HS2

[Hobby]

10 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

It's mostly downhill from Edinburgh to London, due to the curvature of the earth - what about the return journey ???

 

 

Brit15

 

Often wondered about that, it's another run I do regularly due to SWMBO's mother living up there. MPG has always been better on the run south to Brum despite the cruise being set at the same speed for both journeys and traffic similar... Perhaps there is something in it!!

[Ron Ron Ron]

29 minutes ago, Allegheny1600 said:

What about a suitable power source?

Without a revolution in battery technology, the only way I can see to create vehicles that have range and speed is from an external source - like an overhead supply, perhaps..........

There are Chinese EV’s that are capable of in excess of 400 miles on a single charge, using today’s battery tech.

Tesla have recently squeezed more efficiencies out of their existing, class leading, present day batteries, to provide over 400 miles range (approximating to 320- 380 miles in real world driving conditions) on their biggest cars.

However, Tesla are shortly going to be introducing their 4680 new tech batteries into their cars, boosting range further.

 

Moving on; solid-state batteries, that have been promised for a long time, are nearing volume production level status.

Companies like QuantumScape and NorthVolt are building the production facilities as I type.

These should reduce costs, reduce weight and improve battery charge capacity, significantly.

There are literally billions of $$$$ being spent on R&D of new battery tech, by hundreds of companies, large and small.

A 1,000 mile range on a single charge is said to be within reach before the end of this decade.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk talks about his aim to achieve a one million mile battery vehicle.

That’s the useable life of the battery in a vehicle, but includes much longer range available between charges.

If he only gets half way there, that is some achievement.

 

A large part of the research is in reducing, or eliminating the rare metal elements, particularly those that are most environmentally damaging.

For example, Tesla are removing the need for any Cobalt content, with a battery thats main ingredient is raw silica sand.

The technological leaps that are coming off the back of the “EV  revolution” are going to be quite profound, in ways that the average person in the street has not realised.

 

Back to HS2..........

 

 

.

 

 

Edited May 16, 2021 by Ron Ron Ron

[GoingUnderground]

18 minutes ago, Allegheny1600 said:

What about a suitable power source?

Without a revolution in battery technology, the only way I can see to create vehicles that have range and speed is from an external source - like an overhead supply, perhaps.

Link the vehicles more closely together and find that’s what being built!

Forget batteries. I see that as an intermediate step. The pollution and recycling problems of all those millions of tons of lithium and other metals necessary for every vehicle to have a battery will become unmanageable. As I remember matters from my school chemistry lessons, the further apart in the electrochemical series that the materials used to make a battery are, the greater the energy that you can store in the battery. So advances in battery technology may have a physical finite limit. 

 

That is why I believe the hydrogen economy and fuel cells will be where we, or rather folks younger than I,  will end up. Hydrogen represents a very convenient way to store electrical energy. And please don't talk about the risk of explosion or mention the Hindenburg disaster. Just try throwing a match at an empty petrol fuel tank. Petrol vapour is just as dangerous as hydrogen gas when mixed with air, but we all. me included, take that part filled, potentially explosive, fuel tank at the back of our car for granted.

[martin_wynne]

How much brake dust does an HS2 train discharge into the environment? Not all braking can be regenerative. How is the quantity affected by line speed?

 

How much brake dust and rubber dust is discharged by the equivalent in electric road vehicles?

 

Martin.

[Pandora]

2 hours ago, DY444 said:

 

Two observations. 

 

1.  Whilst HS1 was being built a constant theme was "white elephant" and "ordinary people won't be able to afford to travel".  In fact observing the reaction to HS2 is like watching a remake of an old film.

The commercial failure of HS1:

 

The National Audit Office has today published a report on the construction and sale of the high speed railway line linking the Channel Tunnel with central London. The High Speed 1 project has delivered a high performing line, which was subsequently sold in a well-managed way which removed the taxpayer’s open-ended support for the project. However, international passenger numbers are falling far short of original forecasts and the project costs exceed the value of journey time saving benefits.

