Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes [video] | Hacker News Reader

Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes [video]

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142 pointszdw41 comments

Strangely no mention at all of EMUs, DMUs or single self-propelled rail cars. “Every train has a locomotive” is quite US-centric.

I was about to point this out, too. This entire video is US-centric, which explains the dearth of passenger rail content. It completely skips many other types of passenger train. Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs.

Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental Europe. The TGV regularly runs Duplex[1] carriages on the LGV Sud-Est (Paris-Lyon) route, and Swiss Federal Railways has IC2000, IR Double Decker, and the LD Double Decker.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_Duplex

Please find or make similar videos for other parts of the world. As a USian that mostly knew about all the types of railcars in this video, that would be awesome.

> Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs.

Nit pick: The German ICE 1 and 2 series are pulled/pushed by a locomotive [1] that's a direct evolution of the BR 120 locomotive - the world's first electric locomotive to use solid-state converters [2].

As a result of that, the trains have different top speeds depending on the locomotive being on the front (faster) or rear (slower) end [3].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_1#Triebk%C3%B6pfe_(Baureih...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_120

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_2#Betrieb_bei_Seitenwind

The ICE1 being the longer version with locomotives ("Triebköpfe", literally "driving heads") at both ends, while the ICE2 is only half as long, with only one locomotive, and two of them can be coupled - the restriction you mentioned only applies to these.

...but actually the ones to first use this configuration were the French with their TGV, which was then copied by the Germans and Italians for their respective high-speed trains (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein). And then the Austrians implemented a "budget version" of a high-speed train with their Railjet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railjet) which uses an unmodified Taurus locomotive and a control car which has the same design as the locomotive.

> Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental Europe.

And west of Chicago in the US. Amtrak runs double-decker cars west of Chicago and in fact Chicago's passenger rail service (Metra) is mostly (all?) double-decker.

My understanding is that tunnel clearance in the east is not sufficient for the double-decker cars.

I also see containers stacked two high and auto carriers that appear to be similar height and these probably also don't travel east in the US for the same reason.

Double deck cars do exist on the east but are configured differently. West of Chicago the floor is level with the door, east the double deck is achieved by having the lower floor halfway below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_(railcar)

It’s not the lower/upper deck that is at different heights, it is the station platforms and doors. West coast has track-level platforms so the doors are on the lower deck, east coast has high-level platforms so the doors are above the bogies at the ends of the cars.

Caltrain’s Stadtler trains have both sets of doors, presumably for future standardization on high-level platforms.

Had to look those up:

- EMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit - DMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_multiple_unit

Reading about how these are generally made of an even number of cars reminded me of this[1].

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd05xx/EWD594.PDF

And even the US is coming on board.

Caltrain (commuter train in the SF Bay Area) is actively testing a fleet of new EMUs now, scheduled to begin passenger service in Sept 2024.

There are also already DMUs and EMUs in service in the United States.

Of the legacy carriers, New York’s MTA has been usig multiple units for the better part of a century. These days, a lot of rail services like SMART in Sonoma, DART in Dallas, and Sprinter in San Diego to name a few use them as well.

He is doing a full series on the engineering of railroads and mentioned this is just the basics. He did not cover locomotives (propulsion, types, differences among passenger, fright, etc) in this video and focused solely unpowered rail cars.

I would love to see an in depth study of Switzerland's freight rail system. Apparently it works well for quick movements of small amounts of freight (single container).

From what I can tell, the much lauded US freight rail system only works for slow (30 mph or less average speed over distance) high latency shipments in massive quantities (coal, and raw minerals). There are frequently delays, which makes US freight rail noncompetitive with trucking.

Open to suggestions if anyone knows where I can read a good explanation of the Swiss practices that enable their system to be low latency.

Important pay off it is that us railroads AFAIK have optimized for the high latency and humongous trains whereas in many other places there are constraints that prevent such strategies.

