air conditioned trains are an achivement in 2023?
It's a no brainer when building today, but wasn't back then, and retrofitting is extremely complex and expensive.
My favourite underground in the UK.
i really don’t understand where this myth is coming from. do people seriously think the UK is an “economic disaster”?
https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=DE-GB-FR
and here are the numbers for 2023: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02...
Take out London and the rest of the UK is an economic basket case with low education levels, high rents, rapidly aging citizens, low wages, low investment, low productivity, a small tax base and a public estate in poor condition.
This was a really interesting piece on the matter, in fact most of Murdoch's work for the FT is excellent
https://www.ft.com/content/e5c741a7-befa-4d49-a819-f1b0510a9...
If you don't have a way to access the FT, this chart encapsulates my point quite well
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/ftc...
The UK has a huge reservoir of natural talent which it's doing its best to destroy. Plastic populism suits the ruling class much better than invention and originality.
You can find the wealth and the poverty very close by, even at the same London address. i.e. a flats with huge book value, privately owned; and rented out to struggling people who will never be able to afford to buy their own flat.
More like "basically Romania with Vlad Tepes bolted onto it". The London-driven finance-first economy (to which I partake, btw) inevitably sucks the blood out of the rest of the country.
It's London...
It's not so much "air con on trains" but "air con in deep tunnels without a vent". There is nowhere for the heat to go, and the tunnels have already warned up over the decades. (2)
> Conventional air conditioning was initially ruled out on the deep lines because of the lack of space for equipment on trains and the problems of dispersing the waste heat these would generate.
Every solution is a costly compromise. e.g. drilling a new vent to the surface is theoretically possible, but very hard in a densely populated and built-up area.
A lot of comments talk about tunnel size, which is a minor factor: Everything's easier to engineer when you have more space. But fundamentally the issue is where to send the waste heat, not "tunnel too small".
I’m guessing water would be creating more problems. But it’s a train line, bringing in large blocks of ice should be simple.
Air conditioning an underground train means pumping that hot air into the tunnels. The tunnels have insufficient ventilation because this wasn't conceived of as a problem when many of them were built, and that's a challenge to rectify.
There's also the issue that the trains are already making the tunnels too hot. 4000 trains running back and forth generates a lot of heat from both the engines and braking friction. That heat goes into the clay of the tunnel and is very slow to dissipate due to the high heat capacity of the clay. The trains are never stopped for long enough for the temperature to drop, and so the temperature of the clay has slowly risen 5-12 degrees depending on the line from when the first line was dug in 1863.
Air conditioning the carriages of the new trains didn't result from any developments in air conditioning technology, but from breakthroughs reducing the thermal output of the engines and brakes. This gives them a heat "budget" letting them air condition the carriages without outputting any more heat into the tunnels than a standard train.
Turn air-con on in an enclosed space, with nowhere to vent the exhaust, and that space just gets hotter. A small, deep tunnel is close to being an enclosed space. You might be able cool the train interior a bit, but the tunnel will get hotter. Meaning the air-con has to work harder. Meaning it generates more heat.
The Picadilly line is already uncomfortably hot for a good part of the year (but far from the worst [1]). This includes the platforms.
What this article says is that the trains themselves are lighter and more efficient, so less heat is generated by the motors and brakes. They argue that that gives them some heat budget to use on air-conditioning. As a whole, the new trains will generate roughly the same amount of heat as the old ones. So the tunnels and platforms will stay around the same (ie, too hot!), but the train interior will be comfortable.
[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/tube-underground-lond...
The tunnels have absorbed heat over the decades, venting yet more heat into the tunnels is not going to work.
More space would make the engineering easier, but it's not the fundamental issue.
It's not primarily about headroom.
There are some projects underway to try and cool the tunnels, but they're deep underground and have accumulated heat over decades.
It's not really the size of the trains that allows AC on the subsurface lines, it the fact that the lines are well ventilated to allow steam and smoke from steam engines to escape.
