120 comments on The World according to Gave
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120 comments on The World according to Gave
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France has the potential to move large amounts of freight by rail, but fails to do so (management and the unions of SCNF often get the blame). Often the financial troubles of the Chunnel get blamed on this. Much more rail freight was projected than actually moved between England and France. (Of course I read the English language comments; French comments may blame the Brits). France has made it a goal to get every last switchyard and rural one track spur line electrified. Perhaps the Swiss move to rail freight will affect France as well.
Another overlooked point is the pioneering TGV system, now nearing completion. The rest of the EU is following the French lead. Short hsul sir travel is being challenged by high speed rail, and the EU HSR network will be in place as oil becomes more expensive and the balance point between rail & air shifts from the current ~400 km to longer and longer distances.
And lastly, France is on an Urban Rail building binge. It appears that every town of 250,000 is getting one tram lne and cities of a half million are getting two. Today, these non-oil transportation alternatives may move a minority of the daily trips; but that can change as oil rises in price. Already, there have been reports of French & German auto use falling by 6% as US use merely slows it's annual growth. They have a non-oil alternative in place to move to, we do not.
Best Hopes,
Alan
And then there will need to be a pretty ferocious debate with the public about whether or not nuclear electricity is a good idea or not.
It is "fairly easy" to recycle used fuel (try doing that with oil !) if fuel imports become a problem. CANDU reactors can burn used fuel basically "as is". France has enough used fuel in country today to get by for decades with recycling. A a breeder reactor remains a theoritical possibility.
The fuel cost per BTU is quite low for U. Always good if one is importing energy. Recycling and breeding are viable only at much higher fuel prices IMHO.
France is finally getting interested in wind as well, for some diversity of supply.
Best Hopes,
Alan
PS: yes you did include a picture of a TGV train. Sorry for my oversight.
Switzerland it the similar, I spent a week in Switzerland a few years ago working on a telecoms projects for the train operators. Spent most the time riding the trains which were absolutely faultless. One interesting observation was how much road freight from Italy, France and Germany was loaded onto trains at the Swiss border and offloaded at the other side having passed through the country without touching the road networks or burning a single gallon of oil. When I say loaded and offloaded I mean the heavy goods trucks themselves were transported by train from one side of the country to the other, drive on - drive off.
I think the only country that is following the french lead seriously is Spain, we are obsessed with HSR and lots of highways, so our solution to mobility and the energy crisis is building more roads and HSR. Another big problem with HSR is that it eats a big part of the budget. At least, in our future transport plans there is a return of light rail urban and suburban, that is a step in the right direction, IMHO.
The existing Northeast Corridor (Boston to DC) down to Miami and west to Kansas City via Chicago, etc. I 6think that it is the best option for the US, rather than true pax only HSR.
ICE in Germany is the equal of TGV, just a decade behind.
Do you have any comparisons available on the maintenance requirements of Railways vs Paved Road? I know track maintenance is pretty steep, but with Asphalt going up these days, how do they compare?
Also, is there a way to design railways to improve on their railbeds' durability? I know that with such a massive, installed base of legacy equipment, the thought of changing the basic structure of it would be monumental.. but still, how would you design a rail system, if you could start from scratch? Wider wheelbase, Different track structure? Tie systems?
I spoke with a guy in the rail industry at an unrelated event recently in Atlanta, and he told me about the big 'changover' in 1939? to a unified gauge, all over Christmas/New Years week. Who isn't thrilled by a story about a monumental, almost insane effort, where everyone has go go above and beyond.. well buckle-up, I guess.. ours is coming!
Bob Fiske
But on the other hand railway maintainace disrupts the traffic flow much more then road maintainance...
I think the biggest difference if you started from scratch would be larger loading gauges for wider and higher loads and higher unified platforms. This would at least be relevant for most european countries. The wheelbase dont matter as much.
If you had enough rail to have two complete systems it could make some sense to have a narrower wheel base for light and medium heavy rail passenger only traffic and a wider one for cargo and long distance travel. But this probably only made sense in earlier times when earth moving equipment were primitive and concrete expensive and the smaller turning radii of a narrow wheelbase mattered a lot for the building cost. Large parts of southern Sweden once had a 891 mm network, three swedish feet from before metrification. One small part of the 891 mm network have survived for commuting to Stockhom and there are a few museum railways. The rest is either scrapped or widened to standard gauge. Had those lines been built now none would have been built as narrow gauge.
There are differences between now and then. The war time electrifications in the early 40:s disrupted the traffic flow a lot less and where made faster then those being made today in Sweden. Back then most of the labour were done manually, they used manny more workers, the equipment installed where lighter and security procedures much simpler. They could more or less suspend working within a few minutes and step off the track when a train approched.
But that were an mobilization effort and today we optimize for cost with a completely different cost for labour and other machines being available.
The differences obviously led to problems and, with the aid of a large number of navvies, the Great Western was converted to the standard gauge. If memory serves me right, it took a weekend for the conversion, but presumably the amount of track was small at that time.
astronomer1
High speed systems around the world are being built to standard gauge, evin if the home country (Spain, Japan, and Taiwan, for example) uses another gauge for its conventional system.
There is a move in Europe to integrate the formerly separate national rail networks into a single european network with common technical specifications, signaling systems, and the like, and some big infrastucture projects that will create trans-european high-speed and freight networks.
