Chinese High-Speed Train Sets New World Record

shmG writes "A new high-speed train linking Chinese cities Shanghai and Hangzhou has set a fresh world record for train speed at 416.6 kilometers per hour (259 mph) on its trial run on Tuesday. The train is expected to cut the travel time by half, to 40 minutes for covering a distance of 202 kilometers between the two cities at an average speed of 350 kilometers per hour. 'The new record of 416.6 km per hour shows that China has achieved a new milestone in high-speed train technologies,' Zhang Shuguang, deputy chief engineer of the Ministry of Railways, was quoted as saying."

Not really

[Viol8]

All tilting does is make it more comfortable for the passengers. It doesnt redice the centripetal forces on the bogies and track which will become severe at very high speed. Also signalling needs to be upgraded for very high speed running to take account of greater stopping distances amongst other things.

Re:booyah

[nojayuk]

The Japanese superconducting maglev system is being designed to run in service at 550km/hr. The test vehicles (which often carry passengers) can achieve this speed pretty much at will, it does not require special versions of the trains. The test area in Japan has two side-by-side tracks about 40km long (longer than the Chinese Beijing airport maglev) and they have successfully run two trains past each other at a closing speed of 1100km/hr, something that may cause problems with super-high-speed steel-wheel trains given their existing rights-of-way have no blast dividers between the tracks.

Re:Wrong!

[macshit]

The article's full of errors:
...

Travellers believe that the high-speed train between Shanghai and Hangzhou make take longer than the two-hour drive on road if the train stops at all the nine stations along the route, seven of which are newly built in suburban districts of Shanghai and some cities of Zhejiang.

What bullshit. The current high speed trains stop maybe once or twice between Shanghai and Hangzhou - why would this one stop more than that? It'd blow the average speed, and anyway, there are already slower regional trains. Trying to claim it's a two drive to Hangzhou is again exageration... especially trying to get in to Hangzhou with its absolutely abysmal traffic problems.

You're right that no sane train operator would have all trains stop at all stations, but it's also pretty likely that even all-stops trains will be faster than driving. Modern HSR tends to be very light and have very good acceleration, so with good operating practices, a single stop need not add more than about 5 minutes of delay including deacceleration/acceleration time.[1] This HSR goes at 350km/h, so the total time taken by the train, including 9 intermediate stops could easily be 80 minutes or less -- far less than the 2 hours or more (if there's no traffic!) that a car at 100-110km/h would take. With express trains making fewer stops, of course, the train wins by an even huger margin.

[1] E.g., the Japanese N700 shinkansen has acceleration of 2.6km/h/s. At that rate of acceleration, accelerating to 350km/h only takes a little over 2 min. Since the average speed of the train during that period isn't zero, but rather about half the final speed, then the actual amount of time lost is only 1 min; double that to include deacceleration for total of 2 min. At intermediate stations, the Shinkansen typically stops less than a minute (maybe even like 30s), so you can see it's not that hard to get the total time lost due to a stop under 5 minutes.

Re:Wrong!

[Eivind]

575km/h is about half the speed of sound too, so assuming you hear the sound the train emitted when it was 1km away, the train will be only half a km away by the time the sound reaches your ears. And half a km at 575km/h is 3 seconds. Which is enough time to leap away, but NOT enough time to first turn and see what's going on, then get away.

For real speed, you want vactrains. Maglevs with a pressure-cabin, in an evacuated pipe. This has numerous advantages. First, there's less risk that anything will be on the line, if the line is in an enclosed pipe. Second, if there's a near-vacuum in the pipe, then it requires substantially less energy to push the train since air-resistance is the primary energy-waste at these speeds, and third, it cuts noise enormously, if the train is floating in vacuum, there's less vibration to begin with, and there's little transmission of noise to the surroundings too. (vacuum is a very good way of stopping noise!)