It's interesting since most Diesel-Electric locomotives are developed here. GMD and GE are driving the development of high-horsepower D-E motive power.
GMD makes a fair number of locomotives for the UK and European market, many of which are nothing more than SD40-2's in new carbodies (Which is 1973 tech, the last for the North American Market was made in 1989 for CP). Of course the European RR's don't have the space for the massive high-horsepower units that are used over here (The 4300HP SD70 variants and 6000HP SD()'s from GMD and the 4400HP ES44DC and AC's from GE) which are 80-90' long. There's nothing today in regular service as impressive as watching (and feeling) 18,000HP of big diesels throttling up. Sadly, passenger rail is simply not viable with North American population densities, beyond a basic government supported level, tourist trains and the Northeast corridor(which has the density). It works very well in the high-density areas in Europe and Japan though. -Adam graywolf wrote: > Well I was talking about regular trains, not world speed record > attempts. BTW as for World Rail Speed Records AFAIK the current one is > something over 550kph (346mph). But that was an electric mag-lev train. > And anyway that record you mention beat the American set one (126) from > the year before (1938), only the American locomotive was put back into > regular service. > > There is not much use in being a rail-fan in the US today we are not > even developing the technology. We basically use RR's as freight > conveyor belts. > > -graywolf > > > John Francis wrote: > >>On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 05:47:36PM -0500, graywolf wrote: >> >>>You are saying that 50 years later, diesel trains are faster than steam >>>trains were? Actually, I think the US had the fastest steam trains in >>>the world. >> >>Nope. World record for steam was 129mph, set by a Gresley A4 Pacific >>named Mallard a year or so before the outbreak of WW II. The engine >>(which was never the same afterwards) can be seen in the National >>Railway Museum in York. That's York in the UK, not Pennsylvania :-) >> >>Nowadays, as others have pointed out, Inter-City trains regularly >>exceed that speed, cruising in the 135-150mph range. And there's >>also the Eurostar which exceeds that speed (although not in the UK, >>unless they've finished the track upgrade since I was last there), >>and the TGV service in France. >> >>Some colleagues of mine have recently been on a trip to China, >>where they rode the maglev train at speeds over twice that 129mph! >> >> > > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