Asia is divided into several large "gauge oceans" of differing gauges; Western Asia, including Turkey and Iran, are predominantly standard gauge, as is China; the Indian Subcontinent is mostly the 5' 6" gauge; Russia and the Central Asian republics are mostly 5' gauge; and Southeast Asia is mostly meter gauge. Projects across Asia, like the Bosporus rail bridge, a standard gauge railway connecting China and Iran across Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and the linking up of the Iranian and Pakistani rail networks across southeast Iran, are slowly knitting together Eurasia into a single network, although with several major breaks of gauge. It will be interesting to see whether the advent of Peak Oil and Global Climate Change will create a push for more linked up, inter-operable, and electrified rail networks across large regions.
Japan rail is all narrow guage 3.5 feet except their high speed rail network.
I would have built the track gauge slightly larger (New Orleans gauge of 5'2.5", 6 inches wider than standard) but with wider loading gauge and more overhead clearance.
Biggest change would be electrifying every rail line. Perhaps every other frieght car would have 1 electric motor and one driven axle. This would increase traction, acceleration & braking and allow for steeper grades on the track (much cheaper).
Changes today ?
Electrify at 60 kV AC, double & triple track most lines (back to 1950s), drill more tunnels, develop light weight & streamlined rail cars (aluminum, titanium, carbon composite) and my network of semi-high speed pax & freight rail lines. Most areas of US are served by two rail companies, try and build a third (perhaps my semi-high speed line).
Build more rail bypass lines around cities (save existing track for local service) and add more grade seperation (see Alameda (spelling) in Los Angeles). Rail tunnel to bypass most of NYC.
I am intrigued by Swiss plans to build quiet rail cars, making trains quieter.
Change US safety regulations closer to EU & Japanese standards. Improve signaling, thus allowing more trains/hour on track, better scheduling. Car tracking & routing is currently improving (bar codes & computers).
Off the top of my head :-)
Best Hopes,
Alan
http://krugtales.50megs.com/rrpictale/OWYtrip/OWYtrip_c.htm
scroll down to just above where the second set of pics start to show:
also, this short story (about halfway down the page) is quite wellwritten, it is the tale about a locomotive, 15 coal cars, a bet and a skilled engineer. One of the more exciting things I have read this week :)
http://krugtales.50megs.com/rrpictale/kiewit/kiewit.htm
This site gives a view into the world of american railfreight, always from the engineers perspective.
"I don't like HSR, construction and maintenance costs are very high"
Relative to what? Certainly not relative to large highways.
"energy consumption is also an issue (at least from an efficiency point of view)"
That depends on what you are comparing it to. Compared to rail service at slower speeds (say, 200 km/h) true high speed rail (300+ km/h) is less efficient. Compared to anything that runs on rubber tires it is likely more efficient, and compared to smaller vehicles with rubber tires it is a runaway winner.
http://strickland.ca/efficiency.html
Take a look at the table: the TGV Duplex achieves a gasoline-equivalent 506 passenger-mpg in actual service (using quoted 80% overall load factor). Even the least efficient European high-speed rail figure I could find was a potential (all seats filled) of 412 passenger-mpg for the AVE. You are unlikely to better that figure with a diesel bus going even 1/3 as fast. Compared to cars? No contest. There simply is no comparison - electrically-propelled rail service is remarkably efficient.
Contrast with airliner efficiencies on the order of 50 passenger-mpg - 1/10 as efficient!!! HSR also consumes less land - I recall reading the original TGV line (Paris-Lyon) in total consumed less land than one Paris airport. It's a piece of land that's distinctly longer in one dimension, but the overall area is smaller. I think in terms of efficiency HSR is a big winner when the alternative is flying. Lower speed rail service may be more energy efficient but total energy consumption will be much higher if the service does not attract people away from air travel.
About 10 years ago, an aquaintance who lived in Paris claimed that their metro/commuter rail system had the capacity to move the entire commuting population of greater Paris. Is this true?
Paris is unusual in big cities in that a lot of people still live in the core-- it's kind of Manhattan like in that regard. This is changing though, as more and more French people find it too expensive or inconvenient to live there, rents rise, etc. and there is a marked movement out to the suburbs
They make extensive use of buses, though.
The mayor had a scheme where they closed part of the roadway along the Seine for the summer, and built an artificial beach.
Since France is quintessentially a country of car drivers, who are militant about their rights, though, I'm not sure how long this initiative will last.
Paris Plage is here to stay. After decades of car domination, push-back is huge.
However there is a philosophical objection to congestion charging from the left -- I think it'll come one day, from a future right-wing minicipality.
It's a real shame all those wonderful boulevard trees were cut down, all over France, to make roads 'safer' (aka if someone skidded off the road, and hit one, they were toast-- the solution to which is, except at corners, not to skid off the road at a speed which will make you toast). A piece of the French landscape lost forever.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/Y2328E/y2328e17.htm
Roadside trees: the aggregate linear length of roadside trees fell by 23 000 km from 1975 to 1987. This 42 percent drop amounted to some 3.5 million trees. While there has been a reported 14 percent increase in trees bordering roads since 1992, the frailty of this aging legacy is heightened by security constraints. It is also inadequately managed.
Conversely France, with its cycling culture, and a car design like the 2CV, is/was way ahead of the curve on technologies with lesser environmental impact.
I've often thought what the world really needs is an updated 2CV.
I am envious of the French nuclear electric transport system - once England's motorways fall silent and everyone asks what went wrong - looking across the chanel to the Frensch zipping around on African U will stick in the throat.
Still a bit worried about the state of those cliffs at Paluel though.