The Anonymous Widower

How Not To Plan A High Speed Railway

The farce that is Fyra might have got a bit better as there are now going to be some extra Thalys trains on the line soon, as is reported here.

But this will only partially compensate for the loss of the Fyra V250 trains and capacity will be nowhere near that needed.

It will also do nothing to get round one of the major design faults of the line; the lack of a branch to the Dutch capital, The Hague. A city incidentally, which doesn’t have an airport well-connected to the city centre, unless you count Schipol.

In some ways the design of the line, would be like the UK, creating a high speed line to Scotland, that bypassed Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.

The Dutch also have a problem in that their tracks aren’t to the European standard of trains on the left, electrified to 25,000 volts AC, so it makes it difficult for high speed trains to run on secondary lines, as they do in most other European countries, The suburban Class 395 run in rural Kent and on HS1. Like the Thalys, they have a multi-voltage capability.

Another problem is that there aren’t enough Thalys trains and you can’t just rustle up some new ones quickly. In fact I suspect there is a large shortage of rolling stock across Europe and I suppose the real problem, is that because every country seems to work to different standards and local politics, manufacturers rely too much on living on the scraps politicians give them. So say if we need say some extra stock on the East Coast Main Line, we can’t generally borrow from the Germans. Saying that though, but for a few years Regional Eurostar trains did run to Leeds.  But then that train was designed to run in the UK, France and Belgium.

We also complain in this country about orders for trains going to foreign manufacturers, but this is a Europe wide problem.

What we need is standards for railways that apply across most of Europe. When you have travelled on trains as much as I have you realise what a disconnected design it all is.

July 23, 2013 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | France, Fyra, Germany, High Speed Two, The Netherlands, Trains