5 ms·

Strangely no mention at all of EMUs, DMUs or single self-propelled rail cars. “Every train has a locomotive” is quite US-centric.

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
I was about to point this out, too. This entire video is US-centric, which explains the dearth of passenger rail content. It completely skips many other types of passenger train. Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs. Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental Europe. The TGV regularly runs Duplex[1] carriages on the LGV Sud-Est (Paris-Lyon) route, and Swiss Federal Railways has IC2000, IR Double Decker, and the LD Double Decker. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_Duplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_Duplex
- mindslight 3y ago
  Please find or make similar videos for other parts of the world. As a USian that mostly knew about all the types of railcars in this video, that would be awesome.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs. Nit pick: The German ICE 1 and 2 series are pulled/pushed by a locomotive [1] that's a direct evolution of the BR 120 locomotive - the world's first electric locomotive to use solid-state converters [2]. As a result of that, the trains have different top speeds depending on the locomotive being on the front (faster) or rear (slower) end [3]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_1#Triebk%C3%B6pfe_(Baureihe_401) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_1#Triebk%C3%B6pfe_(Baureih... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_120 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_120 [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_2#Betrieb_bei_Seitenwind https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_2#Betrieb_bei_Seitenwind
  - rob74 3y ago
    The ICE1 being the longer version with locomotives ("Triebköpfe", literally "driving heads") at both ends, while the ICE2 is only half as long, with only one locomotive, and two of them can be coupled - the restriction you mentioned only applies to these. ...but actually the ones to first use this configuration were the French with their TGV, which was then copied by the Germans and Italians for their respective high-speed trains (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein). And then the Austrians implemented a "budget version" of a high-speed train with their Railjet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railjet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railjet) which uses an unmodified Taurus locomotive and a control car which has the same design as the locomotive.
- HankB99 3y ago
  > Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental Europe. And west of Chicago in the US. Amtrak runs double-decker cars west of Chicago and in fact Chicago's passenger rail service (Metra) is mostly (all?) double-decker. My understanding is that tunnel clearance in the east is not sufficient for the double-decker cars. I also see containers stacked two high and auto carriers that appear to be similar height and these probably also don't travel east in the US for the same reason.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Double deck cars do exist on the east but are configured differently. West of Chicago the floor is level with the door, east the double deck is achieved by having the lower floor halfway below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_(railcar) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_(railcar)
    - throwaheyy 3y ago
      It’s not the lower/upper deck that is at different heights, it is the station platforms and doors. West coast has track-level platforms so the doors are on the lower deck, east coast has high-level platforms so the doors are above the bogies at the ends of the cars. Caltrain’s Stadtler trains have both sets of doors, presumably for future standardization on high-level platforms.
ragebol 3y ago
Had to look those up: - EMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit - DMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_multiple_unit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_multiple_unit
- User23 3y ago
  Reading about how these are generally made of an even number of cars reminded me of this[1]. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd05xx/EWD594.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd05xx/EWD594.PDF
klinquist 3y ago
And even the US is coming on board. Caltrain (commuter train in the SF Bay Area) is actively testing a fleet of new EMUs now, scheduled to begin passenger service in Sept 2024.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  There are also already DMUs and EMUs in service in the United States. Of the legacy carriers, New York’s MTA has been usig multiple units for the better part of a century. These days, a lot of rail services like SMART in Sonoma, DART in Dallas, and Sprinter in San Diego to name a few use them as well.
samtho 3y ago
He is doing a full series on the engineering of railroads and mentioned this is just the basics. He did not cover locomotives (propulsion, types, differences among passenger, fright, etc) in this video and focused solely unpowered rail cars.
paddy_m 3y ago
I would love to see an in depth study of Switzerland's freight rail system. Apparently it works well for quick movements of small amounts of freight (single container). From what I can tell, the much lauded US freight rail system only works for slow (30 mph or less average speed over distance) high latency shipments in massive quantities (coal, and raw minerals). There are frequently delays, which makes US freight rail noncompetitive with trucking. Open to suggestions if anyone knows where I can read a good explanation of the Swiss practices that enable their system to be low latency.
- p_l 3y ago
  Important pay off it is that us railroads AFAIK have optimized for the high latency and humongous trains whereas in many other places there are constraints that prevent such strategies.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    US rail roads just exploit old ifrastructure and contunually break it down further while cutting everything out that isnt perfect. They also externalize lots of cost on society with constant derailing and constant blocking of passenger rail. Their insistance on only high margin delivery, directly leads to simply more trucks on the road. They cut out things that are profitble but not profitable enougth. Their profit could literally pay for a full scale electrification program. Given how perfect the US is for railroading and how there is barley any passenger rail, the US stats in context are not impressive. Just looking at tye Soviet Union in comparison.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Part of it is large, methodical investment. Switzerland explicitly pays for rail improvements using taxes on heavy goods vehicles, and a referendum committed a reduction in Alps heavy goods traffic into the Swiss constitution. https://www.euki.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/20180827_CH_Modal-shift_Study.pdf https://www.euki.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/20180827_CH_M...
- cpgxiii 3y ago
  The Swiss reap the benefits of consistent investment in their rail infrastructure. - Switzerland is very small, yet with massive elevation changes. Conventional trains can only handle gentle inclines (while the Swiss have lots of unconventional mountain railways, those aren't carry a significant volume of freight) compared to roads. Railroads also predate cars and trucks. Together, that means that railroads got better routes first, using very expensive tunnels out of necessity. That means shorter routes that allow higher speeds (no twisty mountain roads). - Swiss railways rely on their impressive timeliness and efficiency to achieve very high utilization of limited resources (e.g. limited parallel tracks in tunnels and other constrained areas). That effectively means freight trains must travel at higher speeds and be much shorter than trains in the US. - More recent investments in infrastructure have gone into longer, deeper, more direct "base" tunnels that replace earlier tunnels with more direct routes. Given the choice between auto tunnels and railroad tunnels, it is much cheaper and easier to build rail tunnels (e.g. handling electric trains require much less ventilation than diesel trucks), and the utilization can be higher (e.g. trains are centrally maintained, controlled by trained operators with good automatic safety systems, where traffic can end up depending on the worst driver on the road). Together, that means rail journeys have continued to get shorter (sometimes by hours) while the roads stay much the same.
philwelch 3y ago
Wouldn't a self propelled rail car still technically qualify as a locomotive?
- namibj 3y ago
  No, but since they got common, Germany switched to the "Triebfahrzeug" terminology in operations, and it translates to "propell[ing/ed] car".

