9 Comments

Awesome article, my city has added some electric buses recently. I have a kind of unrelated question, but I don’t know where else to ask it!

I was wondering about the significance of train shapes. Some trains have straight sides (Think Toronto Subway and NYC Subway Division A stock) and others have bent sides (Like BART, MARTA, Washington DC metro, and NYC Subway Division B stock). By sides I mean like the part with doors and windows which faces the platform at a station. Is this just an aesthetic thing? Or does it have something to do with fitting into tunnels or aerodynamics?

Also, is there any significance to using outside sliding doors instead of pocket doors? It seems a lot of modern systems don’t use pocket doors, for example BART made a switch to sliding doors on it’s new trains. Does it allow the doors to be larger or something?

Expand full comment

For 1. it becomes a bigger issue at higher speeds, but at lower speeds it's actually preferred to have a less aerodynamic shape for better ventilation!

For 2. I talked about this a bit in the video where I designed a low-floor tram, but there's various reasons including being more space efficient and allowing you to have more windows, since there's no overlap with a pocket! on the other hand, pocket doors could be really good for sealing & noise proofing. Plug-style doors can sometimes also be less sturdy than pocket doors.

Expand full comment

So the trains with bent sides can go faster and the square trains have better ventilation. And pocket doors are better for sealing but less space efficient. Thank you!!!

Expand full comment

Great article as always Reece (and hope you’re enjoying your holiday in London!). Looking at what you’ve said about Toronto’s bus network, do you think the city would benefit from simplifying its bus routes and consolidating services more, or does the current network provide more flexibility and one seat rides which is popular with passengers? (Sorry if you’ve already written an article on this, if so please let me know which one!)

Expand full comment

Right now, I don't think it's a good idea because the grid functions really well, but it's definitely something to consider as the city adds more rail & rapid transit! Currently, the network has super high frequencies even without much route consolidation!

Expand full comment

When you were in London, did you try riding one of the single decker electric routes (the high density inter-rail station 521or the more suburban 46--which is one of my locals)? Whats interesting about these is the buses are a joing venture between Alexandar Dennis (i.e. New flyer) and BYD; TfL liked BYD but didn't think the proposed BYD bus body was up to it (needing a mid door) so what we got was a reworking of the successful Enviro200 diesel bus body on top of BYD Chassis and mechanicals/battery.

The 521 was a bit of a problem to introduce, needing to operate from a small depot in the Waterloo area which went all electric, but the local power company had to route in a a significant new power line just for charging from the nearest substation, and the civils for that alone cost the around £500k I think, with the charging equipment on top for a cost of over £1m for charging to support a fleet of about 50 buses

Expand full comment

I ran accross Siemens' eHighway initiative for freight trucking in Europe a while ago. They use an interesting pantograph system to power trucks on the Autobahn and a few other places. There's a bit of an intro in this video from Tom Scott https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg

Expand full comment

IIRC neither Volvo nor Mercedes exist. Well, they do exist, but not as companies that make both cars and commercial vehicles, as their passenger-car and commercial-vehicle branches are in both cases completely separate entities.

Expand full comment

Good to know!

Expand full comment