5 ms·

Innovation in rail travel: The train that never stops at a station

107 points by bensummers 17y ago

_delirium 17y ago
Here's a brief post about this video from a few years ago: http://www.goodcleantech.com/2008/07/futuristic_train_lets_passenge.php http://www.goodcleantech.com/2008/07/futuristic_train_lets_p...
- hussong 17y ago
  I'm still wondering what the docking looks like. Somehow people need to get from the connector cabin to the train and back. This could also result in a lot of people moving back and forth within the train over 20 stops if you can only get in and out at the back of it.
  - andrewtj 17y ago
    The route mentioned in the video has 30 stops over a distance of ~2200 km so it's unlikely there'd be much congestion. Stops here in Australia are even sparser over those sorts of distances so it'd work quite well here too.
  - archenemy 17y ago
    maybe the connector cabin could move along the train and dock above every car. my main concerns are existing tunnels and the aerodynamic profile.
hussong 17y ago
Version with explanation in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K27VmNfwsaQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K27VmNfwsaQ
thingie 17y ago
Hardly an innovation. Various people already had the same idea so many times. It seems quite an obvious and tempting thing to do. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/12/18/train-picks-up-and-drops-passengers-without-stopping/ http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/12/18/train-picks-up-and... Well. It's pretty much unworkable. Train is not a single rigid body, it's composed from bogies and car bodies, and they are only quite loosely attached. They absolutely have to be. So you can't expect it to just sit as a rock on the tracks, even in pretty low speeds. And with speed low enough, you are maybe better to simply stop. Modern electric bullet train unit with high powered axles ratio can accelerate really, really fast. Anyway, you could spend money much better on allowing higher speeds on the whole track, or improving adjacent tracks so to allow higher speeds even for feeders and conventional trains, which could allow you to make fewer stops.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Modern electric bullet train unit with high powered axles ratio can accelerate really, really fast. Yes, but accelerating the entire train is going to cost way more energy than accelerating the transfer car. Also, the transfer car can simply use wheels and brakes to gain kinetic energy from the train, so it can be incredibly light. Even if a longer track and motor are necessary for high speed bullet trains, there would still be a big energy savings. Also, no matter how quickly you can accelerate to make a stop quickly, the same train will be able to save considerable trip time with the transfer car system. Saving a half hour or hour off of trip time from a route is certainly worthwhile, especially if it means that the train can run the same route at a lower top speed. The energy savings from that could be enormous over the long term.
  - wheels 17y ago
    I'd also thought of this independently in the past, presumably lots of people have. As for decelerating, I have no idea if any modern trains do this, but you could in theory charge a battery with the kinetic energy from decelerating the train and use that for acceleration. Naturally it wouldn't be a perfect energy transfer, but I presume much of it could be captured.
    - thingie 17y ago
      It's quite common. Except that there are no batteries (battery won't do, you can't charge it fast enough), you just need to have another train in the same section to consume it (or whole network, if your converter substations are ready for that). Energy savings estimates were like 10 to 20 percent (don't have any link for this, it was some British study I remember, sorry).
    - quant18 17y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake Seems like it's everywhere these days. Even in urban metro lines where you've got like 1km between stations. HK subway trains have been doing this since the 90s. Wikipedia sez Delhi Metro has it too.
JulianMorrison 17y ago
Hah, I invented something like this in my head for amusement, except mine used swappable modular carriage pods that plugged into the train from the side, and a steam catapult for high-gee synchronization and emplacement. I can't see a sensible use for it though.
- nooneelse 17y ago
  I just figured that half the kids watching Knight Rider back in the day thought of a similar trick using cars and trains... I know it was a day dream of mine for a while.
  - JulianMorrison 17y ago
    It would certainly help if the car in question was robot-controlled and could jump several meters vertically without a ramp.
  - mmt 17y ago
    Nowadays, I'd be delighted to do this trick with the train being stationary, especially for an intercity route. It would eliminate the hassles of car rental (especially if the rail stations aren't near airports), obviate the need for checked luggage, and mitigate the increased travel time compared to flying.
vaksel 17y ago
pretty cool...kinda sad that the U.S. stopped doing cool things like this. What was the last big infrastructure project?
- steveplace 17y ago
  Our infrastructure projects assume that oil is going to stay at 80/bbl.
- hugh3 17y ago
