Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads:
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- • Private hire vehicles may soon pay Congestion Charge (IntelligentTransport)
- • South Bank London’s Low Line – Part 2 (1LondonBlog)
- • Slip coaches – when British trains detached cars in motion (99%Invisible)
- • Germany planning free transit to fight air pollution (GlobalCitizen)
- • Boston makes bus lane experiment permanent (StreetsBlog)
- • Rail park opening in Philadelphia (CurbedPhilly)
- • Detroit station revival inspires return of stolen artifacts (99%Invisible)
- • Union Station addition travesty (ChicagoCurbed)
- • Latvia’s railway bridge to nowhere (AtlasObscura)
- • Who owns the space under cities? (Guardian)
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I’d like to see a return of the slip cars concept. Albeit in a safer fashion!
With powered MU cars this could be much safer now, and could also allow for on-the-move re-attachment (with inter unit wireless comms to enable a safe approach speed).
Of course the additional staff requirements would still be an issue (unless it can be fully automated)
DJL
With modern traction, especially if electric, there’s no point.
Split/divide/recouple can be done very quickly with modern couplings, & the acceleration of current machines is so much better.
Charging PH vehicles to enter the central zone would, clearly, raise funds however if it is to be a single charge-per-day I suspect it will just become a ‘cost of doing business’ overhead for the drivers.
Now if County Hall made it like Oslo where, aiui, vehicles pay each time they enter the controlled zone, that might make the numbers reduce.
Alison: County Hall died in 1986. A re-entry charge could have perverse effects, such as vehicles staying inside the boundary as long as they can.
@DJL: Dynamic re-attachment? I don’t think that’s going to work unless the moving train is going quite slowly and attaching coach can travel much, much faster than the train…
That’s just not going to fly…. 😉
SHLR: Agreed it’s not going to happen any day soon. But if it were ever required, the “slip” coach would start out in front of the impending train, and couple on to the front of it. Something for our great-grandchildren to look forward to in their old age, perhaps.
SHLR/Malcolm….none of this slip/re-attachment is quite as Barking as the proposal a few years back to have branch line trains alongside expresses on adjacent tracks with the passengers transferring as the trains moved along perfectly synced for speed. The rationale was aircraft tankers and fighters refuelling!
Re: slip coaches – am I the only one who remembers this from a couple of years ago?
https://www.railengineer.uk/2016/11/14/seamless-interchangeability/
Seemed pretty odd to me; I never did understand how, if – as stated – it”s intended as a solution for people with reduced mobility, a wheelchair user is supposed to be able to get from any carriage to any other on the move while keeping suitable capacity and quality of on board accommodation.
In any case, as with any “dynamic coupling” concept, it breaks the cardinal signalling principles if (a) only one train in section and (b) safety overlaps – and that applies with or without the currently non-existent moving block ETCS Level 3 referenced in the article.
The issue of who owns the ground has had a practical impact in transport terms. In Paris there are a significant number of residential underground car parks built underneath the streets. These are quite popular and provide for residential parking in places where there are no surface level spaces available. The same company looked to repeat this success in London and looked to have a trial in Sutherland Avenue in Maida Vale. This failed for two reasons. One was that, in Paris, the sewers are constructed underneath the footways on each side of the road but in London they are generally constructed underneath the mid line of the road. This added to costs by requiring much more work in sewer diversion. The second is that, in France, the state owns the land underneath ground level so that a simple deal with the state to build the car park was all that was needed. However, in London, the principals that the freeholder owns down to the centre of the earth allowed unwilling property owners the ability to hold the whole project to ransom. When it turned out to look as though the cost per parking space would exceed £1,000 a year, the trial was dropped.
@Malcolm and others – didn’t the Danes try something similar with their IC3 (?) – the ones with rubber vehicle ends – units, in which the following unit caught up the one in front and coupled automatically? When we discussed this with the ops side of DSB, they confessed that there was a technical term for the coupling operation which cannot be repeated on a mixed public forum…
@Quinlet – easily done – an issue which has killed many new tramway schemes in eastern Europe…
Re: GH – I vaguely remember that operation of the DSB IC3s might have involved suspension of normal signalling principles in this way. But did it ever actually happen?
An admittedly very quick websearch turned up no reference.
Balthazar/Graham H. Are you sure this is what they said or intended; nothing lost in translation? When these were introduced, I am sure they said that the door and rubber surround were intend to enable quick coupling and uncoupling. Equally they might have said that they were intending to couple and uncouple during the journey. I think this is no different to what happens at places like Purley, Three Bridges and Haywards Heath every day. If they really intended to couple or uncouple on the move then they were working to different signalling principles to anywhere else in Europe!
I think it must have been lost in translation…. Belgium has the same trains (but electric), from what I remember the entire dashboards folds and tucks away to the side so giving maximum width for the corridor. The big rubber ring effectively becomes the corridor connector.
From what I remeber this was to facilitate the joining of multiple units into longer units and I believe they are mainly used on the Verviers to Brugge and the coast route. The train normally splits into three parts in Brugge: Knokke-Heist, Blankenberge and Oostende. So the speed with which this can be done is very important. The wide corridor is also important as it allows passengers (often with luggage) to switch to be “in the correct part of the train”…
Not 100% sure if it still operates like this, but I remember it from when they were introduced in the mid ‘90’s…
Malcolm: mea culpa, indeed I was there on the very last night of its existence as the seat of the GLA. Though I agree with your ‘perverse effect’ that is what happens presently, so a per-entry charge would still be an improvement.
quinlet: I suspect there are more than a few people who would willingly pay £1000pa for a central parking space now.
Re: 130 – No, I’m not. Hence the question!
@AlisonW
I’m sure you’re right, but those costs were about 1990. The way London building and development costs have gone since then it will be more than double now. Strangely you might have thought that even in 1990 there would be enough people willing to pay £1,000pa for a parking space, but the surveys done by the promoters showed that there were not enough, or not enough concentrated in any one area. To make the scheme pay you would need to have at least 100 spaces and finding that many in a single street, when the alternative was a £100 council resident’s parking permit, was a tall order then and I think would remain so today. If you are willing to pay £1,000 a year you wouldn’t want the parking space to be three streets away.
I can confirm that the IC3’s operating the Øresundståg route regularly couple and uncouple at stations, both rapidly and with a only a very slight jolt. However, I have never been on one that couples or uncouples at speed and hope never to be.
On ownership of the space under cities, in London there is the thorny topic of the railway tunnels under Lord’s Cricket Ground. In The Guardian, source of the article in the weekly reading list, the most recent of a few items on this is:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jul/03/mcc-cricket-lords-tunnels-nursery-end
And as to the space beneath railways but above the ground, a question of ownership and usage is topical and perhaps should be attracting more attention and controversy than it has to date:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/02/small-firms-face-extermination-due-to-network-rail-asset-sale
I though that for railway tunnels …
It was always written into the relevant Ennabling Act ( or TWAO, these days ) that the railway had a “permanent easement” &/or owned the tunnel itself & a volume a few millimetres ( or similar ) around the tunnel-periphery.
@Greg: I think you failed to read the article about the MCC tunnels carefully…
SHLR
OK I will amend that to: “usually & in normal circumstances”