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They do this literally all the time in Switzerland. Works fine. Needs money and planning - and I think with that we've already uncovered the problem. To be fair, the other solution is to tunnel the railway line when there are issues - again, money is needed. Not every single crossing gets replaced, some get closed and/or replaced with self-powered-transport-only underbridge, but the new crossings have higher capacity anyway so you don't need as many of them.

They're still trying to keep up the tradition, although it's a tad simpler nowadays - Re 460 dragging a Class 755 with barrier vehicles, for test purposes: https://eisenbahn-amateur.ch/2018/08/31/lauftechnikmessfahrten-mit-einem-zweikraft-flirt-von-stadler-fuer-abellio-east-anglia/ And if you want to mix your eras and couldn't be bothered with barrier vehicles, you can deliver your 745s with an Re 620: https://www.bahnbilder.de/bild/schweiz~e-loks~re-66-sbb-re-620/1152097/die-re-620-033-1-schleppt-einen.html

One wonders if that will change when they upgrade to ETCS which offers a reversing mode which was introduced precisely for tunnel usage. Then again perhaps not, as reversing mode isn't much use if they need to split the train.

Regarding the first one: perhaps, but anti-slip technology has moved on in the meantime which is how you see plenty of Bo-Bos on previously Co-Co jobs, such as BR 151 to BR 189 in Germany or Bo-Bos over the Gotthard. See also the XLoad option for the Vectron: https://press.siemens.com/global/en/pressrelease/sudleasing-orders-20-vectron-locomotives-xload-behalf-sbb-cargo-international . This doesn't seem like a huge issue. The second part is going the be the more interesting one: Eurotunnel already ran tests with the Vectron back in 2012, the idea being (so they pretty much said) to evaluate commodity locomotives through the tunnel. According to this document, TSIs apply since 2012 allowing for the use of standardised locos: https://www.getlinkgroup.com/content/uploads/2023/08/ra2012-uk-eurotunnel-group.pdf . The question is whether this is or will also be acceptable for passenger traffic. The rules can be change in any case, the question is what the updated rules would be. Of course you could just double-head, i.e. have 4 locos per train. It could possibly still end up being cheaper than developing new custom locomotives which rarely happens nowadays.

Not quite the main topic - but when these need replacement I expect it'll just be some Vectrons or Traxx's with at most a few tweaks. Vectron's are already built at 6.4MW (vs 5.6 or mostly 7MW for the existing locos) and have been tested in the tunnel, they're not far off what's needed. Only question is how many tweaks will be needed to satisfy whatever regulations apply at the time.

To play Devil's advocate: Germany has recently built or is still building a fair few 250km/h routes, for example:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendlingen–Ulm_high-speed_railway . Then again, German railways aren't renowned as the paragon of excellence. Switzerland also doesn't bother but then they're not building true high-speed lines right now but rather piecemeal tunnels which happen to be high-speed(ish) capable, and they don't really need high speed for what their network is used for.

I wonder if there's more to it than meets the eye. How was the specification written in the first place? 1 door per side is totally sensible for Talgo-length carriages, and still works reasonably at SMILE or TGV lengths. Did they assume a given carriage length in the spec, did they spec doors per unit of length, did they assume double-wide doors as is done on a lot of double-deck stock, or something else altogether?

Your post proved my point: almost all of those loco-hauled trains are on their way out. The exceptions are: - PKP who are still buying plenty of locos, but I did exclude Eastern Europe for a reason. - OeBB: which I mentioned with the Railjet, and here it's one of the same locos in front of some older stock that's on its way out. - DB with a Vectron in front of preexisting stock, and they don't appear to be buying more.

Neither is true. Outside of Eastern Europe aren't many major European cities with many diesel trains left, and locos are also increasingly on their way out - and most of those left are push-pull. For the former there are more and more hybrids/bi-modes. Notable new exceptions for the latter include the ICE-L and IC-2 (both are niche usecases inside Germany - and the more recent IC-2's are EMUs - and the ICE-L will have hybrid traction for some routes), Nightjet which is a complete exception, some Railjets (although they're getting EMUs too now), and perhaps a few more. An entire diesel-only station in the middle of a big city is almost unheard of.

Germany also uses steep gradients on some of its high speed routes (e.g. Wendlingen Ulm), but the price seems to be that freight usage (happens during the night) is more restricted - and some people claim that the ICE 4 ended up being more expensive than it should've been just to handle these steeper routes. I don't suppose freight is a big concern for HS2 though given that it's more about freeing up capacity for freight elsewhere.

