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Comment by cnorthwood | Hacker News Reader

Pendolino's are still used on the West Coast Mainline connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow and I don't really have a problem with them. They're not going away any time soon, until we have HS2 (brand new route and alignment without the curves that need tilting for 125mph running).

Interestingly, they are increasing the speed on some of the northern bits of WCML through changing the bank of the track more. My understanding is that if the bank was too steep, slower running freight trains had issues with it even if faster running passenger trains were fine. With a general increase in the speed of freight trains, the speed differential is less so a higher bank can be tolerated, and I think there are sections of WCML where non-tilting trains can hit close to the speeds of the Pendolinos.

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I'm not sure if I'd call Pendolino a dead end? From Wikipedia: "Pendolino is an Italian family of tilting trains used in Italy, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the UK, Switzerland and China."

In Finland, they seemed to have had a lot of problems with the tilting mechanism in the winter, so new digital hydraulics system was developed for that. Digital hydraulics is a fun concept by the way.

Sources: https://community.boschrexroth.com/t5/Rexroth-Blog/New-hydra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Sm3

Finnish pendolinos have been running with the tilting mechanism permanently off for felt 10 years.

Well, the info says digital tilting hydraulics was tested 2013-2015 without faults and VR decided to install it on all trains. Couldn't find newer info.

I might have been wrong that the tilting mechanism has been completely disabled. A web search turned out only that it has been limited: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7047961

And a press release by the railway company from 2011 says that the higher speed enabled by the tilting is no longer reflected in the timetables https://www.vrgroup.fi/fi/vrgroup/uutishuone/uutiset-ja-tied... I would say that has not changed afterwards.

Either way, travelling slower through the curves has stopped the wobbly feeling for the passengers. So in practice the tilting has been a dead end in real life for the Finnish railways. Even if I did not really follow the argumentation in the article why tilting is a dead end.

The original post also says

> The Pendolino itself is a fine product, with the tilt removed. Alstom uses it as its standard 250 km/h train, at lower cost than 350 km/h trains. It runs in China as CRH5, and Poland bought a non-tilting Pendolino fleet for its high-speed rail service.

I guess this is a reference to "New Pendolino" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Pendolino), one of the most recent versions of the train which omits the tilting.

As an aside, after one was destroyed when it derailed in Cumbria, its replacement - a standard, non-tilting train - was nicknamed the "Pretendolino"

I've travelled London-Glasgow quite a few times over the years since the 90's and I've noticed that the timetable has got gradually slower and slower recently and now it's no faster than the 40 year old trains they replaced in the late 90's. The fastest time went from 5:00 down to about 4:20 when the pendolions were first allowed to go at full speed. But now there seem to be only about 2-3 trains a day that do it in less than 5hrs. TBH, if it's going to take 5hrs+ they might as well have stuck with the old style trains as they had more comfortable seats with better legroom.

Do you not find the WCML a bit of a rollercoaster ride in places? There’s definitely a few points where you’re being buffeted and tilted all over the place unpleasantly.

I can’t believe they’re going to make parts faster? Tea will be flying everywhere.

few bits in the Thames Valley if I'm walking back from the buffet car or whatever, but the bits they're making faster are the bits through the Lakes and Borders and whenever I've been on the Transpennine 110mph trains I can't say I've found it particularly bad compared to the 100mph ones it replaced. (Not been to Scotland on one of their new 125mph trains yet and I don't know if they'll be authorised to run at full speed)

Isn't it inevitable that sooner or later a train will be on that section of track moving slowly? So any train that can go on that track has to be capable of staying on track even if they are stopped or barely moving.

Sadly I always got sick on them, but not on the non tilting east coast trains.

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