US rail roads just exploit old ifrastructure and contunually break it down further while cutting everything out that isnt perfect. They also externalize lots of cost on society with constant derailing and constant blocking of passenger rail.

Their insistance on only high margin delivery, directly leads to simply more trucks on the road. They cut out things that are profitble but not profitable enougth. Their profit could literally pay for a full scale electrification program.

Given how perfect the US is for railroading and how there is barley any passenger rail, the US stats in context are not impressive. Just looking at tye Soviet Union in comparison.

Part of it is large, methodical investment. Switzerland explicitly pays for rail improvements using taxes on heavy goods vehicles, and a referendum committed a reduction in Alps heavy goods traffic into the Swiss constitution. https://www.euki.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/20180827_CH_M...

The Swiss reap the benefits of consistent investment in their rail infrastructure.

- Switzerland is very small, yet with massive elevation changes. Conventional trains can only handle gentle inclines (while the Swiss have lots of unconventional mountain railways, those aren't carry a significant volume of freight) compared to roads. Railroads also predate cars and trucks. Together, that means that railroads got better routes first, using very expensive tunnels out of necessity. That means shorter routes that allow higher speeds (no twisty mountain roads).

- Swiss railways rely on their impressive timeliness and efficiency to achieve very high utilization of limited resources (e.g. limited parallel tracks in tunnels and other constrained areas). That effectively means freight trains must travel at higher speeds and be much shorter than trains in the US.

- More recent investments in infrastructure have gone into longer, deeper, more direct "base" tunnels that replace earlier tunnels with more direct routes. Given the choice between auto tunnels and railroad tunnels, it is much cheaper and easier to build rail tunnels (e.g. handling electric trains require much less ventilation than diesel trucks), and the utilization can be higher (e.g. trains are centrally maintained, controlled by trained operators with good automatic safety systems, where traffic can end up depending on the worst driver on the road). Together, that means rail journeys have continued to get shorter (sometimes by hours) while the roads stay much the same.

The US has smartly standardized on nuckle coupler while Europe stupidly continually used manual coupling.

Thankfully this might be finally changeing. Because its now 100 years later we can jump ahead in technology. Having cargo cars that automatically couple, but not just physical, also hydrolog, electric and data, plus the ability to digitally decouple. Swiss Cargo already does this in production.

Making it a Europea wide standard is in progress.

https://www.dac4.eu/

This is something we really need to interduce to continue to push electric rail transport.

The difference in couplers between the US and Europe is a fascinating bit of history. The US mandated automatic couplers in 1893, taking effect in 1900, since the existing manual couplers were a major cause of industrial accidents. Even today, most European freight rail depends on absolutely ancient manual couplers. A major secondary benefit of the AAR-style automatic coupler is a much higher strength, allowing for much longer and heavier trains than are possible with the manual connectors. Historically, the few European trains using automatic couplers were exceptionally large/heavy, like Swedish iron ore trains between Kiruna and Narvik.

Its kind of a back and forth. Before Adopting the Janney coupler the US had an even worse coupler then those used in Europe. The current European coupler don't have as high and injury rate as those that were the justification for the US government to force the Janney coupler.

Even Soviet moved to an automatic coupler, SA3, but somehow the Europeans never went beyond the screw coupler.

> AAR-style automatic coupler is a much higher strength, allowing for much longer and heavier trains than are possible with the manual connectors.

This isn't necessarily generally true for all 'manual' connectors. You could design a very strong manual connector as well. But your overall point is true, the US coupler are much higher strength.

Europe never had much cause to improve on this aspect because you simply can't be using very long trains on the European network.

> Historically, the few European trains using automatic couplers were exceptionally large/heavy

We have to be specific about cargo trains here, lots of passenger trains use forms of automatic coupling. But the issue with those is, while many of them use the same kind of Scharfenberg couplers they don't have things like power, hydrolics and data in the same place.

We really need to standardize all of those things, including the decoupling protocol.

