# TGV 360mph record attempt TUESDAY



## jamesontheroad

Sorry to keep harping on about it, but the green light was given earlier today for a full record attempt to be made. *TOMORROW (Tuesday 3 April 2007) is the day*.

You can watch the record attempt live online via the website of France 3 Television from 12h55 local time, 10h55 GMT, 05h55 EST, 02h55 PST at this link:

http://video-direct.france3.fr/player.php?id=25

Press release from AFP:



> 02/04/07 16h21 GMT+1*French train aims to break world speed record*
> 
> Source: http://www.france24.com/france24Public/en/...j5&cat=null
> 
> France's high-speed TGV train will try to smash its own world record and reach speeds of up to 580 kilometres (360 miles) per hour Tuesday in a move that manufacturer Alstom hopes will help it trounce its Japanese and German rivals in a rapidly expanding market.
> 
> Weather conditions permitting, a black V150 train will rocket along a stretch of the new high-speed line between Paris and the city of Strasbourg on France's border with Germany.
> 
> The experimental version of the Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV) will aim to break the current 17-year-old record of 515.3 kilometres (320.2 miles) per hour.
> 
> The train has already broken the record in several test runs carried out since mid-January, reaching speeds of 559 kph, according to the SNCF state rail operator.
> 
> But these speeds have not been officially verified.
> 
> "Tuesday is the official day," said an SNCF spokesman. "There will be monitors in place, and we'll see what speed we can hit."
> 
> The current world speed record for a train was the 581 kph reached in 2003 by a Japanese magnetic levitation train. But Alstom says that as these trains do not use ordinary rail tracks, this record cannot be compared with what they are hoping to achieve Tuesday on the Paris-Strasbourg line.
> 
> The Velaro, a high-speed train built by the German electrical engineering giant Siemens, currently holds the world speed record for a regular commercial train. That record -- 404 kph -- was achieved last year.
> 
> The TGV record being attempted Tuesday, the culmination of several months of tests that have cost an estimated 30 million euros (40 million dolars), is on a specially modified experimental train.
> 
> "Beyond the technical exploit, this is part of an attempt to record data on the behaviour of the infrastructure and of the rolling stock in extreme conditions which are impossible to carry out in the laboratory," said a statement from the three partners involved in Tuesday's test, the SNCF, the network operator RFF, and Alstom.
> 
> Another aim of Tuesday's record attempt is to show off French engineering prowess and help boost Alstom's sales of TGVs abroad, in a multi-billion-dollar market that increasingly competes with regional air links and where Japan's Shinkansen and Germany's Siemens are major players.
> 
> "If we beat this record, that will put us in a good position with respect to our competitors who do not have this technology," said Philippe Mellier, the head of the Alstom's train unit.
> 
> China, Korea and Taiwan are already big customers for high-speed trains, and Turkey, Brazil and Argentina are also entering the market.
> 
> Currently, average travelling speeds for the TGV are around 300 kilometres per hour, but trains on the latest-generation Paris-Strasbourg line are to run slightly faster at 320 kilometres per hour.
> 
> Work began five years ago on the state-of-the-art Paris-Strasbourg TGV line, which opens to the public on June 10. One of the biggest rail projects in Europe, it mobilised some 10,000 workers and required 78,000 tonnes of steel -- enough to build eight Eiffel towers.


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## jamesontheroad

She's done it... 574.8km/h, or about 357mph… almost one mile every ten seconds.

*j* :blink:


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## MrFSS

How long was the course the train ran to set that record (I don't read French so the web site didn't help me)? Was it part of regular trackage that is used for passenger service everyday?

Can you imagine if Amtrak could even approach 300 MPH out west what it would do to travel times!!


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## George Harris

Just appeared on Yahoo News: April 3, 2007: A specially modified V150 French TGV high-speed train, set a new world rail speed record at 574.8 km/h (357.1 mph) in France's Champagne region at Bezannes, eastern France, about 125 miles east of Paris on the yet to be opened new line between Paris and Strasbourg.

Two electric locos with three unit articulated double deck coach set between them. 25,000 hp, overhead power voltage increased from normal 25,000 to 31,000, larger diameter wheels on the locos.

Technicians on the train had "French excellence" emblazoned on the backs of their T-shirts.

Soure: Reuters and others.

Good Morning, America ! Let's wake up and do something. Also, this is within 4 mph of the Japanese record for their Maglev system, which is at this time the record for any form of guided transport.