The line was delivered within the overall funding and timescale available for the project. However, this was at a higher cost and later than its targets. Construction of the line cost £6,163 million,18 per cent higher than the target costs. Despite missing these targets, this performance compares well with other railway projects. The line has performed well since it opened, with only 0.43 per cent of services being delayed in 2010-11 by infrastructure incidents, such as track or signal failures.

However, the number of international passengers using the line is lower than originally forecast. Actual passenger numbers between 2007 and 2011 were, on average, two thirds of the level forecast when the Department guaranteed the project debt in 1998, to enable the line to be built. This left the taxpayer exposed to the risk of lower-than-expected passenger income, which had been expected to repay the project debt.

 

I hope the National Audit Office do not have to write the same summary about HS2 in 2041, HS2  sold off due to the taxpayer being exposed to lower-than-expected passenger income

Edited May 16, 2021 by Pandora

[DY444]

51 minutes ago, GoingUnderground said:

Personally, I think that self-driving electric cars are a real threat to railways.

 

1. Electric cars reduce the environmental advantage of railways over road, especially if the electricity is solar, wind or tidal generated, or we get to a hydrogen economy with solar, wind or tidal generated electricity being used to produce the hydrogen. Yes, I know that much of the microplastics are from car tyres but less aggressive driving by self-driving cars may reduce that.

 

2. Reliable self-driving cars should be safer than cars driven by humans, reducing the safety advantage of rail, no mobile phone call distractions, no risk of falling asleep or being taken seriously ill when at the wheel, and faster response to potential collision/accident situations.

 

3. Electric self-driving vehicles should, in theory, be capable of higher speeds than conventional cars, reducing the speed/time advantage of rail.

 

4. In theory, because of their potentially faster reaction times self-driving vehicles should not need so much headway between individual vehicles, which would give higher utilisation of each mile of heavily used road at no extra cost.

 

5. As the proportion of self-driving electric vehicles increases and the number of accidents falls, insurance premiums may rise less quickly year on year, or even fall. This reduction in the cost of ownership will give electric cars extra leverage over rail.

 

For rail to retain any advantage over road for medium distance journeys between places, it must offer significant speed/time and space/accommodation advantages over self-driving electric vehicles, and the price differential must be kept as small as possible or rail will simply be priced out of the transport market. 

 

My view is that real world viable self-driving cars are a very long way off.  Reproducing a human's situational awareness and ability to interpret risk accurately against an infinite variety of scenarios is an extremely complex problem to solve.  My reading of it is that it is a classic 80:20 style conundrum in that most of automated driving is relatively straight forward but the tail to make it real world viable is borderline impossible with the technology likely to be available over the next decade at least.  You can see this process in action by looking at the development life cycle so far.  Development proceeded quickly and achieved the 80% level and then hasn't got very much farther.  If the rate of progress had been maintained then they'd be on sale now.  It also relies too heavily on something that has been proven repeatedly to be a human weakness, namely monitoring an automated system for correct operation over long periods. 

 

[Richard E]

24 minutes ago, Hobby said:

 

52% actually. 

 

He wouldn't be...

 

We've been going to southern Germany and the Czech Republic every year by car since the late 90s so i speak with some knowledge of the run. He also didn't say where he lived, or where the journey was to, that was your assumption that it was from Calais. Hence in my reply I mentioned north to south Germany which was also a possibility. Calais to Dresden can be done in 9 hrs without stopping so that leaves 15 hours for breaks... Been there, done that, overnight, several times... Kids and wife asleep! Not recommended, though, as you say, for safety reasons... Two drivers alternating though, different kettle of fish...

 

As a family we used to do Cherbourg or Le Havre to Turin in a days driving in the 1960's in a Mk1 Cortina, and later on an Austin 1100, and no autoroutes used. That was at legal speeds. Night boat so slept on the way over. OK, late arrival in Turin but it was just over 700 miles from Cherbourg or 600 from Le Havre. Even now Google Maps reckons that Cherbourg is 10 1/2 hours by car and 17 hours by public transport whilst Le Havre is 9 hours by car. By comparison the same journey is 11 1/2 hours by air!