It looks like the new standard will be a form of Scharfenberg coupler, they will be able to form much bigger trains then is possible today but still not be as strong as the American ones are.

Good video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUj4ne3ENRI

Wouldn't a self propelled rail car still technically qualify as a locomotive?

No, but since they got common, Germany switched to the "Triebfahrzeug" terminology in operations, and it translates to "propell[ing/ed] car".

He's got a new video about rail shapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nteyw40i9So

Nuclear Waste Transport rail car, nearly operational as of 21 September 2023:

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/new-railcar-designed-tran...

Love Brady’s work. I bought his book too. While I was hoping for a more coffee table type book, it is more dense than that but still a delightful read.

Book Title: Engineering in Plain Sight.

Main ones I see are hoppers and cattle cars. I live quite close to a railyard so it is interesting to see all the trains from a distance. There is no regular passenger services here so I rarely see passenger cars. Most of the freight is coal or grain. Heavy things are generally transported by roads since the mines and powerstations are not always near the rail line.

I live about 100 yards from the Union Pacific mail east/west line out of Chicago and we see a great variety of freight cars, but I cannot recall the last time I saw a stock car. I guess that's because the Chicago stock yards no longer exist except as a neighborhood.

The only passenger cars this like carries are the Metra double-deckers (except for the very occasional heritage trail such as the Big Boy entourage.) Amtrak uses the BNSF rails a few miles from here.

Is this in the US or elsewhere? I don't think livestock travels by rail in the US anymore, but autorack cars (that carry automobiles) look similar.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/ETTX_905...

Southern Queensland Australia.

At what point do you realize that you've become one of those collectors of weird railroad information that isn't really useful but somehow interesting to know? And how do you realize it soon enough to catch yourself before you bore your friends with it?

The presenter and the video are super-high-quality! This is the kind of content I expect to see from PBS or some 90s era Discovery channel show. The creator must be professionally trained, or just have a natural talent for education.

Bravo!

The creator, Brady, is professionally trained as an engineer (and presumably works as an engineer too -- I don't think he's a full-time content creator), but as far as I know he's not trained as an educator. I think he just has a natural talent.

Not every. Draisine is missing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draisine

The presenter clarified it was for unpowered cars pulled by a locomotive.

A draisine does not fit that description.

This railbus is adorable! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rail_bus01.jpg

A bit larger and you can use these as legitimate standard trains, like this VT 98 from Germany [1]. Either you attach them at the rear of a regular train for longer distances and then separate it to serve a leg on some rural side track, or you attach a passenger car should you face higher demand on a day (e.g. popular tourist destinations), or you attach a freight car for express service to some industry along the tracks [2].

I seriously miss these things, there are so many rural railways that got shut down following the privatisation frenzy in the 90s, and could really be made to work again with a modern variant.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baureihe_798_752-2.j...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_VT_98

Do you remember "Hält and jeder Milchkanne" (Stops at every milk can)? That's because they did that, which means they collected the aluminum cans of milk at the little stops, which farmers put there, and transported them to the city, or next dairy. Usually on a flatcar in tow, sometimes pigs, goats, sheep, cows too!

But that stopped long before the 90ies. I guess that was over around 1975, or so.

The problem is that they're susceptible to accidents like Dahlerau.

If this light thing runs into a freight train, it crushed the passengers.

It wiped out 2/3rds of the senior grade (2 classes IIUC).

But remember that in e.g. rural areas between Hamburg and Berlin similar single-car D"M"Us are used for servicing the villages.

You know with the instantaneous power output of electric drive trains and the low speed of freight trains, you might be able to reverse direction and get back up to a speed where the collision wouldn't be catastrophic. Though it would require rubber coated drive wheels.

I don't think the collision danger should be a reason to not use these. They really could open up a whole lot more rail service on under utilized lines.

Don't say that to anyone from Northern England, they had to suffer these things for a generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)

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