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Comment by jk2323 | Hacker News Reader

I like trains. Because of different reasons, Europe and China is better suited for trains (e.g. public transport in cities available).

What I would like to see: 1. An inter European Rail network. Possible 4 Tracks (freight and personal.

2. This trains should be able to connect and disconnect wagons automatically. Hence a fast train may ride from Lisbon , 3 wagons get disconnected outside the city in a railroad shunting yard and then continue to Madrid, the rest of the train bypasses the city and heads to the next big center.

3. See this technology widely used for the freight trains: http://www.cargobeamer.eu/

The big advantage of trains is that you can run them nuclear and with Thorium reactors in the future.

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(2) already happens, even if it's not automatic. The train that leaves Lisbon gets divided into two when it arrives in Medina del Campo; one part goes to Madrid, the other to Hendaye (France), where it connects up to the TGV.

I know. I have experienced it. But I have experienced it as an very time consuming process. I don't see why this can't be done in an automated way, taking minutes. Not hours.

Hours? Even back with locomotive-pulled trains where you actually had to shunt the cars to a different platform that should be below 15 minutes, and today, it adds less than three minutes to the train that is longer at the platform (Ohlsdorf, Hamburg rapid transit).

Provided that both trains arrive on time.

And doing in in flight is much harder (and not legally possible), but if you would want to join/separate in the outskirts to get one into town and the other on the bypass, just the stopping and reaccelerating will cost some minutes.

It can be done very quickly with multiple units (powered carriages without a separate locomotive).

In the UK this is known as "portion working" and is a routine part of some routes' timetables.

The slight difficulty doesn't come from the separation, which is easy - open the automatic coupling, drive away the front bit and then drive away the rear bit after the front has got clear - but the joining. With an intensive timetable, waiting for a (possibly slightly late) other portion can leave a train missing its booked slot into London, with knock-on delays.

2. was done in britain a long time ago. They just uncoupled cars at the rear end and braked them down to intermediate stops; the rest of the train continues. (Ok, no bypass.)

Unfortunately the inverse operation isn't as easy, and it's an expensive operation, too.

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