 

We didn't continue doing it in a single day in the 70's as Mum became a poor traveller by car suffering from car sickness unless she sat up front. We used to have an overnight break then, usually somewhere between Dijon and Lyon.

 

I recall one year doing the journey by train and it took two days from London. And to add insult to injury the year we did it by air we hit such bad turbulence that the cutlery in the galley (yes, it was real knives and forks then) hit the galley ceiling before they hit the floor.

[DY444]

10 minutes ago, Pandora said:

The commercial failure of HS1:

 

The National Audit Office has today published a report on the construction and sale of the high speed railway line linking the Channel Tunnel with central London. The High Speed 1 project has delivered a high performing line, which was subsequently sold in a well-managed way which removed the taxpayer’s open-ended support for the project. However, international passenger numbers are falling far short of original forecasts and the project costs exceed the value of journey time saving benefits.

The line was delivered within the overall funding and timescale available for the project. However, this was at a higher cost and later than its targets. Construction of the line cost £6,163 million,18 per cent higher than the target costs. Despite missing these targets, this performance compares well with other railway projects. The line has performed well since it opened, with only 0.43 per cent of services being delayed in 2010-11 by infrastructure incidents, such as track or signal failures.

However, the number of international passengers using the line is lower than originally forecast. Actual passenger numbers between 2007 and 2011 were, on average, two thirds of the level forecast when the Department guaranteed the project debt in 1998, to enable the line to be built. This left the taxpayer exposed to the risk of lower-than-expected passenger income, which had been expected to repay the project debt.

 

I hope the National Audit Office do not have to write the same summary about HS2 in 2041, HS2  sold off due to the taxpayer being exposed to lower-than-expected passenger income

 

That kind of misses my point.  That quote pertains to performance relative to the forecasts of the promoters of HS1 not performance relative to the negative expectation of the naysayers before it was built, and doesn't relate to the affordability of tickets either.

Edited May 16, 2021 by DY444

[GoingUnderground]

21 minutes ago, Rivercider said:

I suppose one challenge of creating self-driving vehicles is what to do with them once they have delivered the occupants to the chosen destination. Perhaps on arrival in the city centre they could collapse, or fold up, to take up less parking space.

On the other hand in the post-covid world the number of city centre offices, (and retail opportunities), may be much reduced, so city centre parking may not be a problem.

 

Personally I think HS2 will do what railways seem to have done since the beginning, and expect the magnetic pull of London to increase,

 

cheers

You forget that a self-driving car doesn't need a parking space near the occupants' destination. It will be capable of going to a car park miles away on its own, and returning to pick up the occupants as and when  the occupants call it back. And those car parks could be completely automated and take up less space with the cars in single carousel type "trays" once the need for the driver and passengers to approach the parked car on foot is removed.

 

But a self-driving car will never be able to offer as much space as a railway carriage or be as sociable with face to face seating. To do so it would need to get a lot bigger or have the ability to change its internal configuration according to the number of occupants, and I can't see that happening.

 

Humans are social animals, and we enjoy the company of our fellow human beings, or most of us do in physical face to face situations. Teleconferencing or telemeetings are, IMHO a poor substitute and do not allow a real rapport and team spirit to be created. That's one of the reasons why folks are so glad to get out of lockdown and socialise again. So I really can't see offices becoming a thing of the past. Or, perhaps I need to invest in companies offering residential team building courses and away-together weekends if Covid really has ushered in the long-predicted era of remote/home working for the many.

[corneliuslundie]

My concern is that self driving road vehicles will depend on software written by humans. When we see how many iterations of software it sometimes takes to get a train working, what hope of software that copes with everything in the real world?

And i am not thinking of those Amazon things which trundle around MK and end up in hedges according to reports.

And re HS1 - in part the shortfall in Eurostar traffic was down to the British government tightening security procedures and making train travel less attractive - as discussed endlessly on another thread. So self inflicted.

Jonathan

[DY444]

5 minutes ago, GoingUnderground said:

You forget that a self-driving car doesn't need a parking space near the occupants' destination. It will be capable of going to a car park miles away on its own, and returning to pick up the occupants as and when  the occupants call it back. And those car parks could be completely automated and take up less space with the cars in single carousel type "trays" once the need for the driver and passengers to approach the parked car on foot is removed.

