing his PhD research on some manner of electric drives. His “day job” has been with United Technologies Hamilton Sunstrand where electric drives are supposed to be eliminating all of the costly and maintenance-intensive hydraulic motors on airplanes.
I was giving him a hard time the other day, for all of the advances in motor design and the use of electronics to provide variable-speed control of AC motors, there is renewed interest in some form of flexible mechanical drive to get between the motor shaft and wheels of high-speed trains on account of the unsprung mass hammer-blow problem. He was “pulling my chain” for my interest in constant-velocity couplings, saying that if the power transmitted by high tension power lines were done with mechanical shafts, the shafts would have to be bigger in diameter than barrels. Of course one would not contemplate anything but electric transmission to get power from one geographic area to the next, but mechanical transmission appears to not be going away anytime soon, even people thought it would, for transmission over varying distances of feet or even inches in rail and automotive suspension.
Your traditional solid-axle rear-drive car has a Cardan shaft. Cardan is just a fancy name for a universal or U-joint, after this Italian fellow named Cardano back in the Renaissance.
[quote user=“Paul Milenkovic”]
The fellow in the office next to mine is doing his PhD research on some manner of electric drives. His “day job” has been with United Technologies Hamilton Sunstrand where electric drives are supposed to be eliminating all of the costly and maintenance-intensive hydraulic motors on airplanes.
I was giving him a hard time the other day, for all of the advances in motor design and the use of electronics to provide variable-speed control of AC motors, there is renewed interest in some form of flexible mechanical drive to get between the motor shaft and wheels of high-speed trains on account of the unsprung mass hammer-blow problem. He was “pulling my chain” for my interest in constant-velocity couplings, saying that if the power transmitted by high tension power lines were done with mechanical shafts, the shafts would have to be bigger in diameter than barrels. Of course one would not contemplate anything but electric transmission to get power from one geographic area to the next, but mechanical transmission appears to not be going away anytime soon, even people thought it would, for transmission over varying distances of feet or even inches in rail and automotive suspension.
Your traditional solid-axle rear-drive car has a Cardan shaft. Cardan is just a fancy name for a universal or U-joint, after this Italian fellow named C
Just a reminder that the PCC streetcar does not use nose suspended traction motors. The two motors on each truck are mounted longitudinally and drive through some kind of worm or spicer geatbox to each axle. But the unsprung weight is substantially reduced by resilient wheels.
Arne’t then, resilient wheels an absolute requirement for the “wheel motor” as developed by Alstom, Magnet Motor, and Energy Storage Systems?
Yeah, I have seen a PCC truck, I believe it was at the Illinois Railway Museum some while ago. Each traction motor is truck mounted, and it drives the right angle gearbox through a Cardan shaft, that shaft with the universal joint at each end.
Something tells me that the original Bullet Train in Japan used this kind of arrangement, but I would need to confirm it.
I am not so sure that the resilient wheel is that great for railroad use. A one-time neighbor who had worked for Rockwell talked about doing a prototype streetcar in Detroit and of sending a wheel through a drug store window when it came off. A resilient wheel failure resulted in a fatal accident on the German ICE train. OK, two incidents does not make a pattern, but let’s just say there are concerns.