  Remember that big infrastructure projects are a lot easier in China since the government has no hesitation about demolishing entire villages which might sit in the way of the latest highway, rail line or dam.
  - rbranson 17y ago
    O? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chongqing_yangjiaping_2007.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chongqing_yangjiaping_2007...
    - nanotone 17y ago
      That's an extreme example. How many people are going to fight to keep their home after having power and water cut and a 30-foot pit dug around it? Keep in mind that on the whole, Chinese people are much more likely to give up personal property/liberty for the benefit of the state. It's a massive generalization of course, but the difference between Chinese and American mindsets is really significant.
pierrefar 17y ago
Looks cool as a concept but I'd like to see an actual implementation. Also, the initial jolt on impact of the pick-up car is going to be very unpleasant, and perhaps even dangerous.
asimjalis 17y ago
Implementing the idea and making it work safely would be quite innovative. I can see a lot of things going wrong. * What if the door on the pick-up car gets blocked? Sometimes straggling passengers hold the door open for their friends. It would need to get out of the way to prevent a collision with the drop-off car. * What if there is a malfunction in the pick-up car so that it is not able to accelerate fast enough to catch up with the train? * From an engineering point of view this seems fragile -- there are a lot of parts that need to perfectly synchronize with each other. A single error will quickly cascade through the system and result in serious loss of life.
- hxa7241 17y ago
  Yes, and weighing the whole thing against alternatives makes it questionable. First, it might save lots of energy, but it is also a lot more complicated than just having brakes, which it is going to have anyway. And how much energy would it really save? It still has to accelerate that detachable portion which could be a substantial fraction of the whole, and furthermore the train would probably need to be substantially heavier to support the extra mechanism, which would be a loss . . . Still, it is a creative leap, which makes one think about how to be similarly inventive. You have to get some wild ideas before figuring out the details.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    It saves a lot of energy. Accelerating one part can be done by taking energy from the incoming sub/super carriage. Accelerating and decellerating the smaller carriages is much more efficient than the whole train.
    - krschultz 17y ago
      Are you sure? How much extra air drag will there be having a hump that basically doubles the frontal area and adds a load of form drag?
  - lftl 17y ago
    I'm less worried about energy, and more about time. Not having to stop at every stop along a route would cut a lot of commute time, and make adding more stops more feasible.
hugh3 17y ago
How's this for a simpler implementation without many of the problems which have been mentioned: Approaching the station, there's an announcement on the train "Everybody getting off at the next station please move to the last carriage". Then the last carriage simply detaches from the train and coasts into the station to unload at the platform. Meanwhile, another carriage has been loaded with the passengers who were due to get on at the station. After the train passes the carriage is shunted by a small locomotive to catch up with the train and it attaches to the end. No need for crazy long parallel tracks and dangerous transfers between high-speed trains. Difficulty: most high-speed trains have locomotives at both ends afaik, but that's a minor issue.
- thingie 17y ago
  High speed trains don't have any locomotives (only German ICE1 uses this approach), powered axles (and other electric equipment) are distributed across the whole unit. (So you can't split it, only couple/uncouple two units together.) But, if you think that those transfers are dangerous, I don't know what to say about coupling in high speeds. Insane, maybe :-) Coupling even in station when only the locomotive is moving is favorite source of accidents. Basically you'd have to reach almost same speed as the train you are coupling with in the exactly same moment when you are going to touch it, with only very small difference that buffers can absorb. Hard enough if that speed is zero.
  - extension 17y ago
    Surely the trains would be specially constructed to perform this procedure reliably, and it would be entirely automated. This doesn't seem like it should be a hard problem if the system is engineered from the beginning to handle it.
    - thingie 17y ago
      Coupling two things together in 200 or 300 kph is not a hard problem? That's like people without any programming experience saying, hey, that traveling salesman can be easily solved for 10 nodes, so just add more power and solve it for 100 or 1000, that cannot be that hard! It's quite hard to control exact speed of a train (at such high speed), even without any atmospheric effects and with ideal adhesion conditions that never change. I can imagine it in like 50 kph, when the worst thing to expect is a derailment, some deformation zones blasted, and few non-fatal wounds. But every problem rises at least exponentially with the speed.