Or perhaps thanks to it. Trouble is with preventative measures is many think they were useless because they actually achieved what they set out to achieve.

Chickens and eggs: lack of cyclists isn't a surprise if the infrastructure isn't there. Often it's a case of build the infrastructure and they will come - ideally by switching away from cars (which helps reduce the traffic issues). Can't tell if that's the case here though since I don't know the area.

No they don't - it's already factored into the timetable. The difference is that for DST we're effectively winding the clock forward or backwards relative to now, when crossing a time zone boundary you're merely relabelling the same moment in time. To be fair, DST is also just a relabelling, but the trouble is that the same (labelled) moment of time appears to be repeated within the same geographical area or vice versa.

I'm not sure that requiring legislation is as much of an issue as some on this thread make out to be. One house is easily whipped, and the other one has to be careful about which issues it makes a stir about to avoid the eternal risk of being reformed - although I have to admit that this is just my idle speculation (proven by various law changes in the past however). I think your point about taking a long time is the key one: the more work that's needed and the longer it takes, the more likely priorities will change again / elections will change things / etc.

That's why they don't blanket such vehicles, they use appropriate tools to extinguish them. That's first hand information from multiple firemen I know. Your second paragraph is highly misleading. A few garages have done so, it's very much the exception - because it's plain and simply a nonsensical approach. The fact remains: extinguishing battery fires requires different techniques, but most of the criticism is misplaced and in fact misinformed. Here's a balanced take on it: https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/au/news/auto-motor/are-electric-cars-a-major-fire-risk-459605.aspx And that infamous car transporter fire recently? The cause of the fire is unknown, but as of yet there's no evidence that it was due to batteries - apparently all the electric car decks were completely unharmed.

Same for the diesel technology - wonderful until it catches fire. It is true that batteries have some challenges of their own, but the data is pretty clear: battery vehicles are less fire prone, and the tools to put out such fires are available (they're becoming more and more widespread across fire services internationally). Water tanks are far from the only solution. The real issue with battery vehicles is uninformed and political animosity as opposed to real fundamental issues with them.

A little late I know: I'm pretty it's just WTB, they certainly list it on the Class 68 datasheet: https://www.stadlerrail.com/media/pdf/ldeuklightbrlldrs0816e.pdf I wouldn't say that most locos on the continent have it. Plenty of newer locos do, but plenty don't - I think ZWS/ZMS is an older standard and the most common for cargo locos for example (so much so that BLS went to the effort of retrofitting it to the RE465s to let them work with their Traxx's and Vectrons. I don't think it's entirely standardised, but sufficiently so that plenty of mixing and matching is and will be possible - currently most operators seem to be standardising on something called WTB-ÖBB which is ÖBB's take on things, used by various ÖBB stock (Railjets, other push-pull sets), and in future by the DB on their Talgos ("ICE-L"), along with locos to be used with it including Vectrons. I assume that the differences between WTB-ÖBB and other usages lies primarily in the area of PIS and other specialty functionality, but clear information is hard to find.

Planes getting scrapped is mostly a myth even if it sounds plausible (see e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/planes-grounded-by-covid-19-largely-avoid-the-junkyardfor-now-11622799001 ) - I do believe many were mothballed but were later brought back, if you leave aside the symbolic scrapping of a few A380s. But there is an issue that would affect both trains and planes: "staff shortages", which is partly down to people having been fired during the early years of the pandemic (and issues with re-hiring now that travel has picked up), but also a seeming rise in sickness amongst staff nowadays. The number of times in the past year that I've read a news story of "chaos at random airport" that included "short notice sickness" is quite astounding, never mind the rise in long-term sicknesses. This isn't limited to flights of course - there's chaos with railways, buses, logistics in general from time to time.

Now I'm curious - will it be one of the two European standards (most likely 760mm, less likely 550mm - although the latter is much better once you start using double-deckers) or something else? This doesn't seem like a likely factor. It's just ETCS I thought - already being fitted to various trains for the ECML, and there is plenty of expertise around Europe with retrofitting it to all kinds of stock dating back to at least the 60s. This is likely the deciding factor.

