VIA Rail Canada trains currently go up to 100 MPH in some places

In Manitoba trains can get up to very high speeds on the 'National Hill,'
just out side of Winnipeg....

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VIA Rail Canada trains currently go up to 100 MPH in some places

In Manitoba trains can get up to very high speeds on the 'National Hill,'
just out side of Winnipeg....

Oh now you've done it. The National Hill is supposed to be a secret. Even the people in Winnipeg don't know they have a Hill.

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the people in Winnipeg don't know they have a Hill.

Bill, I used to live in Winnipeg, there
are a lot of things they don't know there...

:):)



(Ok I'll stop now.)

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I think many modern freight bogies also have some limited axle swing

No, they really don't.

Take a look at Figure 4 here. I'm sure I read somewhere about this showing up on freight trains in North America. Or maybe I'm thinking of passenger cars.

Found it! Maybe not in service, but tried on coal cars on CPR. Quote from page 676 of Wheel-Rail Interface Handbook edited by R. Lewis, U Olofsson. Flexible steerable bogies used on CPR coal trains since 1989, resulting in significant reduction in flange wear and tread shelling.

High speed passenger trains were tried in Canada back in the last century, but the problem still remains that nobody (private or government) wants to pay for the right of way upkeep this needs. Canadian freight operations are making good money right now and nobody in the industry wants to mess with that.

The Turbo Train between Toronto and Montreal in the 1960s to 1980s hit speeds of 140 mph on stretches of good tracks, but the scheduled times for the complete run then were only slightly better than today's diesel-electrics on the same run. Neither the Turbo or the modern trains regularly meet their schedules, as they are often held up by freights.

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You are behind the curve Chris.
125mph routes include:
East Coast Main line, major sections between London and Newcastle
West Coast Main Line, major sections between London and Carlisle
Great Western Main Line, London to Bristol

HS1 is operated at 300kph 186mph), but is cleared for 330kph.

East Cast is signaled in part for 140mph, and the Class 91 is capable of doing that with a bit in hand, and if thee is a speedo fault with the DVT leading will hit the loco "soft" speed limiter which is set at the high side of 150mph.

In addition to that there are a lot of 110mph cleared routes, I'd have to dig through the Sectional Appendix region by region to list them all.

(As an aside - the Virgin Class 390 is only cleared for 125mph, have their speed limiters set at 142mph, and have never operated at anything other than 125, but were designed to operate at 140mph - it would have saved a lot of money to have designed them for the speed they operate at...)

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Do you have a National Hill in England?

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You are behind the curve Chris.
125mph routes include:
East Coast Main line, major sections between London and Newcastle
West Coast Main Line, major sections between London and Carlisle
Great Western Main Line, London to Bristol

HS1 is operated at 300kph 186mph), but is cleared for 330kph.

East Cast is signaled in part for 140mph, and the Class 91 is capable of doing that with a bit in hand, and if thee is a speedo fault with the DVT leading will hit the loco "soft" speed limiter which is set at the high side of 150mph.

In addition to that there are a lot of 110mph cleared routes, I'd have to dig through the Sectional Appendix region by region to list them all.

(As an aside - the Virgin Class 390 is only cleared for 125mph, have their speed limiters set at 142mph, and have never operated at anything other than 125, but were designed to operate at 140mph - it would have saved a lot of money to have designed them for the speed they operate at...)

The dedicated HSR track for the CHSRA system is from what I read, is designed for a max speed of 250mph or 402.336kph(kph courtesy of Bing), while the trains so far are only calling for 220mph max(for the moment) or 354.05568kph(kph courtesy of Bing). So far on the two segments that have signed contracts for Construction, there is 95 miles of dual track, there is a 3rd segment of 30 miles(this could be more than 30 miles, only the future or the CHSRA knows for sure), but that hasn't been let out for bids yet, probably cause of the new alignment through Bakersfield.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Do you have a National Hill in England?

The nearest we have is probably the Lickey Incline, 2 miles at 2.65%

The nearest we have is probably the Lickey Incline, 2 miles at 2.65%

Damn stupid way to build a railway!! Same as the line though Dawlish .....

It was assumed that cable or horse assist would be used on the steep bits back when you Brits built railroads like this. It looks silly today, but in 1832, compared to the roads that were available, it probably looked pretty cool.

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Of course it is a fairly useless to try and compare UK rail with the USA.

UK - Miles of mainline - 9,788
US - Miles of mainline - 149,000
US - Miles used by Amtrak - 22,000

Railways in the UK had to fit on a small island that was already inhabited.

Rail in the US created towns and cities as it moved west.

