The View from the Cab

by Rafael

one way to discover how HSR operators in other countries have built their infrastructure and run their trains is to tag along in the driver cab, at least vicariously.

Series 500 Bullet Train

The following YouTube video is part 1 of an eight-part series tracking the progress of a sixteen-car series 500 bullet train from Hakata (Fukuoka) to Tokyo on the Sanyo and Tokaido shinkansen lines traveling in "nozomi", i.e. express, mode at a top speed of 300km/h (186mph). The audio is in Japanese, but the author has kindly provided limited translation.



(Playlist for parts 2 to 8)

Total trip distance is 1069km (664mi), part 6 includes the "rollercoaster" section between Toyohashi and Laka Hamana. Operated jointly bby JR West and JR Central with a change of drivers at Shin-Osaka. Dwell times at run-through stations are around 50 seconds, this is normal in Japan. The journey as such is entirely uneventful. Infrastructure is supposed to be this dependable!

For our purposes, it's perhaps the design of the line that is of greatest interest: at-grade vs. elevated vs. trench vs. tunnel structures, selective use of sound walls, speeds through populated areas, fences etc. Also, contrast the graceful design of the train - inspired by the streamlined shape of a kingfisher breaking the water's surface without creating much of a ripple - with the ugly headspans.

Series 700 Bullet Train

Also informative is this in-cab video of a series 700 bullet train, the successor to the sleek but expensive series 500. This design features a duck-billed nose that minimizes tunnel boom and susceptibility to sway in heavy cross-winds and when passing high speed trains approaching from the other direction.

Note that the Japanese obsession with punctuality isn't just a source of personal pride for the impeccably dressed bullet train drivers but rather, an operational necessity: in many sections, the existing lines are at capacity, so drivers are expected to stick as close as possible to timetables that are prescribed down to the second. The Tokaido shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka supports a total of 285 trains on weekdays. It is headway constraints rather than a lack of engineering chops that force most Japanese bullet trains to travel (at slightly) lower speeds than their counterparts in Europe.

To activate close captioning in (somewhat broken) English, please click the up arrow on the lower right. Keeping the mouse button pressed, slide up and toggle the CC icon.



Eurostar

If you prefer a running narration in the Queen's English, below is the first video of a similar series documenting a Eurostar trip from Paris to London (h/t to Trains4America). The video was produced in 2004, three years before the second portion (CTRL2) of the High Speed 1 line in the UK was completed. Parts 11 and 12 of the series are now only of historical interest.



(Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

The UK is not a signatory to the EU's Schengen Agreement. The British government therefore required border controls including dedicated boarding platforms at all Eurostar stations in France even before the Al Qaeda terrorist bombings on the London Underground. Security consists of running your ticket through a bar code reader at a turnstile, your bags through a scanner and walking through a metal detector. With no baggage handling to contend with, passengers can arrive at the station as little as 10 or 15 minutes before their train leaves.

The first thing you'll notice is that the overhead catenaries feature poles not headspans. Also note the lateral distance to the nearest buildings and embankments/retaining walls on the way out of the French capital. The speed limits there may have more to do with signal block length and associated headways (i.e. emergency braking distance) on the regular network than with concern about noise: one section of the line supports a total of over 200 trains on a weekday. Out in the undulating countryside, extensive cut-and-fill earthworks were needed to keep the ruling gradient to 1:40 (i.e. 2.5%).

Lille, a city of a million inhabitants, got SNCF to run the line to the UK through its downtown area. French mayors and local business leaders understand that "beet field" stations like Haute Picardie make it much more difficult to attract the inward investment they need to compete with the Île-de-France region surrounding the capital. The section through Lille features tunnels, trenches and elevated structures with tall sound walls through residential neighborhoods. Some connecting regional trains depart from Lille Europe, many others from the legacy Lille Flandres station about 1/4 mile away, a single stop away on the local metro and tram lines. Passengers can also choose to walk through a shopping-mall-cum-conference-center.

