A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
It doesn't go any faster until the tracks are updated, but the experience inside is much better!
experience inside is much better!
Yes, absolutely!
I miss the Quiet Car. For those of us who used to commute from Philly to NYC, a train ride that is anywhere from 75-90 minutes long is a blessing!
It takes me 2-1/2 hours to drive from Philly to Montclair, NJ at 80 mph. Do I care that the new Acela may not be faster? Who knows. When I sit inside and feel that comfy ride? I doubt I’ll care.
Yes, the tracks need to be updated but Acela is still faster than me driving.
(( _ _ ))..zzzZZ
The tracks are the limiting factor. The acela trains are basically the TGV. They could go the same speed with better infrastructure.
The tracks and I'm sure the distances between stops. Hard to hit full speed when you already have to plan to slow down for the next stop.
Part of handling that is having both local and limited-stop services (which they likely already do) and a good local/commuter train network.
I'd think, in order to hit full speed even with a limited stop or express train, you'd still have speed issues coming up on a metro area. You can't just blow through Philly at 160 even if you hadn't planned on stopping there.
In an ideal world you'd have bypasses or tunnels to help them keep up speed, but that all depends on land allocation and investment. If you're stuck with old windy narrow tracks then yes youre going to be limited.
Trains like shinkansen can go very fast through dense urban areas, i think mostly in tunnels - but also because they spend a lot to straighten the routes. Obviously there are still some slow sections, but they minimize it by design - and probably a willingness to bulldoze historical land ownership.
I guess in Philly the route probably winds around a bit. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ It looks like all lines funnel through a couple of very tight curves around the centre. That looks like quite a sensitive choke point.
But apart from that section it looks like the acela limit is over 100mph for quite a lot of the urban area around Philly, which isn't too bad. Its not like its crawling around at 60mph for half the distance.
There's another interesting looking slow chicane in Wilmington. In that case there's what looks like an ideal bypass line already there for any express. It runs through a massive siding (freight maybe?) that is limited to 10-30mph. Looks like a no brainer to me, strengthen those bridges and run any express through that. plenty of dead space around there to reconfigure just one level crossing i think to worry about. most of it is 3-4 tracks already judging by google map.
I heard that US freight and passenger rail don't like to share and enjoy though so probably that's a non starter.
You can but the track has to be built for it. Japan has stations that are passed at 320km/h (200mph). You need minimum four tracks (two platforms, two passing) and curves/gradients suitable for the speed, along with noise mitigations as necessary.
If you're trying to re-use tracks and stations built in the 1800s that's possibly less feasible.
The speed with high speed rail is usually made between cities, less so in dense areas. But that doesnt mean there is no gains to be made by improving track and running at say 130-160 km/h (80-100 mph)
To my knowledge these trains can alao accelerate quite fast because they are electric trains.
The express service is still considerably limited in the DC to Boston because it's like 40% metro and still has to slow down. You have DC, Philly, NY, and Boston all with substantial suburban infrastructure and it adds up.
In the best of situations on express it's hard to justify express acella unless you are really cash strapped.
Not really for Acela. The NE Corridor is fully grade separated for most parts and four cities chosen are far enough apart to make use of the train's top speed.
It makes use of the trains top speed for less than 50 miles of the route. It’s basically only infrastructure: tight curves, ancient bridges and tunnels, too many choke points. It may be grade separated but you still can’t blast through towns at full speed. It’s limited by freight trains. It’s even limited by shipping, because of drawbridges.
Edit - Here’s a partial map illustrating speed increases for some planned infrastructure projects
The Acela trains are far from being on par with French TGV, German ICE, or Japanese Shinkansen.
For a European, this is just a medium speed train.
As the comment you've replied to says, they are limited by the line speed and their design, and design speed, is effectively the same as the latest TGV.
TGVs at "normal speed" go at 320km/h or 200MPH. They can go up to 350MPH.
The Acela with its 160MPH top speed does not come close.
Its literally the same trainset by the same manufacturer as the TGV, hence the comparison. The highest track speed on the northeast corridor is 160 MPH, which is why they're calling it a 160 MPH train.
