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| Re: CALTRAIN Prepares for Electrification (918641) | |||
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Re: CALTRAIN Prepares for Electrification |
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Posted by WillD on Tue Mar 30 15:27:25 2010, in response to Re: CALTRAIN Prepares for Electrification, posted by Jersey Mike on Tue Mar 30 09:00:51 2010. Great, ERTMS, another boondoggle. Why do I get the feeling that North American rail projects are designed to relieve foreign equipment providers of their defective crap.Huh? The Chinese are using a derivative of ECTS on their Wuhan-Guangzhou PDL at 250mph and an average speed of 194mph. How is that a boondoggle? Or do you just want our rail system to remain uselessly slow so you can get picture of signals? To hell with the people who actually want to get from point A to point B, eh? Once again the whole point of the crash standards is to mitigate the effects of all crashes, the vast majority are not train to train. And once again, the technical memorandum accompanying the Caltrain waiver petition to the FRA is pretty clear. At anything above 20mph the effect of a grade crossing impact is identical regardless of whether the vehicle is compatible with 49CFR238 or EN15227. Below 20mph the European EMU will see deformation of crash energy management components but no intrusion into the operator's cab. Above 20mph there will be deformation of both FRA and UIC rolling stock, but in the case of the European railcars the deformation will be predictable and mitigated by the CEM. An American design is likely to buckle at a point behind the cab, as in the Bombardier Bilevels, or to cause the trailing car to jackknife. Now maybe current FRA regulations are too strict as they were basically lobbied for by Bombardier so that they could win the ACELA contract , but given the crash performance of European rolling stock in accidents vs American stock I'd pick American stock any day. I'd be happy to roll things back to what they were in the 1990's. That'd work, but it will not happen. Rolling back crashworthiness requirements would mean a whole host of virtually incompetent operators like Metra, Metrolink, and MN would get carte blanch to order structurally deficient railcars without also installing adequate train control and protection systems. It'd be nice if we could simply order ICE 1s, but unfortunately that day has passed and the FRA sent us down this path toward uselessly slow, heavy rolling stock. California is setting an excellent example to the rest of the US as to how we can deal with the onerous requirements without sacrificing passenger safety. With any luck we can adopt the Bay Area's solution to LA, Houston, Dallas, and other large cities which to this point have adopted light rail with only minimal investment in commuter rail. Heck, the Metra Electric and South Shore line would be ideal for conversion to European EMUs. The Dutch DD-IRMs provide performance vastly superior to the 1200 series EMUs with greater capacity on 1500vdc wire with 25kv compatibility. It'd be nice if BBD still offered them. |
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