Planning an operational railway is a series of trade-offs
As a railway operator, I often felt that on different sorts of railway, different sorts of engineer are your best friend. On a cash-strapped rural or freight railway, it’s the permanent way – you can do without most things but not track. On an InterCity line, it’s the rolling stock engineer, who turns out trains each morning that will earn hundreds of thousands of pounds that day. On a suburban railway, it’s the signal engineer, who provides line capacity.
What of high speed? It’s all of them. Everyone, and the interactions between them, are crucial. This includes engineers I’d never met before – those making decisions on tunnel ventilation are in fact the most critical, as spacing of ventilation shafts in tunnels turns out to be the binding constraint on High Speed 2 (HS2) capacity. (Note to anyone designing Northern Powerhouse Rail – space your shafts equally in train running times, not distance. You know,
China will operate bullet trains to Tibet, close to the Indian border in Arunachal Pradesh before July this year, marking the opening of high-speed train services to all Chinese mainland provincial-level regions, a senior official has said. A 435-km rail link to the regional capital of Lhasa will run Fuxing high-speed trains powered by both internal-combustion and electricity, Lu Dongfu, board chairman of China State Railway Group Company Limited, told state-run Xinhua news agency on Saturday. Construction started in 2014 on the railway line connecting Lhasa with Nyingchi in eastern Tibet. It is the first electrified railroad in Tibet and is slated to begin operations in June 2021.
2021-02-12T05:00:00
UK: The Institution of Railway Operators has completed the phased launch of Rail Academy, a ‘one-stop’ online training platform providing remote learning courses for operating staff of varying experience and skill levels.
Please sign in or register for free to view this page
You have reached your limit of news stories for this week. Register for FREE to read this article and get:
Unlimited access to online news coverage from:
Railway Gazette International covering the global railway industry
Metro Report International covering the urban transport sector
Rail Business UK industry news for the British railway market
Weekly e-mail newsletters covering the sector(s) of your choice