107 points by bensummers 17y ago

Here's a brief post about this video from a few years ago: http://www.goodcleantech.com/2008/07/futuristic_train_lets_passenge.php http://www.goodcleantech.com/2008/07/futuristic_train_lets_p...

hussong 17y ago
I'm still wondering what the docking looks like. Somehow people need to get from the connector cabin to the train and back. This could also result in a lot of people moving back and forth within the train over 20 stops if you can only get in and out at the back of it.
- andrewtj 17y ago
  The route mentioned in the video has 30 stops over a distance of ~2200 km so it's unlikely there'd be much congestion. Stops here in Australia are even sparser over those sorts of distances so it'd work quite well here too.
- archenemy 17y ago
  maybe the connector cabin could move along the train and dock above every car. my main concerns are existing tunnels and the aerodynamic profile.

hussong 17y ago

Version with explanation in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K27VmNfwsaQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K27VmNfwsaQ

thingie 17y ago

Hardly an innovation. Various people already had the same idea so many times. It seems quite an obvious and tempting thing to do. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/12/18/train-picks-up-and-drops-passengers-without-stopping/ http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/12/18/train-picks-up-and... Well. It's pretty much unworkable. Train is not a single rigid body, it's composed from bogies and car bodies, and they are only quite loosely attached. They absolutely have to be. So you can't expect it to just sit as a rock on the tracks, even in pretty low speeds. And with speed low enough, you are maybe better to simply stop. Modern electric bullet train unit with high powered axles ratio can accelerate really, really fast. Anyway, you could spend money much better on allowing higher speeds on the whole track, or improving adjacent tracks so to allow higher speeds even for feeders and conventional trains, which could allow you to make fewer stops.

stcredzero 17y ago
Modern electric bullet train unit with high powered axles ratio can accelerate really, really fast. Yes, but accelerating the entire train is going to cost way more energy than accelerating the transfer car. Also, the transfer car can simply use wheels and brakes to gain kinetic energy from the train, so it can be incredibly light. Even if a longer track and motor are necessary for high speed bullet trains, there would still be a big energy savings. Also, no matter how quickly you can accelerate to make a stop quickly, the same train will be able to save considerable trip time with the transfer car system. Saving a half hour or hour off of trip time from a route is certainly worthwhile, especially if it means that the train can run the same route at a lower top speed. The energy savings from that could be enormous over the long term.
- wheels 17y ago
  I'd also thought of this independently in the past, presumably lots of people have. As for decelerating, I have no idea if any modern trains do this, but you could in theory charge a battery with the kinetic energy from decelerating the train and use that for acceleration. Naturally it wouldn't be a perfect energy transfer, but I presume much of it could be captured.
  - thingie 17y ago
    It's quite common. Except that there are no batteries (battery won't do, you can't charge it fast enough), you just need to have another train in the same section to consume it (or whole network, if your converter substations are ready for that). Energy savings estimates were like 10 to 20 percent (don't have any link for this, it was some British study I remember, sorry).
  - quant18 17y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake Seems like it's everywhere these days. Even in urban metro lines where you've got like 1km between stations. HK subway trains have been doing this since the 90s. Wikipedia sez Delhi Metro has it too.

JulianMorrison 17y ago

Hah, I invented something like this in my head for amusement, except mine used swappable modular carriage pods that plugged into the train from the side, and a steam catapult for high-gee synchronization and emplacement. I can't see a sensible use for it though.

nooneelse 17y ago
I just figured that half the kids watching Knight Rider back in the day thought of a similar trick using cars and trains... I know it was a day dream of mine for a while.
- JulianMorrison 17y ago
  It would certainly help if the car in question was robot-controlled and could jump several meters vertically without a ramp.
- mmt 17y ago
  Nowadays, I'd be delighted to do this trick with the train being stationary, especially for an intercity route. It would eliminate the hassles of car rental (especially if the rail stations aren't near airports), obviate the need for checked luggage, and mitigate the increased travel time compared to flying.

vaksel 17y ago

pretty cool...kinda sad that the U.S. stopped doing cool things like this. What was the last big infrastructure project?