George


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## jamesontheroad

MrFSS said:


> How long was the course the train ran to set that record (I don't read French so the web site didn't help me)? Was it part of regular trackage that is used for passenger service everyday?


The train was operating along a stretch of the new LGV Est, which is France's newest dedicated high speed railway line. The first phase, which opens to commercial traffic on 9 June (I am very tempted by a day trip to Paris on that day...) runs from Vaires-sur-Marne near Paris to Baudrecourt in the Moselle region. A second phase has been given the green light to open in or after 2012, which will continue from Baudrecourt to Vendenheim near Strasbourg. I'm not sure of the exact stretch used for the record attempt; it was shown briefly on TV today, but I only remember that it was in the region of Lorraine.

The advantage that TGV trains have over other high speed trains (maglev etc) is that they operate on traditional steel wheels, so they can run on ordinary railway tracks (a maglev train needs a pretty sophisticated track from station to station). For the short distance from Paris Gare de l'Est (the TGV Est's Paris terminal) to Vaires-sur-Marne, the trains run on ordinary tracks alongside freight and suburban traffic. To then achieve their top speeds, they join their own dedicated LGV (Ligne à Grande Vitesse) route. These are dedicated high speed routes open only to TGV trains. The line is almost more sophisticated than the train, since the cantenary wires are engineered to much stronger margins so as not to break as a train passes under them. Like an autoroute or freeway, the only thing is designed along much wider curves to help faster travel. The signalling is also more complex; basically being based on in-cab signals. An ordinary visual trackside signal wouldn't be much use since the train would have passed it by the time the driver has had time to even register that it was there 

There are some points to note though... when regular TGV service begins on this line in June, it'll be at the relatively pedestrian speed of 320km/h (198mph). All this is to improve the current service, which 'only' has a top speed of 200km/h (125mph)...! Journey times will be drastically shorter though: Strasbourg - Paris will drop from 4hrs to 2hrs 20m, and again to 1hr 50m when the second phase opens in 2012. It'll also mean that Brits like me who like living in eastern France will be able to take a direct train to Lille in northern France (3hrs 20m from Strasbourg) and then hop on a Eurostar to London, rather than routing via Paris. This same-station transfer from Eurostar to TGV in Lille has proved an exceptionally popular way of tempting UK-France travellers onto the train instead of the plane.

As the BBC reported today, they actually had to crank up the juice on the overhead lines from the normal 25,000 volts to 31,000 volts! Today's test was an extreme example to test the infrastructure and to demonstrate the TGV's superiority over competing high speed trains for forthcoming orders in the Far East.



MrFSS said:


> Can you imagine if Amtrak could even approach 300 MPH out west what it would do to travel times!!


Well, glancing at my Amtrak timetable and imagining we have three times the GDP of the US to spend, if you could average 300mph the whole way you could do:


CHI - EMY in 8hrs 7m

CHI - SEA in 7hrs 21m

BOS - WAS in 1hr 31m

NYP - CHI in 3hrs 12m

...but what would be the fun in that? 

*j* :blink:


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## jamesontheroad

Slightly off-topic, but the phenomenally popular car show on BBC Two television in the UK had a great little feature a year or two ago. They decided to see who could get from the studios on an airfield in Surrey in southern England, to Monte Carlo on the Mediterranean first: Jeremy Clarkson drove there in an Aston Martin DB9, while James May or Richard Hammond (before his infamous car crash in a rocket propelled car) took a bus, suburban train, Eurostar and TGV...

And who won...?

Well, you can watch that part of the show and see for yourself. Let's just say it was very close, and perhaps not exactly a fair representation of the average traveller's choice of travel options 

Part one: http://youtube.com/watch?v=rSKxiw7sajo

Part two: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v8R04FumQvY

*j*


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## AmtrakWPK

And for those of you who run across a foreign-language web site that you want to read, try

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

which is an online translator. You copy and paste the foreign language text into a window, select the "from" and "to" languages, and it will give you a rough translation of what you pasted in. It is usually a bit confused, since it's machine translation, but it's almost always good enugh to understand the gist of the text. Very useful for those times that you're researching something on the web and want to know whether that link you found is actually "on-point" or not.

Also, if you use Google and type in some french text, i.e., TGV grand vitesse, when the results come back, you may find a "translate this page" link in the search result for foreign-language pages, which will automatically do a machine translation of that page. So if you had a link to the foreign-language page, you could work backwards, by selecting phrases in French from that page and typing them into a Google search, then if Google finds that same page by your having used phrases from the page to search with, you could select the "translate this page" link in Google to have that page presented in English.