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

I was about to point this out, too. This entire video is US-centric, which explains the dearth of passenger rail content. It completely skips many other types of passenger train. Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs. Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental Europe. The TGV regularly runs Duplex[1] carriages on the LGV Sud-Est (Paris-Lyon) route, and Swiss Federal Railways has IC2000, IR Double Decker, and the LD Double Decker. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_Duplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_Duplex

mindslight 3y ago
Please find or make similar videos for other parts of the world. As a USian that mostly knew about all the types of railcars in this video, that would be awesome.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs. Nit pick: The German ICE 1 and 2 series are pulled/pushed by a locomotive [1] that's a direct evolution of the BR 120 locomotive - the world's first electric locomotive to use solid-state converters [2]. As a result of that, the trains have different top speeds depending on the locomotive being on the front (faster) or rear (slower) end [3]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_1#Triebk%C3%B6pfe_(Baureihe_401) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_1#Triebk%C3%B6pfe_(Baureih... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_120 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_120 [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_2#Betrieb_bei_Seitenwind https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_2#Betrieb_bei_Seitenwind
- rob74 3y ago
  The ICE1 being the longer version with locomotives ("Triebköpfe", literally "driving heads") at both ends, while the ICE2 is only half as long, with only one locomotive, and two of them can be coupled - the restriction you mentioned only applies to these. ...but actually the ones to first use this configuration were the French with their TGV, which was then copied by the Germans and Italians for their respective high-speed trains (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein). And then the Austrians implemented a "budget version" of a high-speed train with their Railjet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railjet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railjet) which uses an unmodified Taurus locomotive and a control car which has the same design as the locomotive.
HankB99 3y ago
> Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental Europe. And west of Chicago in the US. Amtrak runs double-decker cars west of Chicago and in fact Chicago's passenger rail service (Metra) is mostly (all?) double-decker. My understanding is that tunnel clearance in the east is not sufficient for the double-decker cars. I also see containers stacked two high and auto carriers that appear to be similar height and these probably also don't travel east in the US for the same reason.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Double deck cars do exist on the east but are configured differently. West of Chicago the floor is level with the door, east the double deck is achieved by having the lower floor halfway below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_(railcar) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_(railcar)
  - throwaheyy 3y ago
    It’s not the lower/upper deck that is at different heights, it is the station platforms and doors. West coast has track-level platforms so the doors are on the lower deck, east coast has high-level platforms so the doors are above the bogies at the ends of the cars. Caltrain’s Stadtler trains have both sets of doors, presumably for future standardization on high-level platforms.