Whilst both suffered from the car, truck and plane because the UK railways had been nationalised for many years it was much more integrated. Having one body in charge of the track makes it easier to control train movements. With the freight railroads owning and maintaining the bulk of the track in the US it means that passenger services are the poor relation.

You cannot run a passenger service with these sort of delays on a daily basis



That is today from Amtrak's own website and is far from unusual. Mostly held up by freight trains. Amtrak are supposed to get preference over freight, but watching the webcams on US rail-sites, there is just and endless stream of freight these days.

Even on the East Coast corridor where the Acela express runs, mostly on Amtrak owned track, from Boston to Washington via New York, it can never really be considered "high speed" why, because it has to slow down at places like New London CT, where it would be much to dangerous to travel at high speeds as the track pass right through the town. It doesn't stop here just slows to a crawl.



I took this picture standing on the road, nothing between me and 2023.

There is just a small half barrier that separates track from the town and river.

To have proper high speed rail you need dedicated tracks that do not cross roads and foot-ways, most of the US seems to treat railways like roads, no fences or dividing the track from the surroundings. Whilst we only have 9,788 miles of track, most it is fenced off and difficult to access.

It is expensive to build high speed rail, it cost £80 million per mile to build High Speed 1 and HS 2 is coming in for all sorts of protests.

It can be done but it would take a dramatic reorganisation of the railways in the US and the will to make it work. I for one believe it would work there given the distances.

I do not however expect to see it in my lifetime.

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It has been getting worse over the last 10 years Bernie, with freight traffic growth being limited only by how fast the North American lines can procure rolling stock. Passenger services just slide further and further down the list. The only exception is a few urban commuter services, like GO here in Ontario, that have built their own tracks.

Talk continues on a new high speed line from Windsor to Quebec City here in eastern Canada, but even that will need about 700 miles of completely new, or major upgraded, line. At your price of £80 million per mile that is £56,000 million. The area served has a population of about 15 million - that works out to £3,700 per person to build the track. I don't see that ever happening, without a major change in the local economy and/or how local politics work.

Just for example, I live in a city of about 300,000 people that would be on the new line. Right now there are two major rail lines passing through the town, and at last count there are dozens of level crossings (North American for the road and railway being at the same level) within the city limits. The city is slowly replacing these with elevated crossings, about one every ten or twenty years. The last one cost $130 million bucks, or £67 million. Again, without a major change in the local economy and/or how local politics work they will never replace all the level crossings before the oldest elevated crossings wear out and have to be replaced. Governments are afraid to launch a major project like this, because the expenditures will last till the next election. The railway companies' answer is to move the tracks out of town, which makes passenger service even less attractive.

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Of course it is a fairly useless to try and compare UK rail with the USA.

UK - Miles of mainline - 9,788
US - Miles of mainline - 149,000
US - Miles used by Amtrak - 22,000

Railways in the UK had to fit on a small island that was already inhabited.

Rail in the US created towns and cities as it moved west.

Whilst both suffered from the car, truck and plane because the UK railways had been nationalised for many years it was much more integrated. Having one body in charge of the track makes it easier to control train movements. With the freight railroads owning and maintaining the bulk of the track in the US it means that passenger services are the poor relation.

You cannot run a passenger service with these sort of delays on a daily basis



That is today from Amtrak's own website and is far from unusual. Mostly held up by freight trains. Amtrak are supposed to get preference over freight, but watching the webcams on US rail-sites, there is just and endless stream of freight these days.

Even on the East Coast corridor where the Acela express runs, mostly on Amtrak owned track, from Boston to Washington via New York, it can never really be considered "high speed" why, because it has to slow down at places like New London CT, where it would be much to dangerous to travel at high speeds as the track pass right through the town. It doesn't stop here just slows to a crawl.



I took this picture standing on the road, nothing between me and 2023.

There is just a small half barrier that separates track from the town and river.

To have proper high speed rail you need dedicated tracks that do not cross roads and foot-ways, most of the US seems to treat railways like roads, no fences or dividing the track from the surroundings. Whilst we only have 9,788 miles of track, most it is fenced off and difficult to access.

It is expensive to build high speed rail, it cost £80 million per mile to build High Speed 1 and HS 2 is coming in for all sorts of protests.

It can be done but it would take a dramatic reorganisation of the railways in the US and the will to make it work. I for one believe it would work there given the distances.

I do not however expect to see it in my lifetime.

In the US, the Interstate Highways or 'Freeways' are subsidized, they are paid for with Government money paid to either Government employees or private construction companies, some wrongly think that 'Freeways' are built for Free, nothing could be farther from the truth, freeways just means they were supposed to be free of stop lights or stop signs, though stop lights to regulate the flow of traffic have been installed in recent years as traffic grew and grew, expand a freeway and the Freeway traffic would go up, the Freeways just can't handle the demand and land to expand a Freeway with is a finite resource. As I was growing up I watched Freeways in the LA area being built, year after year, they would extend themselves across the land, sometimes there would be years or even decades of delays cause of lawsuits and tax money had to be appropriated by Congress with matching funds from the States.

