The Anonymous Widower

The Noise of a High Speed Train

There is quite a reasoned article on the BBC today about the sort of noise you might get from a high speed train on HS2 and how you could reduce it.

The article doesn’t mention a technology that by 2020 will probably be available to quieten the train and that is the use of anti-noise, where an equal and opposite noise is generated to cancel the sound of the train. I dabbled in this twenty years ago and even then the technology had been successfully applied in a few applications.  But even if anti-noise itself is not used, in ten years or so how trains create noise will be better understood and better design will be used to cut the noise.

I may be generally against the building of HS2, but I do think that noise will not be one of its biggest problems.

February 28, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Engineering, High Speed Two, Trains