I want Lionel to build one of these for my layout.
First read the description below then watch the video from You Tube. Sorry it is in Chinese.
A brilliant new Chinese train innovation - get on and off the
bullet train without the train stopping. No time is wasted. The
bullet train is moving all the time. If there are thirty stations between
Beijing and Guangzhou , just stopping and accelerating again
at each station will waste both energy and time.
A mere five minute stop per station (elderly passengers cannot
be hurried) will result in a total l
This thing accelerates from zero to ??? in about 1.75 x length of train. HEL-lo G loadings!
Not to mention, there’s overhead wire in the cartoon. What are the pantographs doing during this gyration?
Call me a pessimist, but on a practability scale of 1 to 10 this is about a negative six.
As for the claim that, 'Elderly passengers cannot be hurried…" Maybe not in China. They sure don’t need five minutes to make a station stop on the Shinkansen!
I’m sure I recall reading about a scheme to drop passenger cars off moving trains, perhaps back in the 1950s or '60s, to be braked to a stop at the station by a conductor; but I can’t find any mention of it among the tubes of the Internet.
The British used ‘slip coaches,’ dropped off the rear of the non-stop expresses, to serve smaller cities between terminals. They were returned to the originating termini by ‘stopping’ trains traveling at more mundane speeds and making the usual stops.
That’s the idea exactly. I have the feeling that I might have read about an American experiment with this British idea, which would have been newsworthy at that time. That was when American railroads were beginning to try to cut their losses in passenger service and might have tried anything. The RDC worked out better for them, I guess.
