Source: AMTRAK ACELA EXPRESS. The locomotive car on Amtrak's new high-speed train has the same elongated nose of the French train ¿ grande vitesse (TGV), from which Amtrak adopted propulsion technology.

America is a mobile society, but increasingly many Americans spend their time completely immobilized¿stuck in traffic or delayed at the airport. The freeways are no longer free, and not only on holiday weekends. And the Federal Aviation Authority recently acknowledged that mounting delays at New York¿s La Guardia Airport have "frustrated passenger travel plans." One way to beat the traffic, discovered long ago by the Europeans and the Japanese, is to travel by high-speed train.

Next week on December 11, the era of superfast trains will finally dawn in the U.S.¿after many delays¿when Amtrak¿s Acela Express will start operating in the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C., and Boston. On a 40-mile stretch in New England, Acela (pronounced Ah-CELL-a)¿an odd combination of "acceleration" and "excellence"¿will speed up to 150 miles per hour, cutting the travel time between New York and Boston from four hours and 15 minutes to a mere three hours and 20 minutes. It is mostly on this route that Amtrak is hoping to lure passengers away from the airlines. Currently, its share of the rail/air travel business is 30 percent between New York and Boston, and 70 percent between Washington, D.C., and New York. "We hope to be able to close that gap considerably," says Cecilia Cummings of the Amtrak press office.

Although 150 miles per hour is more than twice as fast as most people travel on the highway, Acela Express trains cannot compete with their European and Japanese cousins: the British/French/Belgian Eurostar, the German ICE train (Inter City Express) and the Japanese Shinkansen routinely reach up to 186 miles per hour, and the French TGV (train ¿ grande vitesse) travels at up to 200 miles per hour. The TGV also holds the world rail speed record, set in 1990, at 322 miles per hour. The advantage these trains possess is that they often run on purpose-built tracks. Although Acela did reach 168 miles per hour in a test run, its operating speed is largely limited by the existing tracks, despite a major overhaul between New Haven and Boston that included complete electrification and the replacement of many bridges.

On the southern leg between New York and Washington, the train does not even exceed 135 miles per hour and so cuts the current travel time down by only about 15 minutes, to two hours and 45 minutes. "If we want to go faster, we must make a major improvement to the electrification system," said Richard Sarles, vice president of high speed rail development in the Northeast corridor at Amtrak. Because the wires are fixed on this stretch, they sag in the summer when it¿s hot and become tense in the winter when it¿s cold. As a result, the interface between the wires and the pantograph, the conducting rod protruding from the train, is variable.

A Bombadier/Alstom manufacturing consortium built Acela Express. Its propulsion technology is derived from the TGV, and the elongated nose of its power car, or locomotive, clearly shows the two trains are related. One key difference, however, is that each Acela coach has four trucks, or bogies (wheel assemblies), with four wheels each. In the TGV design, two adjacent coaches share a truck and are therefore coupled.

Source: LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY TILTING TECHNOLOGY. Because Acela does not run on straight, purpose-built tracks, it tilts as it goes around curves to offset centrifugal force and makes for a more comfortable ride. The Italian Pendolino train, above, has long used this technology.

1 Comments

1. 1. railfan09 08:08 PM 7/22/09

   It's a shame that in a country with a wealth of technical know-how that we didn't began investing in upgrading our rail infrastructure to high speed transit following the aftermath of the oil embargo of 1973-1974. By failing to reform our oil-addiction habits and anti-rail attitudes, we allowed our neighbors in Asia, Australia and Europe to catch up and surpass us by technical leaps and bounds. But due to inconsistent oil prices, crises in the Middle East, increasing road and air traffic congestion, rising environmental pollution and rising property taxes, perhaps high speed rail and their much slower light rail cousins may one day make a triumphant comeback.

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