zoltan
Service Attendant
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2008
- Messages
- 230
Tram-Trains are a German concept that run as streetcars or light rail at times, and on standard railroad tracks at others, that is being considered in quite a few European cities. They are largely used to permit commuter rail to penetrate the centres of cities. An informative post about the tram-trains in karlsruhe, Germany is available on the Human Transit blog.
They interest me because they offer a huge degree of flexibility in how you build urban transport. Already San Francisco's muni metro doubles as a frequent, fast subway downtown and a very low-cost streetcar in the suburbs. Imagine that you had your streetcar and your subway, and then decided that you next wanted to build commuter rail, you could provide direct services to the rest of your network.
For the sake of argument, imagine that you'd never had the huge amounts of money to throw at the transbay tubes in The Bay Area, but you were willing to give up two lanes of the Oakland Bay Bridge for light rail, and you wanted to get the Muni Metro out onto the existing rail lined to Fremont via Jack London Square. And imagine that you'd wanted, meanwhile, to serve San Bruno and Millbrae by way of extending the T-Third line via the Caltrain tracks. If you want, you could also think to the MARC Camden Line in Maryland, which terminates next to the commuter Baltimore Light rail, and imagine it running on through downtown Baltimore on the light rail tracks instead.
So the idea seems to have potential in The US as well as Europe, but the US has one particular problem - The FRA, and their desire to have trains built like tanks. Trains already run on streets in such places as Oakland, CA, Ashland, VA and Michigan City, IN, but outside of these grandfathered rights, I wonder whether such big and heavy trains as the FRA requires would find themselves conflicting with regulations on the safety of vehicles allowed to use roads around other vehicles and pedestrians.
So, what are your thoughts on how well the tram-train concept could be applied to the United States, given the sort of vehicles that would be required on the railroad segments?
They interest me because they offer a huge degree of flexibility in how you build urban transport. Already San Francisco's muni metro doubles as a frequent, fast subway downtown and a very low-cost streetcar in the suburbs. Imagine that you had your streetcar and your subway, and then decided that you next wanted to build commuter rail, you could provide direct services to the rest of your network.
For the sake of argument, imagine that you'd never had the huge amounts of money to throw at the transbay tubes in The Bay Area, but you were willing to give up two lanes of the Oakland Bay Bridge for light rail, and you wanted to get the Muni Metro out onto the existing rail lined to Fremont via Jack London Square. And imagine that you'd wanted, meanwhile, to serve San Bruno and Millbrae by way of extending the T-Third line via the Caltrain tracks. If you want, you could also think to the MARC Camden Line in Maryland, which terminates next to the commuter Baltimore Light rail, and imagine it running on through downtown Baltimore on the light rail tracks instead.
So the idea seems to have potential in The US as well as Europe, but the US has one particular problem - The FRA, and their desire to have trains built like tanks. Trains already run on streets in such places as Oakland, CA, Ashland, VA and Michigan City, IN, but outside of these grandfathered rights, I wonder whether such big and heavy trains as the FRA requires would find themselves conflicting with regulations on the safety of vehicles allowed to use roads around other vehicles and pedestrians.
So, what are your thoughts on how well the tram-train concept could be applied to the United States, given the sort of vehicles that would be required on the railroad segments?
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