Do you see the person standing in the open door of the
yellow car (Soo line?) in the middle of the train?

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Do you see the person standing in the open door of the
yellow car (Soo line?) in the middle of the train?

I don't think it is. The door slides open, so if it were open it would be to the right of center.

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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.

Do you see the person standing in the open door of the
yellow car (Soo line?) in the middle of the train?

I don't think it is. The door slides open, so if it were open it would be to the right of center.

Pixels, Scotty more pixels!
That's all she'll give Captn

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Really makes you wonder why they don't derail around curves being THAT long ....

The only reason a car would derail around a curve would be because of side force resulting from the angle between two cars, plus centrifugal force acting on the mass of the car. The beauty of rails is that this angle depends only on the radius of the curve, while the force depends only on the radius of curvature and the speed of the train. The sum of the forces is the same between cars 1 and 2 as it is between cars 201 and 202.

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You are both right...
In the case of VERY long trains (over 200 wagons), not the "short" forty of fifty wagon train in the picture it is possible to get into a situation where the drag from the tailend is such that the stresses in the leading part can result in derailment. This is particularly the case on undulating track. The solution is distributed power, where you put a loco in the middle of the train to smooth out the surges due to unhappy interactions between the curves and the gradients.

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

Rob, the train in the picture had 123 cars, and no centre engine. They do cut in centre helpers on the really long ones where the gradients are steep. You are right, good quality track is needed for this sort of thing.

Another key is big turn radii. I wish I could draw free body diagrams in this blog :) You would see that the cars at the front do see the biggest net force perpendicular to the tracks, but the magnitude of this force goes down as the radius goes up. A long wheel base and free swiveling trucks also reduce the lateral forces.

Added in edit: found one small shot of a centre helper in the Canadian Rockies.

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An interesting news story on long Canadian trains.

And the picture with the story:

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And a 2014 photo from Sault St. Marie, showing that CN is using some distributed power these days.

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Are Canadian railways that close to financial ruin that they have to run stuff like this to save money and survive?

Not a bit of it, Canadian railways are doing very well indeed....

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Just as soon as they figure out how to ship oil
through the cannel they will start doing it!

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Are Canadian railways that close to financial ruin that they have to run stuff like this to save money and survive?

They are way past surviving, the goal is to make the most money for your shareholders. As I have said before here, the recent annual statements of both the CN and the CP state that the only thing holding back their profits right now is how fast they can buy new rolling stock and power.

From CBC Business news archives: CN profits rose 13% from 2012 to 2013, and 21% from 2013 to 2014. Total revenue in the last quarter of 2014 was $853,000,000 Canadian (about 436,000,000 Pounds). A bit more than surviving, I would say.

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Are Canadian railways that close to financial ruin that they have to run stuff like this to save money and survive?

They are way past surviving, the goal is to make the most money for your shareholders. As I have said before here, the recent annual statements of both the CN and the CP state that the only thing holding back their profits right now is how fast they can buy new rolling stock and power.

From CBC Business news archives: CN profits rose 13% from 2012 to 2013, and 21% from 2013 to 2014. Total revenue in the last quarter of 2014 was $853,000,000 Canadian (about 436,000,000 Pounds). A bit more than surviving, I would say.

I suspect they need more rail as well, but that isn't something they have figured out or just isn't possible on the face because of right of way considerations.

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I suspect they need more rail as well, but that isn't something they have figured out or just isn't possible on the face because of right of way considerations.

As far as I know there is very little new rail being laid in Canada these days, apart from a few commuter lines in the big cities. Almost all the growth is over existing tracks. Of course, that may be the next issue limiting rail growth.

Government plans for a high speed rail corridor on the Windsor to Quebec route (biggest rail passenger market in the country) have been kicked around for at least 30 years, but the big stumbling blocks are money - and right of way. Existing mainlines on this route are amongst the oldest in Canada, and they all go right through every little and big town along the way. Nobody is too interested in high speed rail through their downtown, and the surrounding land is high priced, and/or protected by greenbelt laws, and/or part of parks, etc etc.

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I suspect they need more rail as well, but that isn't something they have figured out or just isn't possible on the face because of right of way considerations.

As far as I know there is very little new rail being laid in Canada these days, apart from a few commuter lines in the big cities. Almost all the growth is over existing tracks. Of course, that may be the next issue limiting rail growth.