ragebol 3y ago

Had to look those up: - EMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit - DMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_multiple_unit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_multiple_unit

User23 3y ago
Reading about how these are generally made of an even number of cars reminded me of this[1]. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd05xx/EWD594.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd05xx/EWD594.PDF

klinquist 3y ago

And even the US is coming on board. Caltrain (commuter train in the SF Bay Area) is actively testing a fleet of new EMUs now, scheduled to begin passenger service in Sept 2024.

bobthepanda 3y ago
There are also already DMUs and EMUs in service in the United States. Of the legacy carriers, New York’s MTA has been usig multiple units for the better part of a century. These days, a lot of rail services like SMART in Sonoma, DART in Dallas, and Sprinter in San Diego to name a few use them as well.

samtho 3y ago

He is doing a full series on the engineering of railroads and mentioned this is just the basics. He did not cover locomotives (propulsion, types, differences among passenger, fright, etc) in this video and focused solely unpowered rail cars.

paddy_m 3y ago

I would love to see an in depth study of Switzerland's freight rail system. Apparently it works well for quick movements of small amounts of freight (single container). From what I can tell, the much lauded US freight rail system only works for slow (30 mph or less average speed over distance) high latency shipments in massive quantities (coal, and raw minerals). There are frequently delays, which makes US freight rail noncompetitive with trucking. Open to suggestions if anyone knows where I can read a good explanation of the Swiss practices that enable their system to be low latency.

p_l 3y ago
Important pay off it is that us railroads AFAIK have optimized for the high latency and humongous trains whereas in many other places there are constraints that prevent such strategies.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  US rail roads just exploit old ifrastructure and contunually break it down further while cutting everything out that isnt perfect. They also externalize lots of cost on society with constant derailing and constant blocking of passenger rail. Their insistance on only high margin delivery, directly leads to simply more trucks on the road. They cut out things that are profitble but not profitable enougth. Their profit could literally pay for a full scale electrification program. Given how perfect the US is for railroading and how there is barley any passenger rail, the US stats in context are not impressive. Just looking at tye Soviet Union in comparison.
bobthepanda 3y ago
Part of it is large, methodical investment. Switzerland explicitly pays for rail improvements using taxes on heavy goods vehicles, and a referendum committed a reduction in Alps heavy goods traffic into the Swiss constitution. https://www.euki.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/20180827_CH_Modal-shift_Study.pdf https://www.euki.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/20180827_CH_M...
cpgxiii 3y ago
The Swiss reap the benefits of consistent investment in their rail infrastructure. - Switzerland is very small, yet with massive elevation changes. Conventional trains can only handle gentle inclines (while the Swiss have lots of unconventional mountain railways, those aren't carry a significant volume of freight) compared to roads. Railroads also predate cars and trucks. Together, that means that railroads got better routes first, using very expensive tunnels out of necessity. That means shorter routes that allow higher speeds (no twisty mountain roads). - Swiss railways rely on their impressive timeliness and efficiency to achieve very high utilization of limited resources (e.g. limited parallel tracks in tunnels and other constrained areas). That effectively means freight trains must travel at higher speeds and be much shorter than trains in the US. - More recent investments in infrastructure have gone into longer, deeper, more direct "base" tunnels that replace earlier tunnels with more direct routes. Given the choice between auto tunnels and railroad tunnels, it is much cheaper and easier to build rail tunnels (e.g. handling electric trains require much less ventilation than diesel trucks), and the utilization can be higher (e.g. trains are centrally maintained, controlled by trained operators with good automatic safety systems, where traffic can end up depending on the worst driver on the road). Together, that means rail journeys have continued to get shorter (sometimes by hours) while the roads stay much the same.

philwelch 3y ago

Wouldn't a self propelled rail car still technically qualify as a locomotive?

namibj 3y ago
No, but since they got common, Germany switched to the "Triebfahrzeug" terminology in operations, and it translates to "propell[ing/ed] car".