[HN Gopher] Tram Trains
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Tram Trains
Author : ortegaygasset
Score : 39 points
Date : 2025-07-23 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.worksinprogress.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.worksinprogress.news)
| fjfaase wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram-train for a more extensive
| list of tram train solutions world wide.
| salynchnew wrote:
| Weirdly sparse list, here.
|
| Does San Francisco's Muni LRVs somehow not qualify as a tram
| train network?
|
| https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/muni-metro-light-r...
| puls wrote:
| It doesn't because it doesn't use any mainline rail track.
| Imagine if the T-Third went onto the Caltrain tracks at
| Bayshore and continued down the peninsula instead of
| terminating at Sunnydale; that would be a tram-train.
|
| It would also be more or less impossible under current US
| regulations, but there's always hoping that that could be
| fixed.
| Animats wrote:
| It would reduce both capacity and speed. That would put a
| slow, low-capacity tram on the same track as a fast train
| line with large trains.
|
| Current Caltrain equipment: [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUEZ6uuM_EA
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That is not just a capacity and speed issue, it is also a
| safety issue. You don't put "light rail" and "heavy rail"
| on the same track, because a collision will be
| catastrophic to the light rail.
| trollied wrote:
| Sheffield in the UK has tram trains - it was the first such
| implementation in the UK, and runs on national rail lines as part
| of the journey to Rotherham.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _while others, such as Cologne, have simply added platforms at
| their main stations to enable suburban trains to run through._
|
| We did?
|
| Cologne's tram system is weird. Over the last century, they
| merged the tram, subway and selected private railways into a
| single network. The result is sort of a tram network on steroids,
| that also runs underground and serves longer distances to two
| neighboring cities. But it's still separate from the national
| train network or even "real" suburban trains (S-Bahn).
|
| (Edit: Just learned the term "interurban" for that...)
|
| That's unlike Berlin or Vienna, where you sometimes have subway
| and S-Bahn side by side in the same station, but on different
| tracks. I think that's closer to what they mean with "through-
| running"?
| croisillon wrote:
| i can't think of any side by side subway and s-bahn in vienna?
| xg15 wrote:
| Was thinking of Quartier Belvedere, but seems to be
| subterranean S-Bahn only.
|
| Maybe Wien Mitte though?
|
| https://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/ubahn/m/large.
| ..
| croisillon wrote:
| no, Mitte is similar to Praterstern, you need a couple
| minutes between s and u platforms
| xg15 wrote:
| Ah, then I was misremembering from my last trip and will
| take that back.
| croisillon wrote:
| no worries, i was genuinely curious if i had missed
| something
| Aphataeros wrote:
| Two stations have the Metro and Trains on the same
| elevation, running parallel to each other: Hutteldorf &
| Heilligenstadt both ends of the U4, but they are
| physically separated and you have to leave the metro to
| enter the train system.
| dillz wrote:
| Handelskai, too. (U6 <-> S-Bahn)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Tram-trains manage speeds about the same as the wholly tunneled
| Paris Metro.
|
| Uhhh, it's not.
|
| E.g.
|
| > Line 8 is 22.057 km (13.706 mi) long, including 2.8 km (1.7 mi)
| of open-air tracks in the southeastern suburbs.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_8
|
| Maybe they just meant comparing it to the tunnelled sections but
| I also don't see why that would really impact speeds. It's the
| traffic/grade separation that gets you the speed advantage.
|
| also the Paris Metro is kinda slow because of station density, so
| you may save a lot of walking but have a lot of station dwell
| time.
|
| Go during the day and pick any two arbitrary points in Paris and
| you'll usually find cycling faster than transit on Google Maps.
| xxmarkuski wrote:
| > This caps capacity and reliability.
|
| Karlsruhe: The local operators have severe quality issues, in
| part due to this concept. There are like four points in the city
| where issues impact the whole network. The rolling stock is very
| bad compared to the other regional trains running in Baden-
| Wurttemberg (no/bad ac, flaky internet, no sockets, bad seating).