 

I will go out on a limb now and predict that self-driving cars with approval for operation on normal urban roads are at the very least 25 years away.  It is a regulatory minefield and with my hard nosed engineers hat on I just can't see it.

Edited May 16, 2021 by DY444

[DY444]

5 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

My concern is that self driving road vehicles will depend on software written by humans. When we see how many iterations of software it sometimes takes to get a train working, what hope of software that copes with everything in the real world?

 

Nail on the head.  In urban environments you get one of two things.  Lots of collisions or lots of congestion because the vehicle stops every time it doesn't know what to do - which will be often.

Edited May 16, 2021 by DY444

[boxbrownie]

1 hour ago, Allegheny1600 said:

Not much left of the unrestricted autobahn left anymore, if anything.

 I have driven/been driven from central England to the south of France and at legal speeds, it takes some doing to do it in 24 hours - you have to be on the move almost continuously with two or more drivers, limited stops for food and toilets, you could not recharge your Tesla in such short stops.

Even if fezza started his journey from Dover, he would be hard pushed to go those distances in the time stated, factor in anything that negotiates London and you’re time shoots up.

As I said, you can’t justify BREAKING THE LAW to make such comparisons, never mind that if a single trains worth of people were to try it, the chances of serious accidents go up immensely.

I don’t know, we used to regularly travel from Essex to Frejus in the SoF in a very long day, usually setting off very early morning but always (not withstanding accidents or traffic) made it before sun down at our mates villa, which admittedly in the Summer could be 10 pm......not sure the traffic density would make it quite so easy nowadays though TBH, or my age  

[Hobby]

3 minutes ago, GoingUnderground said:

railway carriage or be as sociable with face to face seating. 

 

Humans are social animals, and we enjoy the company of our fellow human beings, or most of us do in physical face to face situations

 

Interesting point, I hope I am not taking things too out of context, but I'm not sure the "face to face" thing is as clear cut as that. In a group of three or four table seating is ok when the group all know each other, but that isn't the case where they are strangers. Hence many people will choose the airline seating so they can build the luggage barrier to protect their space.

 

I would add to that second sentence that that is the case only when we are in control of the situation and able to choose who we are in company with, many (most?) people are not comfortable with sitting with strangers.

[GoingUnderground]

10 minutes ago, DY444 said:

 

My view is that real world viable self-driving cars are a very long way off.  Reproducing a human's situational awareness and ability to interpret risk accurately against an infinite variety of scenarios is an extremely complex problem to solve.  My reading of it is that it is a classic 80:20 style conundrum in that most of automated driving is relatively straight forward but the tail to make it real world viable is borderline impossible with the technology likely to be available over the next decade at least.  You can see this process in action by looking at the development life cycle so far.  Development proceeded quickly and achieved the 80% level and then hasn't got very much farther.  If the rate of progress had been maintained then they'd be on sale now.  It also relies too heavily on something that has been proven repeatedly to be a human weakness, namely monitoring an automated system for correct operation over long periods. 

 

There are difficulties, but I think you'll find that self-driving is far closer than you think. Our car is coming up to 6 years old but has adaptive cruise control. Set the speed and it keeps to that speed +- 2mph up hil land down dale. If the car in front slows down our car slows down, and If the car in front stops, ours stops, all without me doing anything. Directional control is more problematic, and dealing with unexpected obstructions is the stumbling block. But if my, and most other peoples' brains can manage it then it is only a matter of time before cars will be able to drive themselves.

 

And you don't need a human monitoring it. Our observation and reaction times would be far too slow to take corrective action if it went wrong. It just needs extensive testing and possibly twin "brains" which bring the car to a halt if the two brains come to different answers given the same data, rather like aircraft autopilots. 

[Hobby]

I think you are right with it used on motorways, they are the obvious place to trial it, but I'd agree with the others about urban (and countryside) locations as being some way off. Mine has ACC and lane assist, strange feeling the steering wheel react when I'm approaching a sharp curve!

