We did?
Cologne's tram system is weird. Over the last century, they merged the tram, subway and selected private railways into a single network. The result is sort of a tram network on steroids, that also runs underground and serves longer distances to two neighboring cities. But it's still separate from the national train network or even "real" suburban trains (S-Bahn).
(Edit: Just learned the term "interurban" for that...)
That's unlike Berlin or Vienna, where you sometimes have subway and S-Bahn side by side in the same station, but on different tracks. I think that's closer to what they mean with "through-running"?
Maybe Wien Mitte though?
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/ubahn/m/large...
Uhhh, it’s not.
E.g.
> Line 8 is 22.057 km (13.706 mi) long, including 2.8 km (1.7 mi) of open-air tracks in the southeastern suburbs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_8
Maybe they just meant comparing it to the tunnelled sections but I also don’t see why that would really impact speeds. It’s the traffic/grade separation that gets you the speed advantage.
also the Paris Metro is kinda slow because of station density, so you may save a lot of walking but have a lot of station dwell time.
Go during the day and pick any two arbitrary points in Paris and you’ll usually find cycling faster than transit on Google Maps.
Karlsruhe: The local operators have severe quality issues, in part due to this concept. There are like four points in the city where issues impact the whole network. The rolling stock is very bad compared to the other regional trains running in Baden-Württemberg (no/bad ac, flaky internet, no sockets, bad seating). The trains have way too little capacity, I’ve seen incidents, where they run three coaches (which they don’t do often, they are too long to enter the city), where people could not get in anymore. Some of the stations in the surrounding area are absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through. Some trains are split or merged when leaving or entering the city, but it always causes delays. When trains can’t use the heavy metal rails and thus not leave the city due to ICEs getting priority, a lot of inner city traffic can be affected. The cooperation between the different infrastructure operators is also a source of problems.
Do not take Karlsruhe uncritically as an example where this model works well, yeah sure average numbers make it look good, but the reliability is complete ass. KVV always manages to surprise me on how bad it gets.
I don't follow your point. It's not like the inner-city tram lines are all perfectly segregated from road traffic and no accidents ever natively happen inside the city limits.
That's not the fault of the tram-train system, though - without the tram-trains, you'd still have the same platform access situation if you wanted to take the heavy rail regional train instead.
yet, what this historiography conveniently omits is that it was the glorious government intervention that strangled the often privately owned interurban/tram/train companies out of business due to massive amounts of roads being built under public works programs that were all too common from the 1920s-1940s.
As the article mentions later:
automobile doomed the interurban whose private, tax-paying tracks could never compete with the highways that a generous government provided for the motorist.
that provision had many names, one was “New Deal”
I don’t have a solution but two observations:
1) somehow in Asia never happened what happened in the West, that is, private transportation companies are still private, they prosper, and the societies excel at mobility.
2) Never ever destroy built infrastructure. Always plan for the possibility for a comeback. Post-war, many cities removed tram tracks. But even a rusty tram track is cheaper to repair 70 years later than, paying upfront for the dismantling and 70 years later for a complete new construction.
Keeping unused right of ways open is challenging too. Adjacent properties will tend to encroach, and depending on specifics and local rules, may be able to claim the encroached property through adverse possession.
In Somerville, the Somerville Community Path was a disused heavy rail right-of-way when I first visited in 2002 or 2003. Ripping up the tracks and putting in the community path improved walkability to a Red Line station (Davis) and creating a nice space for recreational walking and cycling.
There are real trade offs to leaving disused infrastructure in place. Not losing a continuous right-of-way is a huge upside, but there are definitely downsides too.
Really what killed the rail system was the concept of free highway travel. Private companies will never be able to compete with free, government subsidized travel. It so thoroughly killed private companies that they couldn't even afford to really downsize and salvage what was left of their passenger operations. By comparison you have to pay for highway travel in Japan and China and Korea.
Where I am from in Europe, the rise in property value thanks to rail lines is captured by lucky property owners. That is why as a free market guy I support subsidising rail and other public transport with taxes, if we don't have the Asian system.
Sure, "lucky". Lucky as in, I'm well connected and I hear in advance from the politicians where the transit lines will be so I make sure to buy properties/land in those areas, so later I turn out to be really lucky when the government projects just happen to cross over my private land/property.
Funny how that kind of luck only turns out to favor the already wealthy and connected, 100% of the time, and never the poor. How do you call that type of luck?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Major_railway_stations_...
e.g. today's 18:24 from Horsham to Peterbrough going through London Bridge at 19:31, Blackfriars at 19:37 and then St Pancras (for a triple!) at 19:46 https://www.thetrainline.com/live/departures/london-blackfri...
I literally posted a train going through London Bridge and north out of London!
This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than the passengers disembark.
I had no idea. A few systems are still in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban#United_States
This is not a feasible option due to the vast difference in crashworthiness standards between US freight rail and other system types such as light rail. The FRA actually prohibits allowing these two types on the same network of tracks at the same time. However, they could use a line along the right-of-way were it big enough to accommodate another set of tracks.