Eurostar trainsets feature two tractor cars plus motors on the first bogie of the passenger cars immediately adjacent to the tractor cars, for a total of 12 powered axles. Total rated power is 12,200kW (16000bhp). In the event of an emergency, a single tractor car is sufficient to pull the trainset out of the Channel Tunnel, where the speed limit is 160km/h (100mph) for passenger and 100km/h (60mph) for freight and car/truck ferry trains. Along the route, the train has to adapt to four different signaling systems, multiple pantograph settings and two electrification systems. The 750VDC third rail pickups are no longer needed now that CTRL2 has been completed and trains terminate at St. Pancras International, shaving more than 20 minutes of the nominal line haul time and substantially improving punctuality.

Since the summer of 2009, Southeastern Highspeed regional trains also use the new High Speed 1 infrastructure. The series 395 "Javelin" trainsets have a top speed of 140mph and will provide frequent shuttle services between downtown and the sports venues in the East End during the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Takeaways

- operators all use automatic train control systems that engage the brakes if drivers ignore speed limits that are signaled in their cabs. In addition, the infrastructure operators have central facilities for managing traffic on the lines.

- high speed trains do run through suburbs and rural towns at 200-300km/h (125-186mph) in both Japan and Europe. Shinkansen lines typically run through Japanese towns on elevated structures, whereas European planners prefer to run trains at grade and construct numerous road overpasses.

- however, where the line runs (relatively) close to existing buildings, speed limits are either much lower or else noise is mitigated with sound walls and/or soundproof windows installed at the railway's expense.

- expensive tunnels into downtown areas of large cities are worthwhile IFF there is excellent connecting transit and/or transit-oriented development in the immediate vicinity of the station. Both can significantly increase ridership.

Thursday Open Thread

by Rafael

I'm pressed for time today, so here are a few snippets of HSR-related news from around the world:

• A new High Speed Commuter Train enters service in the UK today. Traveling at a top speed of 140mph, the Japanese-built "Javelin" is extremely light (for a train) and equipped with powerful electric motors. These permit rapid acceleration and deceleration such that the service can share the expensive HS1 tracks with Eurostar, whose trackage fees on the UK side have long been 10 times higher than in France. This is oneI reason why tickets are so much more expensive than those for similar distances within France. The new regional HSR service should reduce Eurostar's costs in the UK.
  
  For more on the concept of running both long-distance and purely regional HSR trains on the same tracks, see also our earlier post on "HiSpeed Services And Branding".
  
  
• Meanwhile, Greengauge 21, a prominent HSR advocacy group in the UK, warns that the government's proposed top speed of 250km/h (155mph) for HS2 (the extension to London Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester) will be insufficient to attract enough ridership. For the extension to be a commercial success, it claims the line will need to support top speeds of at least 300km/h.
  
  
• VIA Rail, Canada's counterpart to Amtrak, wants to upgrade service to 125mph in the core Windsor-Quebec City corridor. This could eventually connect to the Midwest HSR network that proponents think was given a boost by the FRA guidelines published yesterday since it will eventually link eight US states. However, much like the hoped-for Pacific Northwest link between Vancouver BC and Portland (perhaps Eugene), there are simply no public funds on the table. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a conservative, remains opposed to improved passenger rail service in his country. In addition, the Canadian border agency is demanding C$500,000 per year to man the new border post at the train station in Vancouver. This was enough to derailed the effort to get at least the Amtrak Cascades route extended.
  
  
• JR East has officially unveiled its new E5 series trains, which will serve the Tokyo-Shin Aomori route at a top speed of 320km/h (199mph) starting in 2013. The advanced active-tilt design will run on the existing Tohoku shinkansen line, which was built for a much lower top speed decades ago. While the Fastech 360 development platform for the E5 did achieve the desired top speed of 360km/h (224mph) on the same tracks, it failed to meet very ambitious targets for noise emissions and emergency braking distance. The signature retractable air brakes are not needed at the lower top speed defined for the E5 and were therefore cut from the final design.
  
  
• A new report on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv HSR line in Israel has uncovered cost overruns and inadequate planning in a key section. It seems likely that heads will roll in the agencies responsible.