| The trains have way too little capacity, I've seen incidents,
| where they run three coaches (which they don't do often, they are
| too long to enter the city), where people could not get in
| anymore. Some of the stations in the surrounding area are
| absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk
| over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through. Some trains are
| split or merged when leaving or entering the city, but it always
| causes delays. When trains can't use the heavy metal rails and
| thus not leave the city due to ICEs getting priority, a lot of
| inner city traffic can be affected. The cooperation between the
| different infrastructure operators is also a source of problems.
|
| Do not take Karlsruhe uncritically as an example where this model
| works well, yeah sure average numbers make it look good, but the
| reliability is complete ass. KVV always manages to surprise me on
| how bad it gets.
| Peteragain wrote:
| In Melbourne we loved our Tram Trams that run down the middle of
| the street and hold up the traffic. The W class trams were all
| fazed out and replaced with "light rail". Bigger Faster Better.
| Not. Melbourne has a good mix of tram and train - yes you take
| athe train to the city (a through route via the underground loop)
| and get on a tram for the last km. Small frequent trams are
| better for this and require lighter track. I think there was a
| recent HN article to this effect.
| PLenz wrote:
| Time to reinvent the Interurban
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban
| woodpanel wrote:
| The article mentions the old chestnut ,,but due to preference
| given to automobiles" without further explaining what that
| actually means. Since there's no need to. We're all very well
| aware how to fill out the blanks in our minds: cars are bad,
| car manufacturers are evil, they did this to us, only
| government intervention can save us.
|
| yet, what this historiography conveniently omits is that it was
| the glorious government intervention that strangled the often
| privately owned interurban/tram/train companies out of business
| due to massive amounts of roads being built under public works
| programs that were all too common from the 1920s-1940s.
|
| As the article mentions later:
|
| _automobile doomed the interurban whose private, tax-paying
| tracks could never compete with the highways that a generous
| government provided for the motorist._
|
| that provision had many names, one was "New Deal"
|
| I don't have a solution but two observations:
|
| 1) somehow in Asia never happened what happened in the West,
| that is, private transportation companies are still private,
| they prosper, and the societies excel at mobility.
|
| 2) Never ever destroy built infrastructure. Always plan for the
| possibility for a comeback. Post-war, many cities removed tram
| tracks. But even a rusty tram track is cheaper to repair 70
| years later than, paying upfront for the dismantling and 70
| years later for a complete new construction.
| nocoiner wrote:
| I really like your point #2. A little bit of me dies every
| time I see a rail-to-trail project. Granted, many (most?
| all?) of those lines have approximately a 0% chance of ever
| being economic again, but there's also rail-centered
| redevelopment that's being permanently foreclosed.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Over the longer haul, 99% of the potential infrastructure
| value of the "destroyed" rail line is in the unified right
| of way ownership. Rails rust (or are sold for scrap,
| legally or not), ties rot, ballast (gravel) becomes choked
| with dirt, brush, and trees, and bridges and viaducts
| crumble. _So long as_ the rail-to-trail project doesn 't
| erect a too-high legal barrier to eventual higher-value
| uses, it's actually a best case scenario.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Excellent point and well stated.
| toast0 wrote:
| Tram tracks are a triping and cycling hazard. Leaving unused,
| presumably unmaintained tracks in your city for 70 years just
| in case has a cost.
|
| Keeping unused right of ways open is challenging too.
| Adjacent properties will tend to encroach, and depending on
| specifics and local rules, may be able to claim the
| encroached property through adverse possession.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| There are real costs to retaining disused tram tracks. In
| Boston, the MBTA Green line E branch tracks were left in
| place for decades after service was discontinued, no doubt
| increasing costs every time they had to pave around them or
| do utility maintenance below them.
|
| In Somerville, the Somerville Community Path was a disused
| heavy rail right-of-way when I first visited in 2002 or 2003.
