In my opinion these kinds of historical mechanical/civil engineering stories are quite interesting. Would love to see more.
There's the Toronto gauge, the Japanese high speed rail gauge (which is standard, 1435mm, for the world but wider than what was used before in Japan, 1000mm and less) and the Spanish high speed rail gauge (which is also standard, 1435mm, even though they usually use Iberian gauge which is wider - and on this, they have some interesting train designs that are capable of automatically switching between the two).
It was four per day in each direction pre-Covid.
This seems ridiculously low given HS2 in the UK is planned to have 18tph on the core line (to various destinations, but still).
To make matters worse the spainish high speed lines have mandatory reservations so once the train has sold out you are not allowed to board - unlike the UK where you can still board but may have to stand for some of the journey - which is not ideal but at least you don't have to stand around for another hour waiting for the next train anyway.
the next train comes into the station as the previous one is leaving
> The schedule offers trains every 3 to 5 minutes on the most used sections during rush hours. During other traffic periods, intervals range usually from 4 to 12 minutes or up to 20 minutes on outer sections. During late nights, only selected express services are operated and all late-night services usually run every 20 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_s...
I believe that the 1, 2 and 3 lines in NY share the same tracks in the core and can hit about 30tph in the peak
if you're talking about total trains then somewhere like clapham junction is way, way higher (something like 180/hour)
back to stopping services: thameslink core manages 24, and that entire route is several hundred miles long
and crossrail core will do 24 on opening, designed upto 30 (the railway on either end is also several hundred miles long)
Wikipedia suggests the Wenhu line in Taipai was testing upto 50tph, and a post from 2006 on District Dave's forum said Lille Line 2 was at 47tph [0]
Both of those lines are short vehicles though - 52tph. The forum does post that many Moscow lines are 38tph (95 seconds) at long trains (140-160m)
[0] https://districtdavesforum.co.uk/thread/5210/worlds-most-fre...
The existing quad-track line carries 15 trains per hour [2], and is full, but this is because it carries trains of varying speed -- express passenger trains, commuter/regional trains and freight.
(The Victoria Line is a metro line, pretty irrelevant comparison.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2#Proposed_service_...
[2] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/how-many-trains-run-per...
From December the west coast mainline is bringing in a roughly pre-covid timetable. The railway is a 4 track railway, but looking at just the fast tracks leaving Euston, there will be 13 departures an hour on the fast lines
3tph Manchester 3tph Birmingham fast 2tph Liverpool 1tph Chester and North Wales 1tph Glasgow 1tph Crewe via Trent Valley stops 2tph Birmingham via Northampton (switch from the fast lines to the slow lines after about half an hour)
None of these are high speed - I'm currently on a train to Manchester and my phone says we're doing about 125mph (200km/h). HS2 is a more reasonable 200mph.
To be fair, Accela Washington-New York-Boston is more akin to the London-York-Edinburgh services which are only 2tph, or 31 trains per day (44 run as far as York, but only 31 continue to Edinburgh)
The frequency on the WCML can't be higher as some of those trains are non-stop as far as places like Stoke, Crewe, or even Warrington (about 90-110 minutes out of Euston), where others do stop at places like Watford, Milton Keynes and Rugby.
The full proposed timetable from Dec 2022 is here: https://railforums.co.uk/threads/december-2022-timetable-cha... which might be at https://files.smallpdf.com/files/e54b2d4e9c7a08be02a4be30522...
(In addition to the 5 trains per hour to Birmingham above, there is another one or two from a different London station - Marylebone, and there's a handful of additional trains from Euston to Edinburgh via Birmingham)
The hourly Glasgow departure averages 105mph to Warrington
Once you get up north speeds drop -- the eng to end average for Glasgow-London is about 84mph (401 miles in 4h47), Edinburgh-London is a similar distance but a bit faster at about 4h26, so 89mph.
Washington DC to Boston is 440 miles and seems to take about 6h40 at best, just 66mph
Average over 24 hours (yes including night when there are no trains) is one departure every 43 seconds.
I miss the trains in other countries so much. They’re reminders of what we could have had here had we not let NIMBYism win. https://www.quora.com/Why-wasnt-BART-built-initially-to-loop... has some of the history, there’s probably a better article out there somewhere.
Here in the Denver metro area, we used to have trains running all over the place, and 100 years ago, there were daily trains between Denver, Boulder, Golden, and Longmont. Then they ended service and tore up most of the tracks.
Fast-forward to 2022, and now they're trying again to put rail between Boulder and Denver, but it's a $1+ billion boondoggle that hasn't gone anywhere in 15 years. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4 [2] https://www.cpr.org/2022/03/01/rtd-fastracks-commuter-rail-b...
These are all intercity trains to cities north of London.
There will be 6 trains per hour to Birmingham (120 miles from London), three of which continue beyond Birmingham. An additional 11 trains don't stop at Birmingham, but cities beyond it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2#Proposed_service_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2#/media/File:HS2_v...
