Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
Safety, because the trains are less prone to collapse like an accordion after derailing. A Eurostar train has been recorded as having derailed at a speed close to 300 km/h with no resultant loss of life or severe injuries among its passengers.
|
You know, it's always been a gruesome massacre when a derailed train ended up looking like a sorry 'accordion'.
Rescuers would have to pick up pieces of passengers scattered all around; it is horrible.
That's why they invented this Jacobs thing. It is only safer.
We're not talking about commuter trains stopping every couple of miles here.
These are regional trains running way faster, right? Even 110mph is actually pretty fast. You'd have to be seriously lucky to survive any derailment at that speed.
Thankfully, the probability for a contemporary train to derail must be as low as (or even lower than) that for a plane to crash. It is extremely low, but certainly not negligible, given the massive number of daily rides or flights.
What do they say? Something like 'shit happens', I think. Well, yes, it sometimes does.
Fact is random commuter trains mustn't need that kind of inflexible bogies simply because they run much much slower, so their reliability depends almost exclusively on track maintenance.
Although I surely wouldn't like to experience any derailment of a RER train here in Paris anyway. It would be pretty violent, even at a 50-mph speed. There's no seat belt, and you most often stay up for your short commutes in there.
At 50mph, a real shock would be as brutal as in a car on the road.
So it is just definitely necessary to anything running really fast, so customers may say - ok, I'm riding the safest possible thing, even when shit would unfortunately happen.