 

I don't know about Hydrogen vs battery, I thought hydrogen used more electric to make it so battery would be more efficient... But perhaps a conversation for the EV thread?

[GoingUnderground]

8 minutes ago, Hobby said:

 

Interesting point, I hope I am not taking things too out of context, but I'm not sure the "face to face" thing is as clear cut as that. In a group of three or four table seating is ok when the group all know each other, but that isn't the case where they are strangers. Hence many people will choose the airline seating so they can build the luggage barrier to protect their space.

 

I would add to that second sentence that that is the case only when we are in control of the situation and able to choose who we are in company with, many (most?) people are not comfortable with sitting with strangers.

Whilst you have a point, I don't think it is anywhere near a clear-cut as you are suggesting. I travelled for decades on the Tube in London in the rush Hour. You get used it it and learn to ignore or "tune out" your fellow commuters. And "airline" style seating can be very claustrophobic with the high back of the seat in front of you only a couple of feet at best away from your face.

 

Incidentally, go back to the 1950s and '60s and airlines offered face to face seating. I can remember it, and if I was facing towards the back of the plane it always seemed to me as if I was going to slide off or fall out of my seat on takeoff and climb, were it not for the seat belt.  https://www.pinterest.jp/pin/106116134952383302/

 

Go to a festival or rock gig or even a football match and see the joy on the faces and enthusiasm generated by being there, in the company of strangers.

[billbedford]

18 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

You may well be correct - if I knew what it was!

 

 

In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand. The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.Wikipedia

[GoingUnderground]

49 minutes ago, Hobby said:

I don't know about Hydrogen vs battery, I thought hydrogen used more electric to make it so battery would be more efficient... But perhaps a conversation for the EV thread?

You can make hydrogen from water by applying a process called electrolysis which splits the water into its component atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, using electricity. That same energy could be stored in a battery instead. The fuel cell recombines the hydrogen and oxygen in a process that releases the energy back as electricity.

 

There will be an efficiency loss at both stages in the process in going from electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity, but the efficiency loss is no where near as bad as some people such as Elon Musk claim, and I have read that end to end it can be at least as efficient as a battery, as rechargeable batteries are "powered" by reversible chemical processes which are not themselves 100% efficient.

 

Added:

Some say that Musk is against hydrogen and fuel cell technology because he has so much invested in rechargeable battery manufacture and no fuel cell powered vehicles on the drawing board. Hence he's trying to rubbish the idea of hydrogen before it proves itself as a genuine rival to his batteries.

Edited May 16, 2021 by GoingUnderground

[pete_mcfarlane]

43 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

My concern is that self driving road vehicles will depend on software written by humans. When we see how many iterations of software it sometimes takes to get a train working, what hope of software that copes with everything in the real world?

And i am not thinking of those Amazon things which trundle around MK and end up in hedges according to reports.

The challenge here is that (good) software engineers are a finite resource. 

 

[GoingUnderground]

44 minutes ago, DY444 said:

 

I will go out on a limb now and predict that self-driving cars with approval for operation on normal urban roads are at the very least 25 years away.  It is a regulatory minefield and with my hard nosed engineers hat on I just can't see it.

I think you might be about 25 years out on that prediction if this story from 3 weeks ago is correct. Self-driving is coming whether we like it or not. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56906145

[corneliuslundie]

Hardly self driving when  you read it though. Following the kerb or verge I assume as there is no guarantee of lane markings and not all roads are wide enough. What does it do about potholes?

Jonathan

[billbedford]

23 minutes ago, GoingUnderground said:

I think you might be about 25 years out on that prediction if this story from 3 weeks ago is correct. Self-driving is coming whether we like it or not. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56906145

 

I can see that working really well on 'Smart Motorways'. 

[GoingUnderground]

7 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

Hardly self driving when  you read it though. Following the kerb or verge I assume as there is no guarantee of lane markings and not all roads are wide enough. What does it do about potholes?

Jonathan

It may not be self-driving everywhere, yet. But the fact that it is even being talked about by government shows that it is on its way. If UK governments think that self-driving will make railways obsolete and save them having to subsidise rail then they'll bend over backwards to push self-driving. 

