PC. US Underground High Speed Vacum Maglev Railroad.

Hating trains because of your experience of rail in the UK is like hating chips because of your experience in McDonalds.
British railways are crap. They are not at all an example of how railways should be run.
A system like that in the Netherlands, Germany or Japan is very good for a country.

Yeah UK trains are godawful but not as bad as the long-distance buses. I have had better service on most heritage railways than I get on either of those.


Talking of railways to americans is like proposing a CSA survival timeline in this forum. Strangely enough, HSR are working everywhere else in the world (but we know that America is different , don't we :rolleyes:).

HS vacuum maglev? potentially up to many thousands of km per hour; e.g. LA to NY in 60 minutes acceleration and decelerations factored in. Imagine, getting up in the morning in LA, communiting to work to Manhattam, back by 8pm on the shores of the Pacific. In France, with the TGV, you can live on in Marseille and commute to work in Paris.

You mention coast-to-coast trips in a day but seriously, who needs to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic in a day and is willing to pay the price to do it by this scheme? It is like talking to people who complain about how the closure of the Harlech-Blaenau Ffestionog or the Barmouth-Llangollen lines has made getting to those places so much harder, ignoring the fact that nobody used them in the first place and the local buses are both more frequent and more reliable than the trains were.

teg
 
What is so bad about British trains? The major routes seem to be doing 125mph and the distances are pretty short so that wouldn't appear to be a major detriment. Would in-cab signalling, which is a requirement for speeds above 125mph, allowing several British trains to do 140mph, be much of an improvement?
 

Devvy

Donor
What is so bad about British trains? The major routes seem to be doing 125mph and the distances are pretty short so that wouldn't appear to be a major detriment. Would in-cab signalling, which is a requirement for speeds above 125mph, allowing several British trains to do 140mph, be much of an improvement?

They are expensive, and pretty prone to regular delays.

Having said that, I don't think they are *that* bad; they are certainly a lot better then many other country networks.
 
What is so bad about British trains? The major routes seem to be doing 125mph and the distances are pretty short so that wouldn't appear to be a major detriment. Would in-cab signalling, which is a requirement for speeds above 125mph, allowing several British trains to do 140mph, be much of an improvement?

They are expensive* and not completely reliable. While the mainlines are actually pretty good and if you pre-book you can get very reasonable rates, the rural and commuter lines (which I imagine most people use) are overcrowded and pretty terrible. There have been several times travelling on the Cambrian Line where I have not felt safe given how crowded the trains are.

I don't think the West Coast Mainline could be increased to 140mph for the simple reason it doesn't have enough straight sections, pendelinos are already necessary to increase speeds to 125mph. The East Coast Mainline would probably benefit more from it but I'm not sure how much incentive there is it to expend the money.

teg


*Actually British trains are not more expensive, in fact they are frequently cheaper than French rates (for instance). The problem is that they are very commercially aggressive and charge a premium at peak times, which badly affects commuters.
 
getting back to vacuum maglevs, I suspect the first application might well be transatlantic, rather than transcontinental.

Make the segments in shipyards, mass production style, tow them out to sea, sink them to ~100m (so not bothered by wave action), buoy them in place, mate each segment with the adjoining ones, open the doors between segments, et voila.

Still bloody expensive, but cheaper than excavation, and mass production on one spot is likely to be a lot cheaper than building each bit in place.

Also, if you're going to go to the expense of a vacuum system, then why not go HIGH speed, like Mach 5 or so, in which case you need long distances (otherwise you never get to full speed at any reasonable acceleration), AND you can have a straight line tunnel (at that kind of speed, allowable radius of curvature is like 10s or 100s of km, which means a system on land is really, really tough to do).
 
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