Rail travellers a dying breed

Interesting equation: The price of gas, petrol, goes up; the commuter rail gets more passengers, the trains have to add more cars, engines have to work harder, or a second engine is needed. And still there is bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours.

i dont think fuel price is a huge factor in the overlander increase . If price was a factor , people would probably fly , its generally cheaper .

You could fly to commute to work ? What is the distance you have to cover ? At one time people were considering helicopters for their back yards for commuting. Some actually did it, for a while. Aviation fuel is quite expensive.

pennsy wrote:You could fly to commute to work ? What is the distance you have to cover ? At one time people were considering helicopters for their back yards for commuting. Some actually did it, for a while. Aviation fuel is quite expensive.

the overlander is a long distance train , around 680 km or 400 miles .

Well, the competition between air and rail is also a matter of size.

Commuting over 600 km is really only a possibility on the weekends; i.e. work Mon-Fri, spend home Sat-Sun. Here in Germany, the prices for flying such (short) distances are really outrageous, especially since these routes are only covered by small airlines.
But if you have the money, saving 8-12 hours on travel time each week (e.g. in Germany for Hamburg - Munich, or Mannheim/Stuttgart - Berlin, or the ever-famous Bonn - Berlin route for government employees) is worth it for enough people for there to be enough demand for dedicated business traveller air routes.

Without some Maglev like Transrapid, trains won't really fully compete in that field ever, and for the huge investment in such links, there simply isn't enough demand. We'd likely be talking less than 1000 people who commute each such route by aircraft every week.

pennsy wrote:Interesting equation: The price of gas, petrol, goes up; the commuter rail gets more passengers, the trains have to add more cars, engines have to work harder, or a second engine is needed. And still there is bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours.

In most countries we are talking about electric trains.

Yo George; How does the electricity get to the wires ? Generators powered by petrol ?

pennsy wrote:Yo George; How does the electricity get to the wires ? Generators powered by petrol ?

This is the worldwide section. Most rail outside the US is electrified.

Yes, but the electricity has to come from somewhere.

In Germany, infrastructure-wise, the energy used for electrified railroads comes from:
- 12 % hydropower
- 20 % nuclear power
- 48 % coal plants
- 15 % gas plants
- 6 % other sources (wind, solar, oil, biomass)

40% of the above comes from the public infrastructure, 60% from dedicated turbines in power plants.

Austria in comparison produces almost all its electricity for railways from dedicated hydropower plants, although they have connection points for peak requirements.

There was a time when Italian railways got their power from a geothermal steam system.
Switzerland used hydro power. (Nowadays they have nukes). France runs almost entirely on nuclear power and has been installing streetcars in city after city for decades, having almost eliminated them in the 1950s and 1960s.

http://www.angelfire.com/mac/egmatthews ... ndoss.html

pennsy wrote:Interesting equation: The price of gas, petrol, goes up; the commuter rail gets more passengers, the trains have to add more cars, engines have to work harder, or a second engine is needed. And still there is bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours.

It's actually somewhat insane to what extent railway traffic is planned to be expanded over here.

Current planning for the Mannheim, Germany area sees a wanted expansion of about 50% in commuter service, 50% in interregional service (above 100 km) and 50% in long-distance trains (above 250 km) over current service - within the next 5-6 years. Only thing that probably stays unchanged are international links (above 1500 km). And there's about 3 billion Euro waiting to be invested for the infrastructure to handle the above increases.

And at the same time, most freeways in the area are expanded to 6 lanes, every other village is getting 4-lane segregated highway and the larger towns plan tunnels for hundreds of millions of Euros to route traffic around their cores.
Oh, and airports in the wider region are being expanded too.

My word , Kato ,thats alot of travel options been planned . will people have time to do anything else , LOL ?

I happened to see the overlander train passing through Otrahanga yesterday (sunday ) .$ carriages quite full for the middle of winter and not school holidays . Unfortunately it was running about an hour late .

To pick that up again:

David Benton wrote:My word , Kato ,thats alot of travel options been planned . will people have time to do anything else , LOL ?

For comparison, the core region i talked about in the above post is about the same size and density as the Auckland metro (slightly more spread out with multiple cores). The number of daily passengers on public transport within it well exceeds half a million people, hence why the above is needed.

What is the latest on the Overlander?

still running George , daily in summer and school holidays , and 3 days a week in winter . the trains out of christchurch have been hit hard by the earthquake , with the coastal pacific been suspended until spring .