Come to Switzerland, have a look at how the city-dwellers live - or even in urban areas (and keep in mind that in Europe most people live in Urban areas). You may be very surprised. Most households in major cities do not have a car, and suffer little for it. And I would estimate that most of those cars that do exist are infrequently used. It is entirely possible to build a public transport network that serves most of the population's needs (and without true high-speed rail at that, although there's already talk of an HS2-like project to divert traffic off the busiest mainlines). Of course since we're in a British forum the question becomes: can the British legislature and executive achieve such a thing... and I think the HS2 experience suggests it wouldn't make it very far. (There's no single secret to achieving this - it involves hard work around integrated timetables, integrated ticketing, and lots of smaller infrastructure projects all over the place to make key timetable improvements workable.) And before anyone digs out the strawman of "what about the countryside dwellers" - they're the minority, who may continue to need cars - that in no way affects the suitability of public transport for most of the needs of the general public.

At risk of getting a bit off the topic - the same as I would say for the previous post: it's never a good idea to trust a random commentator. What I hear from firefighters on the continent is that with the appropriate equipment - a so called extinguishing lance (not quite as elegant as it was in German: "Löschlanze) - there are no issues whatsoever getting such fires under control. For some reason these don't seem as well known in the English-language parts of the world, but that's just part of the growing pains (just like we had with the advent of cars in the first place mind you). (And I'm no electric car fan I should say - they have some advantages, and some disadvantages - and I'd take a train over any type of car any day.)

Quite an active project on the continent, across multiple countries. Benefits: aside from the obvious reduction in risk to humans, they make it easy to add electronics to enable stuff like automatic brake tests (saves time=money), and in the longer term future likely to be vital for ETCS L3 (train integrity reporting necessary). There's no way wagonload traffic will survive without it (might not survive with it mind you). The beloved EU have a website on the current project (but bear in mind that non-EU countries are also involved): https://www.dac4.eu/en/

No one proposed using AI for trains, there is absolutely no need to use AI in trains (perhaps beyond algorithms for processing visual data). Simple logic is more than enough.

That one is interesting, but also something that software can be programmed to take into account. This is a fairly easy to imagine scenario, and one that can be fairly easily taken into account of when developing relevant control software. The rule book likely is written as it is because humans are not computers who can predict the likely outcomes of stopping all trains vs not stopping all trains. They had to write something that a human can humanly process in case of an incident. Once you have computers with prediction, you can update the rules to increase safety in a way that isn't possible when it's humans that are processing the rules. Insisting on continuing with rules targeted towards humans is creating an artificial handicap for computer control. Rules are certainly changing, and computers therefore can and will be updated as needs and rules change. The fact that rules are constantly changing is yet another reason for preferring computers - because you can apply the updated rules consistently and they'll be followed consistently. A human may fall back to older training and older rules even if they have nominally been taught the new rules, the computer won't. The fact that rules change is in no way supportive of sticking to humans. The sensor example is poignant because this thread seems to be about the equivalent human issue: the human did not read the data correctly - the human's sensors (or processing of said sensors) did not work. Now the question becomes: are sensors or humans more likely to fail? I suspect it's the latter - especially because sensor failures can be mitigated as and when new failure modes are discovered. Unfortunately humans are a bit harder to fix - pyschology is far more complex than logic. Neither humans nor computers will be perfect. Both will fail, but with one of them a certain failure mode can be eliminated once it's known, with the other it can't.

I'm always surprised by both the surprised customers and... incompetent shops. That taxes must be paid when importing to a country is a widely known and accepted principle - transactions within the EU avoid that certainly, but that's an exception. As a seller it's a good idea to remind customers of this so they don't come back and complain later if you don't deal with customs for them. Seems to work fine for all the EU shops selling to Swiss customers (at least those that haven't arranged DDP, more on that below), has worked fine since as far as I can remember. That said, it's not hard to deal with customs in advance, which really should solve all issues. IOSS seems to suffer from implementation issues (and/or sellers who haven't prepared the labelling correctly or made other mistakes, c.f. the 150 EUR issue above), but to the best of my knowledge it's optional - a good shop should just set up DDP with their courier and that's the end of the story for all parcels. DDP appears to work absolutely fine for a whole bunch of shops selling to Switzerland, and that's everything from my tiny Norwegian coffee roaster to a glasses seller in the US to a bunch of higher volume EU-based shops (so not just Amazon). It's available for EU destinations too, and some shops use it. I get the impression that a bunch of UK sellers simply haven't bothered to read the rules and do their research - it's always UK sellers that I've run into customs issues with (I say that as someone who isn't based in the EU). From missing declarations to incorrect declarations to the odd calculations as detailed in this thread.