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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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I recently read that although the Spanish high speed lines don't have many passenger trains (the recent Perpignan-Figueres tunnel only has two per day, although that's partly because of corona), they also carry through freight traffic from France because there's no break-of-gauge. A bit unusual for a high speed line, but why not.

That really interesting. I wonder how much that impacts maintenance if at all. They definitely couldn't do that if timing on passenger rail was increased, but while there's sufficient gaps then as you said, why not.

>(the recent Perpignan-Figueres tunnel only has two per day, although that's partly because of corona)

It was four per day in each direction pre-Covid.

Yes I was shocked at this too. Even the flagship Madrid Barcelona line only has 1 train per hour.

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.

18 per HOUR!? Like… every 3 minutes? [cries in American] I thought Acela’s 20 trains a DAY was a lot.

the victoria line on the London underground has 36 per hour in the peak

the next train comes into the station as the previous one is leaving

Is this local transit? It is England so practically everything feels like local transit, right? It is better than what we have, sure but it isn’t as impressive as long distance routes.

> 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...

Yes, the core parts of most tube lines are 25tph+ in the peak.

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

note this is stopping services on a 2 track railway (not total trains)

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)

Yamanote Line frequency in Tokyo is about every 2 minutes.

That's a short metro line with identical destinations and stopping patterns and slow top speed more akin to a subway service

I think 60 s is the lowest feasible headway for such subway services, assuming a single platform.

Victoria gets upto 36tph / 100 seconds headway with 133m length trains.

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...

17 says Wikipedia, but the information might be out of date. See [1].

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...

If you maintain similar stopping patterns you can get higher than that on a two-track railway - metro services can do 25tph,30tph or even slightly more.

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)

Meanwhile the average speed of our best attempt at high speed rail (Acela) is 84 mph.

Long-distance trains in the UK manage about the same, with 200km/h max, but for more of the track (and higher accel/decel)

My normal London-Stoke train is 145.9 miles in 1h28, average of 99.4mph, with 125mph along great swathes of it.

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

Which also comes to full stops outside of stations, because it shares tracks in Connecticut

Spend a few minutes at Clapham Junction here at rush hour.

Average over 24 hours (yes including night when there are no trains) is one departure every 43 seconds.

America, where I’m free to drive anywhere at any time because public transit doesn’t effectively exist for most people :(

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.

It had less to do with NIMBYism and more to do with car company profits. [1]

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...

This is not a like to like comparison. If you want to compare like to like, look at how many trains per hour leave from, e.g., Grand Central.

I think it's fair: High Speed 2 will be two tracks leaving London Euston. On those tracks, 17-18 trains will run every hour in each direction.

I suspect that's counting both the intercity trains and the regional trains. If so, the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey and southern Connecticut will be hitting roughly those numbers already--NJT and Metro North add a lot of traffic to the NEC.

Oh for some reason I interpreted this as that many trains departing to the same place. Like as if there were a train from New York to Boston every few minutes.

I already posted this, but I'll repeat it [1].

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...

The thing that you're counting as "intercity" is roughly comparable to what is classified as regional service in the North East US.

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.

An intercity train stops primarily at large towns and cities. Acela looks like the only frequent intercity train from NYC, though I may have missed one as there are several daily Amtrak trains.

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

And a longer one (also 3 times per hour) will make only these stops:

  London Euston            0 miles
  London Old Oak Common    5 miles
  Birmingham             125 miles (1 of the 3 per hour)
  Manchester Airport     205 miles

That is nothing like a regional/commuter train. The existing regional train to Birmingham stops at Watford, Milton Keynes, Wolverton, Rugby, Coventry, Canley, Tile Hill, Berkswell, Hampton-in-Arden and Birmingham — that is like the Philly/LIRR/MNR trains.

No it's not. This is purely new high speed intercity services. If you include the WCML out of Euston ("legacy line" - can still do 125mph/200kmh - which will have increased regional services as space is freed up by moving the intercity ones to HS2), then you can at least double that number. Probably triple given it is a 4 track railway.

LGV Sud-Est, France's first and Europe's most used HS line, sees 240 trains/day/direction, with a capacity of 13 trains/hr, to be improved to 16 tr/hr in 2030. It's a trunk line with many different service patterns though, mostly linking Paris to southern destinations.

Alacatel/Thales promised Muni something like 48 trains per hour (across two tracks and five lines) with their new fangled train control system. For the most part that never happened.

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).

i remember tryung to get a ticket for high soeed rail in spain and ticjet were sold out for a week ahead

I don’t see your point… sometimes there’s high demand of train travel.

In the UK/Germany (and probably others) you can stand if you want to and it is sold out. This is obviously preferable (though not ideal) to having a wait a week for a seat, or get a very slow coach/bus instead.

We are talking about 2-4 hours of travel time standing up, almost nobody would like that.

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.

Well the point is it's an option to stand even if it's far from ideal. I personally would prefer to stand for an hour or two (trains tend to empty out en route) than stand at the station to wait for a seat. I've done it multiple times in the UK and Germany.

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).

There are just two companies that have that route, but another one will be up and running later this year.

When high demand, extra trains are added.

> This seems ridiculously low given HS2 in the UK is planned to have 18tph on the core line (to various destinations, but still).

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.

60 trains/day isn't many hours of 18 trains/hour

Numbers are per route. There are around 15.

I’m not sure it’s legal to have standing passengers in high-speed trains. That’s why you have to buy your ticket before getting into the train, and showing the ticket to railway company personnel if requested. You have an assigned seat there.

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.

> I’m not sure it’s legal to have standing passengers in high-speed trains.

why wouldn't it be?

Security concerns. I’m case of an accident you can sit and maybe survive.

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.

Standing is allowed on Japanese Shinkansen trains or German ICE trains.

But isn't on TGVs, AVE and Frecciarossa trains, so more networks disallow it than allow it.

It’s not the same to travel standing up (i.e. not having an assigned seat) than to be able to stand up (i.e. have an assigned seat).

But you don't have assigned seats on German high-speed trains. It certainly happens (although rarely) that trains are so full that some people need to stand

You can buy a ticket for a non-assigned seat but not for long routes like the one that goes to Paris.

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.

The point is that it's not due to safety or security that Spain and France require a seat reservation.

It will be to keep the quality of the service high, reduce boarding times, or something like that.

fyi it's possible to buy Tokyo to Hakata (over 1000km, takes 5hr, max 300km/h) ticket without reserved sheet. (Though eventually free sheet will be available at the middle stations.)

why does the speed of a train affect its security?

HS2 line is planned, Madrid-Barcelona is built (was completed in 2008).

1 train per hour is slightly more than I would expect on Madrid-Barcelona, I'm positively surprised. Spain is really sparsely populated.

That France-Spain connection is fairly special. Firstly, international connections tend to have much less traffic than intranational ones. Secondly, the line was built with a PPP project (long since failed), assuming it could be very profitable based on track access fees - and the track access fees for that stretch of railroad are basically the highest anywhere in Europe except for the channel tunnel. But unlike the channel tunnel (and thirdly), the connections across the line aren’t as useful as the channel tunnel, which connects a giant metropolis (London) with several other metropoli in 2-4 hours, a sweet spot for rail, whereas Barcelona and Paris/Marseille are more like 6h. Once the French side will update their Mediterranean rail lines to hsr standards, the time will go down and ridership will increase, despite the high costs.

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.

The Perpignan-Lyon has been postponed by the French government. When they complete it, the connection with Barcelona will see much more railway traffic.

We got the weird 1600mm in Ireland :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_Ireland

The British Gauge competition

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...

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