Freeways/Airports had an unfair advantage over Rail, in a Government Subsidy called the gas/fuel/excise taxes, rail never had this, it was assumed that Rail being Private didn't need help, yet with a subsidized competition, airports and roads, how could rail compete? Big Oil doesn't like Rail like the Acela/HSR, why? Acela/HSR doesn't use Oil... And to Big Oil, that is a loss of Revenue and a threat...

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

High speed rail needs two sorts of investment.
First, and probably the harder to get, is the social will.
Second, and more obvious, is the dosh (lots of it).

The UK has a moderately good "fast" network, and as such the social investment is proving hard to get as building the railway will cause a lot of localised disturbance (I live about 200m from one of the routes of HS2); second is the perceived noise problem. The service will not be an intensive commuter one with trains every minute or so, but a high speed one with trains passing a given point every 15-20 minutes, the trains themselves (and the track) is required to meet some very stringent noise regulations which will make it quieter than the major road that runs about 200m from my house in the other direction. (Yes, I will be living in the middle of a transport corridor).

It looks to me, from the comfort of thousands of miles, that the US has to start to look to the way it uses and manages its railways - much of the track I saw in October last year was in poor condition, in part due to the amount of freight using it, but also the lack of maintenance investment. For both high speed and heavy freight you need a good solid, well drained foundation, then a well constructed, graded and maintained track bed, topped off with well laid and maintained track. And that cost money, both capital and recurring, although if you spend more on the capital then the recurring tends to be a bit less. And takes time, but try doing the required foundation maintenance on an operating railway and it heads into the "very difficult" region of engineering very quickly.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

When I was I in England In 2002. I was impressed by your commuter rail service.
Its to bad the US gave up when the car was invented.

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[/quote]

Old James

It looks to me, from the comfort of thousands of miles, that the US has to start to look to the way it uses and manages its railways - much of the track I saw in October last year was in poor condition, in part due to the amount of freight using it, but also the lack of maintenance investment.

North American railroad profits are at record levels. Their management is really only interested in the numbers for the next quarter, or maybe the next year at the most, so they have zero incentive to spend more than they do on track maintenance. Even government investment in things like elevated road crossings are only driven by death statistics. If nobody gets run over for several years, there will be no planning or budgeting for crossing upgrades.

Case in point - a few minutes drive from where I live there used to be a very old bridge over a CP mainline. The bridge was moved there from another crossing in the 1890s, the records of the origin of the bridge were lost. The bridge was owned by CP, and therefore licenced by CP. It was one lane wide. This worked fine as long as the road was a quiet rural road, but new subdivisions meant more traffic in the 1980s, and the bridge became a choke point. The city tried to get CP to contribute to replacing the bridge, they had zero interest. Finally, CP stopped maintaining the bridge, it lost its licence, and the bridge was closed. We got a new bridge then, entirely at city expense.

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It looks to me, from the comfort of thousands of miles, that the US has to start to look to the way it uses and manages its railways - much of the track I saw in October last year was in poor condition, in part due to the amount of freight using it, but also the lack of maintenance investment.

North American railroad profits are at record levels. Their management is really only interested in the numbers for the next quarter, or maybe the next year at the most, so they have zero incentive to spend more than they do on track maintenance. Even government investment in things like elevated road crossings are only driven by death statistics. If nobody gets run over for several years, there will be no planning or budgeting for crossing upgrades.

That is pretty much correct. The freight railroads only see the need to maintain their tracks, and only the main lines at that, enough that they can move freight at a decent speed (rarely does freight go faster than 60 MPH here, except some intermodal that goes 70) without derailing all the time. Of course, factors like topogaphy often limit speed even more than maintenance levels. I doubt the oil train that derailed in West Virginia was going 50 (maximum for loaded oil trains, I believe) because the tracks curve too much. Iowa Interstate maintains its tracks well, but feels that 40 MPH is fast enough and so doesn't spend the money on a signal system (they use Track Warrant Control instead). Short lines and branches are often only maintained to the level warranted by the amount of traffic they carry and the distance they carry it.