The problem is the infrastructure not the train. Its a good train.
No, it is not the same train. The Acela II has a technical top speed of 189MPH. It might be built by the same company (Alstom), but it is no TGV. One of the differences is that the Acela has less motor units than the TGV.
The Acela II has a technical top speed of 189MPH.
Sounds pretty comparable to 200 mph (320 km/h) to me..
The 200MPH is not the top speed. It is the operational speed. High speed trains in Europe regularly travel at speeds exceeding 300km/h.
Yes... The point is the maximum design speeds of both are very similar.
Yes TGVs run operationally at much higher speeds than the Acela II but that is due to infrastructure, not the train itself. The train itself, independent of track constraints, is capable of similar speeds. I don't think there's much more worth saying on the matter.
Even if same train, it is not run under the same regulations. The US FRA regulations really kneecap the operational speeds:
For the track between New Haven and Boston, [Acela] has a waiver for operation at 7 inches of unbalanced superelevation. This means, that the [tilting] Acela is allowed to use the same curve speed as non-tilting TGVs (or multiple units) in France. The "Acela Express" looses about half an hour between New York and Boston, compared to best practice in tilting train usage. (It also looses at least half an hour, compared to the calculations of US railroad engineers in the 1960s.)
Source: https://zierke.com/shasta_route/pages/15regulation.html
Note that the above was written about Acela 1. The Acela 2 is supposedly lighter weight, so in theory FRA might allow higher speeds (though I have yet to see any progress there).
You're not understanding the difference between the line speed and the train's design speed. The train is capable of comparable speeds, significantly higher than the track speed
It is not. The technical top speed of the Acela II is less than 190MPH due to technical restrictions, and it has less engine units than a TGV.
From the comment that started this thread:
They could go the same speed with better infrastructure.
No, we all understood this the entire time.
As long as they're running on the same tracks as freight, that's always going to be the case.
The Northeast Corridor (where the Acela runs) is owned by Amtrak and is not shared with freight. It's the track curves that are the problem. This is some of the oldest right of way in the US.
This is why America will never compete with places like japan or China because they build dedicated rail for their transport networks.
Amtrak has a bunch of infrastructure improvements that will make a bt of difference but they’re too limited. We have over a century of deferred maintenance on the rails.
It doesn’t matter how fast the train sets can go, when your limited by infrastructure like this
Gotta love those rails. That are more like wet spaghetti. No idea how they can ride on them at all.
"State of the art" mhmm
Sadly, the art is "Impressionism"
Serious question, why doesn't Amtrak just build its own tracks so they don't have to deal with the freight companies?
Prohibitive cost?
There isn't space on their "high speed" routes for proper high speed tracks. They could do it on other lines besides NE corridor but none of them are actually well traveled enough to warrant it. Other places which have good high speed rail either just seized land as needed (China) or have much more compact transportation routes between proper urban centers (Japan, France).
They literally said new tracks, not existing tracks
The problem isn't the tracks, it's the right-of-way. The agency just doesn't have the budget to acquire the necessary land.
As long as certain people expect Amtrak to be profitable, and we’re not willing to invest in fixing a century of deferred maintenance, how can we possible dig out of this hole?
My hope is in state supported routes, although they’re too limited won’t be fast or comprehensive. For example New Hampshire is not a place you’d find enough people to build profitable high speed rail. However they own control some existing track given up by freight rail. In particular I understand there’s a track to Manchester that connects to a track in use by MBTA commuter rail, and they’re considering rail service between Boston and the capital, including the airport. I don’t know if it will happen, but it would only be because of the state.
A lot of investments from the infrastructure act were to study state supported routes and how to add them to the Amtrak network. This is a big deal, because rail is so much more useful when added to a network. We’re stuck at the beginning where each project is considered for only its own merits, and need to build to the point where they can also be considered for the overall network
Passenger trains out of SPK, a town built by the railroads, leave at 01:15 eastbound or 03:19 westbound, nothing else.
I really wish America had faster trains like Europe