Are high-speed trains that good?
I must admit I'm a great fan of high-speed trains: they're very comfortable, they're fast and they take and leave you in the center of the city of your choice (usually). Japanese bullet trains and European TGVs, ICEs and AVEs have returned dignity back to railway transport. But not everybody is happy about them.
As our readers pointed out, Spain is building an extensive network of high-speed trains, which is also being used to connect the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe (the current track gauge used there is different than the standard European one). But some voices are being quite serious about the real cost of high speed trains.
First of all there's the construction work, which affects land usage: Spain needs to build additional tracks and can't refurbish the current ones because of the different track gauge. This increases the cost of the work, which is being diverted from conventional trains, like the ones you might use to go to work on a daily basis.
Then there's the question of where the electricity comes from. When a high speed train runs above 300 km/h (about 200 mph), it uses as much energy per person as a plane (or so its claimed in this article, which is in Spanish). Where does this electricity come from? France's source is obvious: nuclear energy, which is also exported to Germany and Spain, a country where also most of the electric power comes from gas, coal and oil plants.
What's your opinion on this?
[Source: Ecología y Desarrollo, Noticias cada día]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Thomas C. 10:20AM (6/16/2008)
I am totally for high speed trains. they made traveling so much easier when I was in germany a few weeks ago. but if we do install maglev and steel-wheel trains, we need to make them efficient to use. on that proposed plan that was on the popular mechanics web site, i am located in the center of a triangle formed by 3 stops. thats atleast 100 mile trip before i even get to a high speed line. what needs to be done is all of the capitols and major cities be connected by maglev, and then the individual states DOT install regional Steel Wheel lines that lead to the larger high speed lines. people say this wont work because it will take too much time and work, but i look at it this way: it took us 50+ years and god knows how many tax dollars to pave every mile of interstate and build all of the overpasses and underpasses we have today. if we could do that why not build a train system. well, thats my opinion.
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why not the LS2/LS7? 6:32PM (12/06/2007)
It'd be great if they used less energy, but even if they don't, at least they use electricity, which we can generate from clean sources, instead of fossil fuels, which will be disruptive to switch from.
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Benjamin Jones 7:00PM (12/06/2007)
Even if they did use electricity on a comparable scale with planes, there is the possibility of good electricity, whereas electric planes probably won't happen for a while. I think most people here support electric cars for this same reason.
What's more, I used shinkansen quite a bit when I was in japan. Not only were they more comfortable, faster, and more hasslefree than planes, but they were cheaper.
I just can't imagine being about to enter an airport 3 minutes before the plane leaves and still make it on a flight, like I have done with shinkansen, :)
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Domenick 7:16PM (12/06/2007)
I agree that because it's electric, the source of that power can be from renewables. Spain is a great place for solar energy production. Here's news one one such project.
http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsEUPR396.htm
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Mark 7:25PM (12/06/2007)
I strongly doubt that high-speed trains need as much energy as plains. trains do not need to be lifted up to 10km into the air and they travell with 500km/h less than plain. so, why should that cause an equivalent power consumption??
and even if that was so: the produced co2 and other greenhouse gases do not have their effects at 10km, where its much more harmfull.
besides the fact that clean electricity is possible, clean planes are not.
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Dave 8:42PM (12/06/2007)
Mark -
Mass and friction.
- Dave
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Tomey 7:31PM (12/06/2007)
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4232548.html?page=1
This article shows (on the second page) carbon emissions to be more comparable to conventional trains and energy use to be less than half.
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Robert 8:27PM (12/06/2007)
Several things cause me to seriously doubt high speed trains would use as much energy per person / mile.
For a train or a plane at speed, one of the major factors is air resistance / drag which has to be overcome by spending energy. Since both plane and high speed train use a streamlined cylindrical form for the main body, we could assume relative parity on this point. The plane however has huge wings, engines, tail, and elevators sticking out in the airstream. My guess is these structures double to quadruple the amount of drag and energy use.
The second aspect regards how many people can travel within the length of the cylindrical tube. Since a train is often going to be longer and perhaps significantly so, the train wins again.
Third, the train does not require lift and runs on ultra low rolling-resistance steel wheel. The plane however requires lift to stay in the air and generating lift is reflected in higher drag and higher drag means more power is required to maintain speed and flight.
The train wins - I see no way the article saying otherwise is right.
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Karl-Uwe Strunzen 9:11PM (12/06/2007)
On the point with trains being able to get your energy from clean sources: Spain and Italy seem to be going in the direction of thermodynamic-solar plants, where you use collector mirrors to superheat water above 500C. Five such power stations were approved and funded last week in Italy. In California 9 of these have been in use for years and generate 350 MW. Spain have about 30 such power stations under way for 1300MW.
In France the focus seems to be more on Nuclear.
