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Comment by tqkxzugoaupvwqr | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn’t mention the reason. Does anybody know more?

Not an expert, but I would guess it's a combination of:

1. Shinkansen trains are run on an extremely tight timetable (often 5 minutes or less between trains). It takes twice as long to load or unload a double-decker car, so this presents a significant risk for schedulers.

2. One of the key benefits of double-decker cars is that they save space by cramming two cars worth of passengers into a one-car footprint. This allows significant passenger service in and out of small stations with short platforms. But Shinkansen platforms are not hurting for space (nearly all of their usage is single-decker trains, sometimes quite long ones), so this benefit isn't worth much in practice.

Shinkansen are also replaced earlier because it wear faster than normal trains due to its speed, and failure causes catastrophic result.

It's slower, which slows down trains behind it capable of higher speeds.

The Joetsu Shinkansen (where most of the E4's operated) has a lower speed limit of 240km/h so these trains fitted perfectly.

But this will change soon since JR East is adapting the line to go faster.

Yes, and the Shinkansen faces stiff competition from budget airlines, so speed has become a competitive advantage JR wants to push.

There's also a couple more reasons, namely that a double deck train takes longer to board/deboard, and that they're not very accessibility friendly. Plus Shinkansen have drink and food carts and those don't go up or down stairs.

Food carts are no problem if the company wants to. Finnish IC2 trains have elevators for food carts in 2-decker railcars. Nothing inherently prevents same in Shinkansen.

The VIRM double deckers in the Netherlands used to have those food cart elevators. Interesting to hear those are still in use in some parts of the world. The food cart service on our intercity expresses was removed, so in the course of the years those mini-elevators were taken out as well during scheduled revisions of those EMU's.

Now some third party is allowed to provide a mediocre rail catering service, which amounts to students doing a side-job wearing backpacks with hot water and cups and a tray filled with instant coffee and tea and a few cans and packets of crisps and cookies strapped to their bodies making the rounds at seemingly random times and places on the journey. Not quite the same…

Add to that the lack of the frankly brilliant concept of can-coffee (缶コーヒー) from vending machines on the platforms and eki-ben (駅弁) and I suddenly really miss the Japanese train experience.

I would happily deal with the lack of coffee vending machines if the Dutch railway had any semblance of the Japanese punctuality.

No problem except it was built without elevators...

A line built around double deckers could remove some of these (basically all you need is double decker platforms and upper doors) but it’s also easier to just run more trains.

That's easy to do for a new line but pretty much impossible for existing lines, because the clearances are not tall enough to fit a normal double decker train where the first level is at existing platform height. (In the current ones, you step down to the first level.) It would be hard to retrofit tunnel heights and bridges after the fact. You also run into the problem where these special trains are only permitted on parts of the network and stations that can handle them, which severely limits their utilization.

It's why even basic iterations of technologies requiring modification are often market failures, like the A380 requiring special gates to handle it. Boutique technologies like monorail or maglev fail even harder. For most cases it is profitable to use the less optimal but more flexible solution.

IIRC there’s a single tunnel that prevents Amtrak’s normal double decker trains from getting to New York.

It's interesting that they wouldn't update it. The TGV duplex does 320km/h and is a workhorse for SNCF.

They simply reached their end of life and are progressively replaced with newer models.

You can forgive an American not understanding this as most of our public transit vehicles are older than us because they never replace them.

There are still very old trains in circulation on all sorts of lines in Japan, but I heard that 20-25 years is the baseline life expectancy for rolling stock. It is very good for business and for trainspotters.

Wow, that's way shorter than here in the Netherlands. AFAIK, rolling stock over here is revised after ~20 years, after which it goes back in service for another ~20 years before being retired.

Canada has cars over 70 years old in regular service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Via_Rail_rolling_stock...

Canada's passenger rail system is not exactly a market leader. It is ossified, as it seems are most of its customers. And given the distances and terrain between major Canadian cities, trains will just never win out against air travel.

> And given the distances and terrain between major Canadian cities, trains will just never win out against air travel.

With a pretty major possible exception on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. Large fraction of Canada's population in a span of ~1200km. Particularly the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal span with (metro area) population totally ~11 million over 600km, a Shinkansen-speed rail would be very competitive against air travel.

They're working on high frequency rail (which will also increase speeds to ~160km/hr), which should be closer to competitive, but still not great.

This is more or less how it works almost everywhere.