I think there are also some online translation tools that allow you to type in the URL for a foreign-language page and specify the "from" and "to" languages, and it will present a translated version of the page. Lots of VERY useful tools out there if you take the time to find them AND THEN BOOKMARK THE TOOLS!!


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## MrFSS

And, here is the MSNBC report: *LINK*

That puppy really moves!!!


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## GG-1

MrFSS said:


> That puppy really moves!!!


Now thats what I call flying low, When Can I ride one here 

Aloha And Mahalo


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## jamesontheroad

GG-1 said:


> Now thats what I call flying low, When Can I ride one here


Well, according to this BBC News report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6521295.stm



> The technology is also being looked at in California for a new high-speed service between Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to AFP news agency.


???

*j* :blink:


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## AmtrakWPK

If something like that could run between the Tampa-Orlando area and Miami, I think it would see a lot of passengers. I would sure rather take a train that would travel the Orlando-Miami trip in less than an hour instead of a four and a half hour drive or three hours for air travel ( the actual flight is less than an hour but add two or three hours to that for processing at the airport beforehand and then after you arrive at Miami ). You'd be arriving in Miami almost before an airline passenger had gotten through the security lines at the Orlando airport.

Of course, I have some doubts about how energy-efficient that train would be, unless it had more than three coaches. It's got to take an awful lot of energy to run that fast. The fact that they had to "overclock" the system by running it at 31,000 Volts instead of the normal 25,000 Volts certainly suggests that.

And since anything like this would require an Administration that is pro-passenger-rail, flying pigs will be having snowball fights in Hades before we'll see such a thing in the U.S.


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## George Harris

Athough this sounds like working to set a record for the sake of doing it, there is a lot more to it than that. Most of the experimentially derived information on train performance has been checked and confirmed by multiple train operations only up to the currently common maximum of 300 km/h (186 mph) At that speed it is very obvious that you have not reached the practical limit of steel wheel on steel rail. But beyond that level what happens is not so well known. When you try to extrapolate beyond the end of the experimentially derived information, the further you get, the less certain the results. A major objective here was to extend the known into the currently unknown. You can bet that these coaches were loaded with instrumentation measuring everything that could be measured. You can also bet that the results are being held by SNCF with the same level of secrecy as that surrounding the atomic bomb in 1945.

As to California: look at www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov and see what they are planning. Their objective is to operate 2.5 hour services between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Whether it will be TGV practices and equipment or ICE or Shinkansen does not appear to be finalized. Hopefully it will be the best overall mixture and will include a lot from American track practices, which are by far the best in the world in many aspects.

George


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## Guest

If the feds were willing to spend some money on trains, they could have a line from NYC - Chicago taking either the route of the Broadway LTD or the 21st Century LTD. Perhaps modified a bit to hit more metro areas along the way.


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## jamesontheroad

Just to update, here's a YouTube clip of the official (English language) SNCF video of the record breaking run:



*j*


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## AmtrakWPK

Sunset Limited recently beat it's previous speed record on UP tracks, of 575 furlongs per fortnight.


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## jamesontheroad

> Sunset Limited recently beat it's previous speed record on UP tracks, of 575 furlongs per fortnight.


Ah, but were there two lawyers on board to ratify it...? :lol:

*j*


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## AmtrakWPK

They did, but they slept through most of it, so it doesn't count. They made the mistake of trying to count the freightcars that were passing the siding Sunset was parked on. Turned out to be more effective than counting sheep.


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## George Harris

MrFSS said:


> How long was the course the train ran to set that record (I don't read French so the web site didn't help me)? Was it part of regular trackage that is used for passenger service everyday?


From the May 2007 Railway Gazette:

This was done on the not yet opened TGV Est Europeen line. (This line is the new line for Paris to Strasbourg.) "on a specially prepared section between km 264 and km170. This was chosen for its favorable profile with a long gentle downgrade and only large radius curves that would not limit the record attempt."

A look at the speed - distance profile shown in the article says that, like the 1992 record' this was all they could squeeze out of the length available. The run was done westbound, in other words, in the direction of decreasing km post numbers. The speed is shown as being 574.79 km/h at kilometer 193.92. Immediately after passing that point, the brakes go on so the train can bed slowed down to 300 km/h by kilometer 170.