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why not the LS2/LS7? 9:27PM (12/06/2007)
The air is much thinner at altitude and planes are smoother. It is likely a plane is facing less air drag than a train (excluding the drag created when producing lift). Even if it isn't, it is in the air for less time than a train (thus reducing the total energy expended impacting air during a trip) due to being faster.
One advantage a train has is that it is much longer. Basically, given a certain amount of frontal area, it's useful to "hide" as much useful floor space behind that as you can, and a train can be a lot longer than a plane, so it can do it. Oops, Robert already covered that.
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Chris M 10:35PM (12/06/2007)
Planes don't have as many protrusions (wheels) or slots (joints between cars) as trains, and at high altitude the air is thinner and drag is dramatically reduced. While it takes a lot of energy to lift the plane up, most of that energy is recovered when the plane descends.
But trains can run on cheaper more efficient electricity, not yet available to planes. Also, there have been proposals to run maglev trains in evacuated tubes to reduce drag and increase speed.
The leading high speed trains (TGV, Shinkansen, Transrapid) all use special dedicated tracks that support high speed. Some "high speed" train proposals use existing tracks to save construction costs, but the existing tracks cannot safely support high speed operation. Result, the train is "high speed" in name only. That is what is proposed for the "California High Speed Rail", and also why it will never come even close to the speeds the promoters claim.
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kert 1:44AM (12/07/2007)
elevated light rail ( like the ones in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur ): No interference with existing traffic, no burrowing at huge cost, convenient, clean ultra fast ( compared to other modes of city transportation ) and much better experience overall than subway.
If you can go seamlessly go city-to-city with transport like that too, who needs cars ?
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priusguy 3:55AM (12/07/2007)
Definitely a large fan of the high speed trains. Rail travel in Europe is organized chaos - not reserved seats. But it always works out. Very efficient way to get around. So much the better that it using electricity vs. oil.
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GoodCheer 10:19AM (12/07/2007)
I just read about a huge new solar power plant proposed for the Sahara that would export power to Europe.
www.omninerd.com/news/Harvesting_Solar_Power_from_the_Sahara_Desert
That would match up well with electric trains to provide fast, environmentally neutral, convenient inter-city transportation.
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NM 10:23AM (12/07/2007)
Trains are far more efficient than planes. To even think otherwise is silly. Maybe if airports adopt a catapult launcher similar to aircraft carriers it would start to get close but a monster plane taking off will always doom planes to higher CO2 emmisions. Trains have repeatedly been shown the most efficient form of mass transportation available. People who say otherwise have some other nefarious agenda.
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Nils 11:14AM (12/07/2007)
Totally agree NM. Just google it and you'll find that assuming a coal-based generation scheme, the train emits 10 times less. In france the TGV emits nothing at all cause all electricity is nuclear and hydro.
To Chris M: the transrapid is a maglev train. And did you know maglevs use even far less energy?
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why not the LS2/LS7? 11:37AM (12/07/2007)
There's no way a train at these speeds uses 1/10th the power of a plane. At lower speeds it's quite possible, but at these high speeds, it spends a lot of energy just to maintain its speed and all that energy is completely lost and not recovered when the train slows.
I think this 10X efficient stuff might be when the train is filled to the brim with heavy cargo. Weight is a killer in planes but in trains due to the steel on steel wheels, it doesn't make nearly as big a difference. So a train stuffed with heavy cargo would take car less energy than a plane to move it.
But there's a limit to how close together you can pack people. They simply refuse to pay to be put closer together (well, outside of parts of Asia). In particular, the top half of the train remains near-empty.
And there's NO WAY a maglev is far more energy efficient than a regular train. Spending energy to keep your car elevated takes more energy than just sitting on a track. At high speeds, air friction is the main killer and a maglev can't beat that.
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matthijs 12:08PM (12/09/2007)
Well I am glad to see that Spain is following Germany with it's feed-in tarif (EEG, since 2000) on solarpower. Germany with this feed-in tarif created 215.000 jobs, a 9 billion market in solarpanels and is now by FAR the leading solarpower producer in the world. They create more then half of all solarpower produced in the world, and this in 7 years! And the best thing is, it's all done without federal funding!
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Karkus 12:56PM (12/07/2007)
Here's another case where the Blogger should do a little research before posting something based on one obscure source.
ABG, please put quality before quantity, and have someone else read your post before you post claims without backing them up.
The EU has been trying to limit airplane travel to cut down on CO2.
Here's some actual data on air vs train in Europe using high speed trains. CO2 is not even close.
http://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm
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Mike 1:01PM (12/07/2007)
I couldn't care less whether or not high-speed trains are faster, slower, cleaner, dirtier, or more or less energy efficient than airplanes. The EXPERIENCE is so superior to air travel that I would always choose a high-speed train (or even a reasonably fast one) over an airplane everytime if given the choice.
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