The biggest issue is often bridges. Retaining the land that additional track(s) were on is fairly cheap. Building and maintaining rail bridges is not.
And building the light rail bridges for a transit system is not cheap. It's just less horribly expensive than building bridges which you could run strings of 220-ton freight locomotives over.
To really be usable - by revenue-generating trains - track has to receive regular maintenance. Which costs money. If your RR is desperately short on both revenue-generating trains and money, then it's kinda obvious that you cut the no-longer-necessary expenses.
And railroad rails are steel, generally weighing 100+ pounds per yard. Scrap steel sold for far fewer dollars per ton in the '70's - but you get about 200 tons per mile of unused track that you tear up.
I don’t know the regulations but that’s probably why.
That said, I believe the FRA did allow lighter designs such as the Siemens FLIRT for commuter lines so the rules are definitely less onerous.
Also, the old buff strength rules were not great at keeping people alive. 25 people died in the Chatsworth train collision that led to the PTC mandate, which compares poorly to a similar crash between two trains in Germany which killed 12. There is a reason why buff strength has not been the criteria for automobiles for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chatsworth_train_collisio...
The bigger problem is the freights just have no interest in sharing the tracks with passenger trains, and requiring heavier and more expensive passenger trains is a convenient way to price the project to death.
Older American regulations favor pure buff strength. European regulations tend to emphasize making collisions impossible by using signalling and automatic emergency stop braking, and then crumple zones and other safety technologies. And the US has ended up adopting similar signalling regulations anyways with PTC, so now it is perfectly fine to allow European rolling stock. We already emphasize safety technologies over buff strength in US car regulations.
https://railroads.dot.gov/regulations/federal-register-docum...
I think they stopped it. As far as I know, Amsterdam's tram, metro and train lines are entirely separate again. They may still have some connections, but if so, those aren't used for regular service.
As for the through problem, the main problem here was that many cities were already big before trains were introduced, and most didn't want to demolish large chunks of the city to make space for trains to the center (although American cities infamously later demolished their city centers to make space for cars). Amsterdam was on a big waterfront, however; the original 15th century port that wasn't being used anymore. The port moved east, and a new island would host the new central station right in the heart of the city. Although the city did lose its view of the waterfront.
Edinburgh drained a lake to make space for the train station. And of course some cities did demolish houses to make space for trains.
One long platform with two heights to accommodate metro line E and trams 3 and 4.
A few points I want to add: The Stadtbahn (called Tram-Metro in this Article) is usually just as fast in the outlying areas as in the inner areas and rarely street running, just doing it with less infrastructure. It's just that rail tracks are even faster.
There are quite a few newly built S-Bahn Tunnels in cities under a Million in Germany, in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Leipzig (you could quibble about citie vs metro area population).
The major downside of Tram-Trains compared to S-Bahns, Rapid Transit or just through running away from the city center is that they slow way down in the city center, much more than the other options. This makes it a bad fit for the sprawly, north american cities without a strong center which have much more demand for non city center destinations and a much more expansive center compared to european cities with tram-trains.
The big benefit of Tram-Trains is the flexibility. Over a region, some sections can implement their own new through running section for the Network (Heilbronn), be almost a metro (the Kombilösung and some parts of S11) or provide S-Bahn style service (e.g. Freudenstadt for a mediocre Regio S-Bahn).
But it's a master of none: Too slow and cramped for high-quality regional services, too few doors for rapid passenger exchange, too demanding and expensive (electrification and vehicles) for connecting small rural lines, legally limited in capacity (75m) for very busy services.
They can be great, but it really depends on local circumstances.
Before converting commuter rail to Tram-Trains, most American cities should first implement a frequent (at least 2tph), all-day, regular service with more urban stations for commuter rail and perform true ticket integration between mainline rail and their other urban transport (the ticket integration is very important!). This also applies to many european cities, such as in France, Spain, Belgium, ... .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forch_railway
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sihltal_Z%C3%BCrich_Uetliberg_...
If you visit Metz, its easy to book a motel at the outskirts near an end stop of the train. Parking your car is free if you ride the train, the ticket serves as the exit ticket for the parking area too.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettis_(bus_%C3%A0_haut_niveau...
fjfaase•1d ago
salynchnew•1d ago
Does San Francisco's Muni LRVs somehow not qualify as a tram train network?
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/muni-metro-light-r...
puls•1d ago
It would also be more or less impossible under current US regulations, but there's always hoping that that could be fixed.
Animats•1d ago
Current Caltrain equipment: [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUEZ6uuM_EA
AnimalMuppet•1d ago
bobthepanda•17h ago
We stopped requiring buff strength in automobiles as the only thing a long time ago because it turns out that mostly just resulted in the cars surviving and the people inside them dying. Try throwing a steel box full of eggs and see what happens to the eggs.
bobthepanda•17h ago