Among other pieces of information: "40 runs were made when speeds exceeded 400 km/h." "aerodynamc phenomena became extremely significant between 500 and 550 km/h." One unplanned incident resulted in an emergency stop from 506.8 km/h within a distance of 16.8 km, compared to a calculated need for 25 km. "The (brake) discs reached a temperature of 650 deg C." (1202 deg F).


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## jamesontheroad

Just to update (and to brag) ... my tickets are booked for a weekend I in Paris from 7 - 10 June. I'll be travelling out (from Strasbourg) on one of the last days of 'slow' (125mph, 200km/h) Corail service and back on the first revenue earning day of the TGV Est (at 198mph, 320km/h).

Like travelling across time zones, the faster journey on the way back (2hrs 20m instead of 4hrs) means my weekend will gain an extra two hours... sort of :wacko:

I'll post first impressions when I get back.

*j*


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## MrFSS

jamesbrownontheroad said:


> Just to update (and to brag) ... my tickets are booked for a weekend I in Paris from 7 - 10 June. I'll be traveling out (from Strasbourg) on one of the last days of 'slow' (125mph, 200km/h) Corail service and back on the first revenue earning day of the TGV Est (at 198mph, 320km/h).
> Like traveling across time zones, the faster journey on the way back (2hrs 20m instead of 4hrs) means my weekend will gain an extra two hours... sort of :wacko:
> 
> I'll post first impressions when I get back.
> 
> *j*


May we ask what the fare is for a trip such as you will take?


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## jamesontheroad

MrFSS said:


> May we ashttp://discuss.amtraktrains.com/index.php?act=Post&CODE=02&f=12&t=11817&qpid=76746k what the fare is for a trip such as you will take?


Ok, deep breath... SNCF fares are a little more complicated than Amtrak's 

The easiest way to explain is to show you the press info the SNCF released. You can find a complete fare table for the new TGV Est services on page 17 of this pdf document:

http://www.tgvesteuropeen.com/IMG/pdf/Doss...vril2007_FR.pdf

EDIT... here's a jpeg of that page...






From left to right, the columns on that page show you:

- the current price in (basic) Corail service, 2nd class and 1st class

- the current price in (enhanced) Corail Téoz service, 2nd class and 1st class

- the new price of TGV Est travel 2nd class off peak, 2nd class peak and 1st class

- highlighted in pink, the lowest possible 'prem' and discount card fares

- and in the final two columns the journey time and time saved by the TGV

Prices are in euros, so multiply by about 1.34 for US dollars or use a converter like xe.com to work 'em out in your currency. Sample fares for international routes to Luxembourg, Germany and Switzerland are explained on pages 14 and 15.

SNCF's biggest marketing push for the TGV Est has been the promise of 5,000 introductory 'prem' fares every day throughout the summer: that's to say one fares such as Paris-Reims €15 (USD$20), Paris-Metz €20 (USD$27), Paris-Nancy €20, Paris-Strasbourg €25 (USD$34). There are also some international routes like Paris-Luxembourg and Paris-Zurich with €25 and €35 prems (USD$47). However, as many regional journalists have been quick to point out, basic fares are now as much as 35% more than in Corail service. And when the SNCF open a TGV line, they immediately cancel all slower / cheaper Corail services, so the current fare choice that I would have between Corail and the refurbished Corail Téoz disappears.

A vast majority of regular French travellers can take advantage of railcard discounts: season tickets, 60+, or in my case, the 12-25 card for young people. This costs €49 (USD$66) a year and guarantees 25% discount on all travel (even walk-up-and-go) *or* 50% off many advance purchase fares, which are quota controlled and naturally run out as they sell out.

In addition to all these, there are are regular (weekly) seat sales on many TGV routes, so advance travellers should be able to do ok if they don't mind commiting to non-refundable non-changeable tickets. Unlike many other countries, SNCF 'prem' fares are available through all marketing streams: online, by phone, in ticket offices or in SNCF boutiques. However it will be more expensive for those who show up and buy a ticket for immediate travel.

So, to answer your question...

I'm travelling out on an off peak Corail service on 12-25 card 50% fare for €23.10, for a trip of 4hrs 4m. I'm coming back by TGV in a peak period TGV with a 12-25 card 50% fare for €31.50, for a trip of 2hrs 21m. Round trip of €54.60, or about USD73.50.

*j* :blink:


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