Government plans for a high speed rail corridor on the Windsor to Quebec route (biggest rail passenger market in the country) have been kicked around for at least 30 years, but the big stumbling blocks are money - and right of way. Existing mainlines on this route are amongst the oldest in Canada, and they all go right through every little and big town along the way. Nobody is too interested in high speed rail through their downtown, and the surrounding land is high priced, and/or protected by greenbelt laws, and/or part of parks, etc etc.

I suspect on the freight lines they would like to lay another set of parallel tracks the whole way. Allows more options. As to the capacity limit, I suppose when the train gets so long that they are still assembling it in the origin yard while it is being sorted in the destination yard .... of course no one is going to like waiting for that to pass at a grade crossing!

Actually that capacity limit isn't quite so simple. It really is no different than the capacity on a highway. When traffic is light cars can pass by a point faster but there is more space between them so the total number isn't the maximum. When traffic is near gridlock there is almost no space between cars but they can't go very fast, again not maximum. Somewhere where traffic is heavy but still moving maximizes the number of cars by a point in a given unit of time. So adding a set of rails is the same as adding a lane to the highway.

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Government plans for a high speed rail corridor on the Windsor to Quebec route (biggest rail passenger market in the country)

Is that Windsor Ontario or Windsor Quebec? (or Windsor Somewhere else)

If Quebec then its only about 200km, so is at the bottom end of the economically effective distance scale which is generally taken as being about 200km as the crow files.
If Ontario, then it is certainly into the sensible distance, and by choosing the right route it would connect Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Windsor, and cut the journey time by a considerable margin. (Currently the timetable suggests this a 14 to 17 hour journey, and I would guess that could come down to near 4 to 5 hours (which, according to Google) is about half the time by car.

That's a nice idea about laying another couple of tracks by a freight route, because both freight and high speed rail work best when "straight and flat" - locals may care to comment on the route geography. The trick with high speed rail is not to "call at every gatepost", but to stop where there is either an existing suitable station, or where there is the land an population that would use a "park and ride" service. Thus on that 1300km journey there may only be half a dozen stops, no stops to change trains, just sit back and relax as the scenery passes by at 300kph.

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

Is that Windsor Ontario or Windsor Quebec? (or Windsor Somewhere else)

Windsor, Ontario - just north of Detroit. Your comments about population, distances, and travel times are bang on.

That's a nice idea about laying another couple of tracks by a freight route, because both freight and high speed rail work best when "straight and flat" - locals may care to comment on the route geography. The trick with high speed rail is not to "call at every gatepost", but to stop where there is either an existing suitable station, or where there is the land an population that would use a "park and ride" service. Thus on that 1300km journey there may only be half a dozen stops, no stops to change trains, just sit back and relax as the scenery passes by at 300kph.

This is where it gets tricky. In general, most Canadian freight lines are not track limited. There was a big lump of money spent double and triple tracking some choke points through the western mountains and in some parts of the east in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, growing train lengths have handled the growth in freight, and what little new track has been laid for freight service has been mostly to move sorting yards out of the downtowns. A good part of CN and CP profit in the 1990s came from selling their old properties in the hearts of Canada's biggest cities. Over the same time long run passenger services have become mostly tourist traffic. Those people don't mind sitting on a siding every hour or so as a hot-shot freight roars by, which is a good thing because that is exactly what happens to most inter-city passenger trains these days. And when the freight lines do build new track, they build it for heavy slow freight trains - that is their bread and butter.

The local commuter services around Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have been steadily building their own tracks since the 1990s, but it it is exactly where you don't want high speed rail - passing through each population centre, with lots of stops.

All this adds up to a high speed Windsor-Quebec train needing almost all new track. That is through the most densely populated part of the country, with the highest property values and lots of political baggage attached to such a drastic change in land use. For example, every two-bit little town along the route (including the one I live in ) says they are happy to help procure land for the new rail line, but only if there is a stop in their downtown. Sort of defeats your comments about how to build a high speed rail system.

Bottom line is that every government (municipal, provincial or federal) can't come to any conclusion. Instead, they commission another study, to be completed just after the next election.

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Let's all play a game to guess how many towns and cities
on the new Windsor/Quebec TGV line, demand a stop?

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Let's all play a game to guess how many towns and cities
on the new Windsor/Quebec TGV line, demand a stop?

The answer is "way more than all of them". Towns near (or even sorta near) the proposed route are lining up saying "we'll give you some land if you shift the route - and stop in our downtown".

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It's fun living here eh?

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Never a dull moment Celt. :)

Just to show the effect of old rail lines and high population density, here is a shot of a line I lived close to about 20 years ago. The City involved is not on the main Windsor-Quebec line, but they have offered up the old city owned track, if....

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