 

As regards potholes it'll probably do the same as you and me, avoid them if it sees/senses them, otherwise  drive through them.

[Edwin_m]

1 hour ago, Rivercider said:

I suppose one challenge of creating self-driving vehicles is what to do with them once they have delivered the occupants to the chosen destination. Perhaps on arrival in the city centre they could collapse, or fold up, to take up less parking space.

On the other hand in the post-covid world the number of city centre offices, (and retail opportunities), may be much reduced, so city centre parking may not be a problem.

 

Personally I think HS2 will do what railways seem to have done since the beginning, and expect the magnetic pull of London to increase,

 

cheers

 

1 hour ago, GoingUnderground said:

Forget batteries. I see that as an intermediate step. The pollution and recycling problems of all those millions of tons of lithium and other metals necessary for every vehicle to have a battery will become unmanageable. As I remember matters from my school chemistry lessons, the further apart in the electrochemical series that the materials used to make a battery are, the greater the energy that you can store in the battery. So advances in battery technology may have a physical finite limit. 

 

That is why I believe the hydrogen economy and fuel cells will be where we, or rather folks younger than I,  will end up. Hydrogen represents a very convenient way to store electrical energy. And please don't talk about the risk of explosion or mention the Hindenburg disaster. Just try throwing a match at an empty petrol fuel tank. Petrol vapour is just as dangerous as hydrogen gas when mixed with air, but we all. me included, take that part filled, potentially explosive, fuel tank at the back of our car for granted.

 

1 hour ago, martin_wynne said:

How much brake dust does an HS2 train discharge into the environment? Not all braking can be regenerative. How is the quantity affected by line speed?

 

How much brake dust and rubber dust is discharged by the equivalent in electric road vehicles?

 

Martin.

Based on an analysis HS2 published on their website some years ago, almost certainly now removed, the journey time appears to be based on the use of regenerative braking only.  Headways are based on using friction braking too, but headway calculations assume that the train in front will stop unexpectedly, which never happens if things are running smoothly.  Some sort of train management system should help with this, for example by telling the train behind to hang back if the one in front is about to slow down for a junction.  

1 hour ago, Pandora said:

The commercial failure of HS1:

 

The National Audit Office has today published a report on the construction and sale of the high speed railway line linking the Channel Tunnel with central London. The High Speed 1 project has delivered a high performing line, which was subsequently sold in a well-managed way which removed the taxpayer’s open-ended support for the project. However, international passenger numbers are falling far short of original forecasts and the project costs exceed the value of journey time saving benefits.

The line was delivered within the overall funding and timescale available for the project. However, this was at a higher cost and later than its targets. Construction of the line cost £6,163 million,18 per cent higher than the target costs. Despite missing these targets, this performance compares well with other railway projects. The line has performed well since it opened, with only 0.43 per cent of services being delayed in 2010-11 by infrastructure incidents, such as track or signal failures.

However, the number of international passengers using the line is lower than originally forecast. Actual passenger numbers between 2007 and 2011 were, on average, two thirds of the level forecast when the Department guaranteed the project debt in 1998, to enable the line to be built. This left the taxpayer exposed to the risk of lower-than-expected passenger income, which had been expected to repay the project debt.

 

I hope the National Audit Office do not have to write the same summary about HS2 in 2041, HS2  sold off due to the taxpayer being exposed to lower-than-expected passenger income

This is a purely financial analysis.  However the socio-economic benefits of having Kent better connected to London, plus the socio-economic and environmental benefits of a convenient and low-emission transport link to the Continent, are highly likely to make it a net benefit if the full picture is considered.  

1 hour ago, GoingUnderground said:

You forget that a self-driving car doesn't need a parking space near the occupants' destination. It will be capable of going to a car park miles away on its own, and returning to pick up the occupants as and when  the occupants call it back. And those car parks could be completely automated and take up less space with the cars in single carousel type "trays" once the need for the driver and passengers to approach the parked car on foot is removed.

This does of course increase congestion and emissions, as all the self-driving cars return to their parking spaces after dropping people off in the morning and vice versa in the afternoon.