As an example, the model identifiers in use by the Paris Metro have the year of the _order_ in them and we still have MP59 trains running on line 11. They have been modernised and refurbished a few times, of course, but that's 63 years of service. Talk about a ROI.

Probably waiting for automated metro to come over to replace those cars, stretching them last service years as much as possible.

Modern trains, yes, but with drivers, in 22-23.

Shinkansen rolling stock tend to be phased out much faster than commuter and local trains, to take advantage of the newest technologies that enable cost reductions and improved amenities. Tokaido Shinkansen, the busiest and most profitable of the network, replaces its rolling stock around the 14 year mark, since the useful life of electric rolling stock for depreciation is 13 years in Japan.

Commuter trains in urban areas tend to be used upwards of 40 years with one or two rehabilitation cycles. That said, the busiest lines generally get new shiny trains every 15-20 years with older ones being sent to less busy lines.

The recent trend (since the 90s) have been to build cheaper, lighter and less long lasting trains, so that trains around that 20-25 year mark can be replaced with ones using the latest technology. That said, I've seen those trains being fitted with the latest traction units (not cheap!) around the 15 year mark, so we'll see how long they intend to use them.

Thank you for those details.

FWIW, this seems to be quite the big deal for Japanese trainspotters right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBDbekns92A (no affiliation but channel highly recommended).

According to pedestrianobservations.com/ double decker is bad because the much increased loading/unloading times make station idle time the limitting factor reducing throughput of the whole system.

But that might apply to metro and regional rail more than long distance, so it might not be relevant here.

> But that might apply to metro and regional rail more than long distance, so it might not be relevant here.

Shinkansen at peak time runs more frequently than even some subways line in Japan. The Tokyo-Omiya section (shared between Tohoku/Joetsu/Hokuriki Shinkansen, which E4 also ran on) runs at peak of 15 trains per hour per direction, or 4 minute heading. (The Tokaido Shinkansen is even more impressive at peak of 16 trains per hour per direction.) The loading time is very, very relevant, and it's why E4 has been phrasing out for a long time already.

Glad to hear it, thanks!

In many instances, long distance lines have more than one platform track per line track. So dwell could happen in parallel. It's still an issue, but could be mitigated.

My guess is that outside of the peak, these kind of trains are not necessary. And the peak can apparently be accommodated without them. So there may be some times where they would be economically advantageous, but not always - meaning it could make sense to have some double deckers.

But for train services, it makes sense to have uniform fleets, both to reduce maintenance costs and increase dispatching flexibility. Trains should also have the same performance profiles and dwell times (as mentioned before). So any small peak time advantage is undone by the bad economics of having a non uniform fleet.

Nice idea on double platforms! It would be neat to see a world where that was done uniformly

But I agree, that world is not ours.

Look at the track layout for the Tohoku Shinkansen [1], you'll see that on most stations, there are either two platform tracks per direction, or one platform track and one passing track. In this world, on mainline rail, stations usually have more tracks than the lines they connect to. (Yes this is not uniformly so, but trains don´t have to uniformly stop at all stops, they can skip smaller ones to reduce dwell time pressure)

Btw, more station tracks than line tracks can also happen on regional rail, for example check out the downton section of RER C in Paris (the yellow line) [2].

[1] https://www.haisenryakuzu.net/documents/jr/shinkansen/tohoku...

[2] http://cartometro.com/cartes/rer-idf/

OH I thought you had meant double-decker platforms for a single track, to serve both levels of a double-decker train.

For sure more platforms than lines in is a good idea that exists today.

I am not actually familiar with Tohoku/Joetsu Shinkansen (living in Osaka), but I can tell you that for Tokaido Shinkansen, dwell time is still very much a problem even with parallel platform. For Tokaido Shinkansen, while the door only open for a minute or so, by the time we are leaving a station, the next train (running 3-4 min behind) is already pretty much pulling into the station.

Previously Tokaido Shinkansen only can only runs 14 train per hour (note that unlike Tohoku/Joetsu, Tokaido Shinkansen runs 14 tph over 350km of tracks, and not all trains has same stops), but after some optimization, including a procedure to reduce dwell time by a few seconds, they were able to push that to 16 tph.

CalTrain revenue service consists of exclusively double decker trains. It may be the fact that it reduces maximum frequency. But maximum throughput? I’m skeptical.

CalTrain has different “limitations” and fitting the maximum number of passengers in one train is an advantage.

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