> To fit air conditioning into the trains has been rather an interesting challenge, as air conditioning units are large and tube trains are small, and Siemens Mobility has taken several ideas and put them together to create the space needed.
They only recently got cell service for example. 20 years after most of the rest of the worlds railways.
Some lines don't even have that yet either!
I'm not sure it's fair to dig out TFL for being backwards. They introduced the Oyster in 2003, something NYC didn't get until 2019.
I've been travelling to places where conventional mobile service is available in the subway and it's such an improvement. Being able to look at maps, message or browse the net is a godsend especially as a tourist in a foreign country.
Now you can redeploy the staff away from repetitive tasks of driving trains and supervising stations, and towards engineering a better service. Get the typical journey speed up from 12 mph up to 45 mph. Make one direction of all tracks an express route that only stops at one station in 10 and drives 60 mph through all the others. Modify the old tunnels with an extra rail on a wall or ceiling for places where the tunnel alignment can't do 60 mph.
Some of these suggestions sound a bit bizarre to a layman, especially considering your idea that the only thing standing in our way is 4G signal and reshuffling some staff.
> Get the typical journey speed up from 12 mph up to 45 mph.
So instead of 30 minutes from Walthamstow to Brixton it'll be 8 minutes? How is that possible?
There are 16 stations, or 14 stops excluding the terminii. If you stop for 30secs at each, that's 7 minutes in itself.
> Make one direction of all tracks an express route that only stops at one station in 10 and drives 60 mph through all the others
So we would have an express lane in one direction and a stopping lane in the other? Why is that a good thing?
To me an express service seems /slower/ than the status quo, because I would have to wait longer for the train that stops where I want it to.
> There are 16 stations, or 14 stops excluding the terminii. If you stop for 30secs at each, that's 7 minutes in itself.
Or... you could stop at only 6 of the stops (express service). You could stop for 15 seconds door-open-time (as long as the crowd waiting for the train entirely fits on the train, thats very achievable - and crowd control can be managed by controlling platform ingress). Busses often achieve 3 seconds of door open time for comparison.
At a top speed of 60 mph, max acceleration of 0.2g, max jerk of 3 m/s^3 and travel distance of 2 miles per stop, the whole travel time becomes 13 minutes. Plus the 1.5 minutes for stops. =14.5 mins = 49 mph.
Lets schedule in one 30 second slowdown (ie. drunk guy holds door for mate for 30 seconds), and the average speed hits the 45 mph target.
I suspect the victoria line, being more modern in its track alignment, could easily be made to go 100 mph too...
You cannot compare bus stopping times with tube stopping times. It's meaningless. But if you must, the average dwell time for a London bus is closer to 15 seconds. Which is actually quite remarkable when you consider you've got to pay as you get on. And there's often a buggy or two trying to negotiate the driver having parked too far from the curb. The peak and off-peak must be wildly different and make this single measurement pretty useless.
https://clondoner92.blogspot.com/2022/07/tfl-publishes-avera...
The optimal strategy is probably to have multiple express routes - ie. Train 1 stops at station A, C, E, and train 2 stops at B, D, and F. A better signalling system becomes necessary for that though - moving block signalling isn't sufficient - you need one that can take into account velocity-acceleration-jerk of both trains to get trains close enough while still ensuring passenger safety. That in turn requires Comms systems not just train presence information.
Simulate it and see...
Turns out that despite most users needing to make more changes, they will complete their journey far faster. The few journeys that are not completed faster (eg. taking the tube one stop) tend to either be walking distance or have an equivalent bus.
Combine it with the fact there are multiple routes from A to B and there are many people who can take the fast train in both directions.
For the railway operator, the trains are a big capital and operational cost. If you can make the trains run faster, you can get better utilisation of the seats, and therefore extra capacity/revenue. That more than outweighs the extra maintenance and electricity costs of going faster.