Destination | Operator | Distance from NYC
Camden / Philly | NJT / Amtrak | 82 mi
Montauk | LIRR / Amtrak | 110 mi
New Haven | MNR / Amtrak | 67 mi
Except for Montauk, these places are cities in their own right, but we don't really think of them as intercity trains because the primary reason someone would board is as a commuter not as a traveler.
The planned schedule for the new line in England will have the shortest train make only these stops, 3 times per hour:
London Euston 0 miles
London Old Oak Common 5 miles
Birmingham 125 miles after 52 minutes
London Euston 0 miles
London Old Oak Common 5 miles
Birmingham 125 miles (1 of the 3 per hour)
Manchester Airport 205 miles
For the time being BART and Muni run 2–3 minute headways during peak hours (so somewhere around 25–30 tph). One of the big things BART remedied with the new cars was the lack of doors (which slows down boarding and increases dwell time).
In Spain there are several railway companies: RENFE, Ouigo and (TBD) Irio. There are enough trains for the current demand. If they detect a surge (holidays for example) new trains are added to the timetable.
Short-distance trains do indeed allow you to be standing up but the travel time is at most 1h.
There are not enough trains in Spain for the cost of the high speed infrastructure. Looking today both the 19.30 and 20.40 MAD BCN are sold out, which means you would have to wait until the next day to travel if you couldn't get to the station before 19.00 (which isn't uncommon).
When high demand, extra trains are added.
Before COVID-19, there were more than 40 trains a day from Madrid to different destinations (Sevilla, Cordoba, Barcelona), and over 20 to many others, so the difference is not that large.
But then also, London is around three times larger and has a bigger weight in its country economy, than Madrid. It just makes sense that more people commute or travel to London anyway.
In the short-distance trains you can get into the train only by passing a card through a rfid reader. Maybe you should compare this trains to UK ones.
Thus, Spain has less population than the UK, is less centralized than UK (where almost everything is in London) and Spain is much more mountainous. We can’t really compare these two countries.
why wouldn't it be?
Edit: keep in mind that the Madrid-Barcelona high speed railway line reaches almost 250kph. That’s more than the double maximum speed of a car in Spain.
I’d say that having to buy a ticket with an assigned seat in high-speed trains in Spain has been always been that way.
However, short-route trains (Cercanías) don’t have assigned seat, but they are not high-speed trains.
It will be to keep the quality of the service high, reduce boarding times, or something like that.
Lastly, there isn’t much freight on the line, because (besides the high track fees) there isn’t much of a standard gauge freight rail network in Spain.
In some sense the Perpignan Figueras line was supposed to be like the channel tunnel, but it really isn’t. It’s not exactly comparable to the rest of the Spanish hsr network - which is arguably overbuilt for political reasons to get hsr into many even smaller cities, and perhaps under-utilised at this point, but it’s not as bad as that one line might suggest when picked as a representative.
7-ft 1/4 inch (2,140 mm) gauge railway - Isambard Kingdom Brunel : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-foot_gauge_railway
Great Western Railway : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Railway
List of 7-foot gauge railway locomotive names : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_7-foot_gauge_railway...
British narrow-gauge railways : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_narrow-gauge_railway...
the Bay area has intense winds?
Like once every other year a bunch of fences would get demolished lol.
If they didn't wanted to reinvent the wheel, they could have adopted another standard railway track gauge: the Iberian gauge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian-gauge_railways
There's a fun story about BART: the US decided to go with a blank slate approach to railway design by hiring not railway engineers but aerospace engineers, and consequently the project relied heavily on reinventing the wheel. This track gauge thing happens to be one of many examples.
As BART decided to forego any standard way of doing mundane railway tracks, they had to endure decade-long delays and huge budget overruns to cover up their loss. Otherwise there would be nothing to talk about a mundane rapid transit system which already covers pretty much the whole Europe.
You're confusing two different topics.
Freight railroads cannot "demand" to use rail lines owned by passenger railroads. Passenger railroads can, if they choose, allow freight lines to use their tracks, and vice-versa.
You can see examples of both in Chicago. CTA, a passenger railroad, used to carry freight traffic, but chooses not to do so anymore. Meanwhile, the local freight railroad companies choose to allow Metra, another passenger railroad, to use their tracks and rights-of-way.
It's not anywhere close to the black-and-white situation you present.
Where passenger railroads own their tracks, they get to decide what runs on them. The problem is that passenger railroads in the United States own very little actual track, and rely too heavily on using freight-owned tracks.
There's lots of railroad magazines that write about this ongoing problem every month.
And no, the local freight railroads aren't "choosing" to let Metra be. They pretty much have to. That was part of the agreement when the regulators allowed the railroads to drop passenger services (which they were previously legally obliged to keep). There's a process, which hasn't been put into practice for a while but is still on the books, for Amtrak to demand the right to use certain tracks (the exact scenario where this happens escapes me).
You should tell the CTA. It will be news to them.
In the US, railroads had to run both freight and passengers or else leave money on the table, 153 years ago, when the first transcontinental line was finished. And if they wanted to advertise speed to passengers, the freight trains had to yield.
When Amtrak started of course things changed a lot, immediately and also gradually, but that was 1971, 52 years ago.