cirdan
Engineer
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2011
- Messages
- 3,942
Another problem in Europe lies in the transition from locomotives + cars to fixed consists. Because of this there are fewer and fewer locomotives, fewer and fewer switching locomotives and switching crews and station track layouts are slowly being rationalized to reflect this. Thus many railroads are asking, can they justify keeping the extra facilities for a once a day night train when the rest of the infrastructure is attuned to an hourly or more fixed-consist service. Many night trains split or join en route and this calls for middle of the night switching. Many sections also start their first leg attached to some day train, and if that day train goes from locmotive and cars to a fixed consist, you lose that option and either face the higher costs of that leg becoming a standalone train, or more likely, you dump it completely.Yeah. The two sleeper services in the UK are really almost too short in duration to run sleepers. High speed lines are causing the same situation with a bunch of Continental routes; the trips are just too fast for sleepers to make sense.Could it be that since Europe has gotten so much HSR its sleepers are no longer needed for many of the shorter routes.
But also, the longer routes in Europe, which still should have sleepers, mostly cross national borders, sometimes several times. There is substantial bureaucracy involved in doing that. This has caused many of the rail operators to not want to deal with cross-border sleeping cars. (Russian Railways is the exception, and is still running sleepers all the way from Moscow to Paris.)
About 20 years ago, the European Union launched a blueprint for a trans-European high-speed network, with glossy brochures talking of Madrid to Moscow being the rail market of the future. Some of the ongoing investments such as Stuttgart 21 still claim to be serving this goal. But what has happened in reality has been the opposite. We have seen the emergence of lots of standalone high speed services, often with incompatible trains and lots of city pairs that previously had direct connections now require mutiple changes, sometimes even overnight stays in hotels, and despite the high speed, now take longer than they did 20 years ago. The beneficiaries of this are the low cost airlines.
20 years ago, most LD car were internationally normed and with the exception of the UK, Ireland, Spain and Poprtugal, which for various reasons were incompatible, these cars could go anywhere and could be mixed in the same consists. Even in the case of Spain there were some international trains using UIC cars. These had their trucks switched at the border. The same for trains from Germand and Poland to Ukraine and Russia. So with this high degree of standardization, international trains were not a big issue. Of course the locomotives were not as compatible and with a few exceptions (such as the French-Benelux multi-system locomotives, and also some German ones) these were changed at borders. But the passenger rarely noticed much of this as many border stations had slick and efficient techniques and the overall delay was not too bad. Today the opposite is true. Fixed consists are normally only suitable for the specific service for which they were designed. When a train is introduced that can run in different countries, this is trumpeted as a huge achievement while the PR folks hope we'll forget that 20 years ago that was the minimum you could expect.
It would be as if the Silvers were cut back at Washington DC and the Keystones to Philadelphia because the NEC was setup to accept only fixed consist Acela trains
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