| Ripping up the tracks and putting in the community path
| improved walkability to a Red Line station (Davis) and
| creating a nice space for recreational walking and cycling.
|
| There are real trade offs to leaving disused infrastructure
| in place. Not losing a continuous right-of-way is a huge
| upside, but there are definitely downsides too.
| euroderf wrote:
| Some combination of interurbans and golf cart cars and electric
| scooters and electric skateboards would make a marvelous urban
| transportation milieu.
| Animats wrote:
| London? London has 13 major railroad stations and they're all
| dead ends.[1] Crossrail, with expensive tunnels, now provides
| some east-west through services.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Major_railway_stations_...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Pretty sure London Bridge has through trains (Thameslink) and
| also Blackfriars.
|
| e.g. today's 18:24 from Horsham to Peterbrough going through
| London Bridge at 19:31, Blackfriars at 19:37 and then St
| Pancras (for a triple!) at 19:46
| https://www.thetrainline.com/live/departures/london-blackfri...
| lpribis wrote:
| Yeah the only through-running trains through the actual city
| centre are the Elizabeth line and Thameslink. If you count
| slightly outside the city centre, you could also consider the
| West London Line (southern and overground), and the other
| overground from Croydon to Islington to be throu-running. But
| they slightly miss the city centre.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a fan-out at London Bridge to three more stations,
| but everything dead-ends within 2km or so. You can't continue
| west or north and get out of London on any of those tracks.
| desas wrote:
| > Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of
| space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center.
|
| This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't
| turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver
| gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of
| the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than
| the passengers disembark.
| standardUser wrote:
| > A final model of light rail worth mentioning is interurbans.
| ...these systems were sometimes staggeringly expansive: at one
| point, it was possible to travel from Wisconsin to New York State
| exclusively by interurban.
|
| I had no idea. A few systems are still in place:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban#United_States
| kposehn wrote:
| > The low density of Charlotte means a transport network like
| Munich's is not viable, but the city could take its pre-existing
| light rail network and join it up to the extensive network of
| railroad lines around the city that are currently used only for
| moving freight.
|
| This is not a feasible option due to the vast difference in
| crashworthiness standards between US freight rail and other
| system types such as light rail. The FRA actually prohibits
| allowing these two types on the same network of tracks at the
| same time. However, they could use a line along the right-of-way
| were it big enough to accommodate another set of tracks.
| bell-cot wrote:
| In quite a few cases, old rail right-of-ways near cities are
| large enough for an extra track or few. Because, back in the
| heyday of American railroads, they either had another track or
| few, or they expected to.
|
| The biggest issue is often bridges. Retaining the land that
| additional track(s) were on is fairly cheap. Building and
| maintaining rail bridges is not.
|
| And building the light rail bridges for a transit system is
| _not_ cheap. It 's just less horribly expensive than building
| bridges which you could run strings of 220-ton freight
| locomotives over.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Funny reason there used to be double tracks almost everywhere
| that is now single tracked: while the government granted the
| property to the railroads, they still excised a tax over the
| portion of that land used by the railroads, so in the 70s
| when companies were going bankrupt left and right they tore
| up their own infrastructure to reduce the tax burden. Hell of
| a fuckup.
| MisterTea wrote:
| How does this work for say, the New York and Atlantic Railway
| which runs freight trains on the same tracks as the Long Island
| Rail Road? There are stations where a freight train passes
| through while a passenger train is behind it.
| senkora wrote:
| The LIRR is heavy rail rather than light rail.
|
| I don't know the regulations but that's probably why.
| desas wrote:
| Is there a reason you couldn't build new light rail trains to a
| higher level of crashworthiness than they are currently? I
| don't know the full details, but that's how tram-trains in
| Sheffield, UK were allowed access to the main railway network.
| trgn wrote:
| Brussels is a great example of a train briefly turning into a
| subway. There's pretty much never a fare check either, so it's
| essentially a free north south subway line at very high
| frequency.
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