steveplace 17y ago
Our infrastructure projects assume that oil is going to stay at 80/bbl.
hugh3 17y ago
Remember that big infrastructure projects are a lot easier in China since the government has no hesitation about demolishing entire villages which might sit in the way of the latest highway, rail line or dam.
- rbranson 17y ago
  O? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chongqing_yangjiaping_2007.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chongqing_yangjiaping_2007...
  - nanotone 17y ago
    That's an extreme example. How many people are going to fight to keep their home after having power and water cut and a 30-foot pit dug around it? Keep in mind that on the whole, Chinese people are much more likely to give up personal property/liberty for the benefit of the state. It's a massive generalization of course, but the difference between Chinese and American mindsets is really significant.

pierrefar 17y ago

Looks cool as a concept but I'd like to see an actual implementation. Also, the initial jolt on impact of the pick-up car is going to be very unpleasant, and perhaps even dangerous.

asimjalis 17y ago

Implementing the idea and making it work safely would be quite innovative. I can see a lot of things going wrong. * What if the door on the pick-up car gets blocked? Sometimes straggling passengers hold the door open for their friends. It would need to get out of the way to prevent a collision with the drop-off car. * What if there is a malfunction in the pick-up car so that it is not able to accelerate fast enough to catch up with the train? * From an engineering point of view this seems fragile -- there are a lot of parts that need to perfectly synchronize with each other. A single error will quickly cascade through the system and result in serious loss of life.

hxa7241 17y ago
Yes, and weighing the whole thing against alternatives makes it questionable. First, it might save lots of energy, but it is also a lot more complicated than just having brakes, which it is going to have anyway. And how much energy would it really save? It still has to accelerate that detachable portion which could be a substantial fraction of the whole, and furthermore the train would probably need to be substantially heavier to support the extra mechanism, which would be a loss . . . Still, it is a creative leap, which makes one think about how to be similarly inventive. You have to get some wild ideas before figuring out the details.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  It saves a lot of energy. Accelerating one part can be done by taking energy from the incoming sub/super carriage. Accelerating and decellerating the smaller carriages is much more efficient than the whole train.
  - krschultz 17y ago
    Are you sure? How much extra air drag will there be having a hump that basically doubles the frontal area and adds a load of form drag?
- lftl 17y ago
  I'm less worried about energy, and more about time. Not having to stop at every stop along a route would cut a lot of commute time, and make adding more stops more feasible.

hugh3 17y ago

How's this for a simpler implementation without many of the problems which have been mentioned: Approaching the station, there's an announcement on the train "Everybody getting off at the next station please move to the last carriage". Then the last carriage simply detaches from the train and coasts into the station to unload at the platform. Meanwhile, another carriage has been loaded with the passengers who were due to get on at the station. After the train passes the carriage is shunted by a small locomotive to catch up with the train and it attaches to the end. No need for crazy long parallel tracks and dangerous transfers between high-speed trains. Difficulty: most high-speed trains have locomotives at both ends afaik, but that's a minor issue.

thingie 17y ago
High speed trains don't have any locomotives (only German ICE1 uses this approach), powered axles (and other electric equipment) are distributed across the whole unit. (So you can't split it, only couple/uncouple two units together.) But, if you think that those transfers are dangerous, I don't know what to say about coupling in high speeds. Insane, maybe :-) Coupling even in station when only the locomotive is moving is favorite source of accidents. Basically you'd have to reach almost same speed as the train you are coupling with in the exactly same moment when you are going to touch it, with only very small difference that buffers can absorb. Hard enough if that speed is zero.
- extension 17y ago
  Surely the trains would be specially constructed to perform this procedure reliably, and it would be entirely automated. This doesn't seem like it should be a hard problem if the system is engineered from the beginning to handle it.
  - thingie 17y ago
    Coupling two things together in 200 or 300 kph is not a hard problem? That's like people without any programming experience saying, hey, that traveling salesman can be easily solved for 10 nodes, so just add more power and solve it for 100 or 1000, that cannot be that hard! It's quite hard to control exact speed of a train (at such high speed), even without any atmospheric effects and with ideal adhesion conditions that never change. I can imagine it in like 50 kph, when the worst thing to expect is a derailment, some deformation zones blasted, and few non-fatal wounds. But every problem rises at least exponentially with the speed.