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Listening to NPR about European high-speed rail and I was just salivating over the prospect of a real train system in this country. Boston to NYC in 2 hours, for $40 or less, that’s the critical price-performance we need. Thinking about how to get that performance…the biggest problem is the number of stops you need to make to pick up people, that totally kills you. Say you have a 200MPH train, you leave Boston but you need to pick up passengers in Providence or New Haven or wherever, you barely get up to speed when you have to start decelerating again, and then you have to wait for passengers to get on and their stow luggage…screw that shit.
But what if there are a couple of cars full of passengers in New Haven, and one pusher locomotive that starts to move them on this parallel track 15 minutes before the Boston train passes New Haven. By the time the Boston train is going through, the pusher locomotive and the two pick-up cars have matched the Boston train’s speed, the pusher train gets shunted onto the main track behind the Boston train, and then the pusher train speeds up until the New Haven cars lock on to the back of the Boston train. Then the pusher locomotive detaches itself, decelerates and goes to a nearby way station. You just reverse the process for trains coming back from NYC - the pusher locomotive accelerates and gets on the Boston track behind the train, detaches the last two cars and slows them to a stop at New Haven.
Of course we have to scale this up to a Boston – New Haven – NYC – Philly – DC corridor, and have people able to get on and off at any stop they want. You’d need a pusher car and a decelerator car at each stop, passengers may have to move from one car to another depending on where they want to get off because the last car on the train is the one that’s going to stop at the next station, but it doesn’t seem too big a challenge. I wonder if any country has tried this out? It seems to make so much sense. Tho I admit what I really want to see is locomotives shuffling cars around at 200MPH cuz that would just be cool.
But what if there are a couple of cars full of passengers in New Haven, and one pusher locomotive that starts to move them on this parallel track 15 minutes before the Boston train passes New Haven. By the time the Boston train is going through, the pusher locomotive and the two pick-up cars have matched the Boston train’s speed, the pusher train gets shunted onto the main track behind the Boston train, and then the pusher train speeds up until the New Haven cars lock on to the back of the Boston train. Then the pusher locomotive detaches itself, decelerates and goes to a nearby way station. You just reverse the process for trains coming back from NYC - the pusher locomotive accelerates and gets on the Boston track behind the train, detaches the last two cars and slows them to a stop at New Haven.
Of course we have to scale this up to a Boston – New Haven – NYC – Philly – DC corridor, and have people able to get on and off at any stop they want. You’d need a pusher car and a decelerator car at each stop, passengers may have to move from one car to another depending on where they want to get off because the last car on the train is the one that’s going to stop at the next station, but it doesn’t seem too big a challenge. I wonder if any country has tried this out? It seems to make so much sense. Tho I admit what I really want to see is locomotives shuffling cars around at 200MPH cuz that would just be cool.