HSR Seizes European Short Haul Market

So reports The Times today on how soaring fuel costs are driving passengers to high speed trains:

The airline industry has been crushed by the price of kerosene and deserted by passengers fed up with delays. After decades of disappointment, false dawns and virtually bankrupt Channel Tunnels, we have finally arrived at the age of the train and the evidence is in the crowd at St Pancras.

Only eight months after opening its doors in November, the new station is choc-a-bloc at peak hours, an exciting but slightly nerve-wracking development for Eurostar and its biggest shareholder, SNCF, the French state railway.

Traffic growth on Eurostar is accelerating like an Alstom locomotive, increasing by 21 per cent in the first quarter, compared with the same period in 2007, and revenues are up by a quarter. Those figures were no flash in the pan, a boost from all the hooplah at last year's opening of St Pancras. Traffic in the second quarter has grown at similar rates, insiders say.

While Eurostar thunders through Kent, the competing service to Paris and Brussels is lost on a never-ending building site west of London. The Terminal 5 fiasco has not helped British Airways's short-haul European business, but by next year (assuming no new operational disaster) it should have ironed out the wrinkles.

Then, BA is left with the awful question of whether short-haul air traffic has any future in Europe. The answer has to be a resounding “no”.

There are a LOT of reasons for high speed rail and we've covered all of those and then some on this blog (no really - check the archives!), including economic stimulus, the environment, declining oil supplies, and air quality. But it may be that the airline crisis is the tipping point that convinces Californians of the value of high speed trains.

For many years, even at the beginning of this year, a common reaction to the high speed rail proposal was "why would I take a train when I can take Southwest for $50?" Until this year Californians assumed that cheap air travel would always be there for them within the state.

No longer. As more and more media outlets report on the airline crisis, and as Californians make the correct link between higher fares and the higher prices they pay at the pump, they realize that cheap airfare is about to become a thing of the past. And since driving isn't an attractive replacement, owing to cost and time, high speed rail is the perfect solution for shorthaul intercity trips within our state.

I promise this isn't going to become "the airline crisis" blog. You'll continue to hear more about the full range of benefits of the HSR project. But it may be that the airline crisis is what cements in the public mind the need for high speed rail. And it should put the final nail in the coffin of the ridiculous ridership debate - as if there's any doubt about HSR's ability to attract enough riders with this knowledge in mind...

CHSRA Meeting: The Authority held its public comment meeting on the Final EIR today in San Francisco. Owing to my obligations here in Monterey I wasn't able to get to the meeting until around 3 PM, by which point it was already over. If only there were some sort of high speed train to get me to SF...oh well. As rafael told me there wasn't much new - the usual pro and con comments ahead of tomorrow's vote to accept the EIR.

The real action on HSR continues to happen at the State Capitol, where the Senate Appropriations Committee was expected to debate AB 3034 yesterday - but instead postponed that until Thursday at 10 AM. It's anybody's guess what's going to happen to the bill. We hope to have someone there for the meeting on Thursday.

HSR Success Stories Keep on Coming

Last year Eurostar opened a new high speed line connecting the Channel Tunnel to St. Pancras station in London - a faster, more central connection linking London to Paris than had previously existed. As a result ridership has soared by 21% - and as the Wired Autopia post notes, Eurostar's ontime record of 93% easily beat that of low-cost air carrier easyJet. Eurostar connects London to Paris in 2 hours 15 minutes - about 15 minutes less than the projected SF-LA trip.

In Taiwan, 23 million people have traveled on the country's HSR service in the first 15 months of operation. A China Airlines subsidiary, Mandarin Airlines, had to terminate its service between Taichung and Taipei because it failed to compete with the HSR system.

Here in the USA, the quasi-HSR Acela service has now taken 41% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor. And ridership on Amtrak California's intercity lines continues to soar. Meanwhile rising fuel costs are driving up airline fares, causing four airlines to go bankrupt in the last two weeks, and forcing Delta and Northwest to merge to cut costs.

Of course, HSR's opponents would have us believe that somehow California is unique - that HSR's global success won't happen here, that air travel's national struggles won't affect "cheap fares" here. Unless these critics have some secret method to cure peak oil and reverse rising fuel costs, Californians should not take them seriously.