The Pennsylvania Railroad's line through Ohio and Indiana was once a beautiful line, double track, good for as fast as the engineer felt like going (before safety regulations came along). It carried the Broadway Limited between New York and Chicago, in stiff competition with New York Central's 20th Century Limited. Then PRR started deferring maintenance. Successor Penn Central deferred it even more. Conrail took over. Somewhere in there, one track was removed, leaving only passing sidings every (I'm guessing) 20 miles or so. CR only maintained it to passenger speeds because Amtrak was still running on it. Finally, they told Amtrak that it would have to pay for that maintenance or slow down to 40 MPH. Amtrak moved its trains to other lines. CR removed the signals and let the track deteriorate further. Then they sold it to Norfolk Southern (with a clause in the contract that if NS ever merged with CR, it had to sell the line to CSX) as a relief valve to NS's own parallel, single track line. Lo and behold, NS and CSX split CR between them and CSX got the PRR line. They used it some, but then they leased it out to a new short line, the Chicago Ft. Wayne & Eastern. (CSX did, however, restore the second track to its former B&O route, which had been removed in the 1960s.) CF&E let the track get even worse, down to mostly 10 MPH standards, I think (maybe 20). Now suddenly, NS (which got the former NYC route in the split) has so much traffic, which as Bernie has noted often interferes with Amtrak, it needs its relief valve back and has come to an agreement with CSX and CFE that it will invest money to return the CFE to 40 MPH standards and run a certain number of trains per day on it. It's just too bad the Erie, the Wabash's Chicago line, and the Chesapeake & Ohio are gone.

Mention above of Pendolino: another thing I forgot to mention is the Amtrak Cascades, which use Talgo equipment (built to strict US safety standards, which are a factor in the tough economics of high speed rail). I believe Amtrak owns one trainset; the rest are owned by the state of Washington, and Oregon just got a couple of its own in the last year or two. They are very popular with the people there. Service now extends from Eugene, OR, to Vancouver, BC (I don't think you can ride that whole distance on a single train, though). Track improvements are under way that will allow these trains to go 110; current maximum is 79. (I won't go into the Wisconsin Talgo mess).

Back in the 70s, Amtrak and VIA both had LRC trains, with active tilting mechanisms. Amtrak had bad luck with them and eventually sold its trains to VIA, which did better. The Acelas also have active tilting, which is more for passenger comfort than safety; they're still legally allowed to go 150 even with the tilt disabled, but they don't because the passengers would be thrown sideways on every curve. (Even worse, their coffee would spill on them.)

There was probably some other stuff I wanted to say after reading most of this thread yesterday, but I don't remember it now.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Thanks for your comments David, they really support my intuition about your country's railroad priorities. With the number of accidents in recent years I can see a day when the federal government will pitch in with some pretty serious regulations and make the railroad owners sort out their maintenance to allow freight to operate at sensible speeds in safety. I'm not talking about 100mph multi-thousand tonne trains, but about those trains running safely at speeds dictated by the topography of the line not the state of the line.

Tilt is sometimes marketed as a "safety" feature, but is in reality a passenger comfort feature. Try riding a UK Class 390 at high speed (test train operation) with tilt disabled and you soon realise just how effective it is a smoothing out the curves....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Bad track like this, some shortlines I've read have to get Tiger Grants so they can do maintenance of their ROW, since they have very few customers. This pic is supposed to be of the 'MAW' aka: the Maumee And Western RR.

This train was actually moving when the pic was taken.


Derailment = lack of track maintenance = lack of money(shortlines), mainline railroads have lots of money, but not all branch lines get maintained at Class 1 standards, and yes the track pictured is in use, notice almost no rust is on the rail head, where train wheels make contact with the rail? Looks used sometime in the past.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Thanks for your comments David, they really support my intuition about your country's railroad priorities. With the number of accidents in recent years I can see a day when the federal government will pitch in with some pretty serious regulations and make the railroad owners sort out their maintenance to allow freight to operate at sensible speeds in safety. I'm not talking about 100mph multi-thousand tonne trains, but about those trains running safely at speeds dictated by the topography of the line not the state of the line.

I think you will find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_speed_limits_in_the_United_States#Track_classes enlightening.

Note that it says the speed limits were in response to a crash that happened less than a mile from where I live (although at the time, neither I nor my house existed). I was not aware of that.

Maumee & Western was infamous for its bad track. It was bought out last year and even before the sale closed, the new owner was already doing track maintenance. It's probably all up to at least Class 1 now, if not 2.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

...I'm not talking about 100mph multi-thousand tonne trains, but about those trains running safely at speeds dictated by the topography of the line not the state of the line.
...

The speeds on commercial railways will always be set by economics, not topography. Unless you can show that better maintenance will improve the bottom line, North American railroads cannot spend more money on track maintenance without upsetting shareholders and possibly even violating fiduciary obligation laws. Even railroad accidents have an economic cost for the owner of the railroad, and this is part of the economic calculation that will determine how much money is spent on track maintenance. When governments don't agree with this, they can (and have) set minimum track quality requirements. But these minimums are pretty low, as some recent photos on here show.

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