by ubercynicmeister » Mon 29 Aug 2005, 20:22:23
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Laurasia', 'O')kay; it's a good point you've made about the length of the freight train with the poor passengers stuck at the back, and no platform to disembark onto.
Ahhh...that's the general idea, yes.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')So....put the passenger carriages on the front, right behind the engine, and make a rule to allow passenger disembarkation FIRST, before all the freight stuff.
You're gonna think I'm being awkward just for the sake of being awkward, but, well...you see there's a problem with that, too.
Um, the drawgear on the average passenger carriage is good for (I am told) about 1200 tonnes. If one places them at the FRONT, then the chances of ripping the drawgear out of the pasenger carriages is very high.
What do I mean?
Passenger carriages are designed to only take a certain loading when being towed. If there's only one carriage, then that's the entire weight of the train - but if one places carriages behind the first, then when the locomotive starts to tow the train away from a stop, that load-of-the-train has to be transmitted through each carriage, accumulating as one goes forward, towards the locomotive.
This is done via the couplings between each carriage. They are known as "drawgear".The heavier the train, the more the force of the train that each coupler (drawgear) has to transmit.
Most passenger trains are fairly light things (in comparison to their equivalent freight counterparts), therfore they have light drawgear.
If one tries to place 13,000 tonnes behind them, you'll just rip the drawgear out of the first passenger carriage . Now, one could add "strengthening" to the drawgear, that's true...but it costs a lot of money.
In any case, the freight trains tend to be of the "slow" variety - they get put away in sidings, they shunt at obscure locations in the middle of the night, they take long-out-of-the-way detours to pick up and drop off wagons.
Passenger trains tend to be somewhat faster - this is where the idea of using "Amtrak" to take high-value light freight works so well with passenger trains. If one has light freight, then the train ends up well within the drawgear limit of passenger wagons.
It works together really well.
The other thing that started to happen in Europe is the use of passenger terminals as direct-to-the-centre-of-the-city fast freight stops - where the small light freight train does a "fast drop off" in the middle of a European city - thus by-passing all of the traffic hold ups that the typical trucking firm has to deal with.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut I also like your idea of giving light freight to Amtrak. This is off topic a bit but I know that in the seventies you could send small packages by Greyhound bus (which I think might be described as US' major national passenger bus line) - it was sort of unofficial I think and I don't know if they still do it.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ust my tuppence...
L.