U.S. Technological Backwardness (Railroad Passenger Trains)

Marcus Gloger for The New York Times. Workers inspect a Velaro E train at a Siemens factory in Krefeld, Germany. Siemens has been in the forefront in the assembly of high-speed trains.

While the U.S. Government is busy destroying Amtrak, in "Overseas, the Trains and the Market for Them Accelerate," the New York Times reports on the success of Siemens of Germany and their continued development and advancement of the technology of high-speed railroad passenger travel. From the article:

Even more high-speed trains? Europe must be kidding.

"We're now turning out a car every one or two days," said Michael Gessner, project manager at the Siemens rail car plant in Uerdingen, a suburb of this industrial city. "When we begin the Chinese order, it will be two a day." Work at the Siemens factory illustrates a coming together of two developments in high-speed passenger train travel: technical breakthroughs in the way the bullet-shaped trains run, and the opening of vast new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that are combining to give a steady boost to the business.

Unless they have traveled abroad, most Americans have had little first-hand experience with high-speed trains, and the problems with the Acela service on Amtrak have left its customers with a slightly bad taste. Hence, as countries including Italy and Spain - and emerging markets like China and Russia - open their pocketbooks for huge high-speed railway development, the United States remains on the sidelines, vulnerable to losing out on new technologies for propulsion and vehicle control.

For those who thought railroads were basically 19th-century technology, think again. Thanks to miniaturization, newer trains have motors built into the axles of every second rail car, rather than concentrating the pulling power in the locomotive, as was done in traditional pull-push trains. The technology makes the trains lighter and enables them to go faster and to brake and accelerate more easily, while causing less wear on rails and wheels.
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Especially if it is likely that oil prices, including aviation fuel, will continue to skyrocket due to depletion, it makes sense to replace most airplane trips under 300-400 miles with higher-speed rail trips. But very little such planning is proceeding in the United States.

I do wonder what happened to all the knowledge and learning and plans for trolleys and streetcars. Do the GE or Brill archives still have this information?

Ironically, the way that GM and Ford are going, the U.S. isn't doing that well in advanced automobile technology either...

GE trade journal ad, featuring Capital Transit.

I have proposed that as DC moves forward with streetcars, that we should develop a joint manufacturing agreement with the producer (comparable to what New Orleans did with the Canal Street line in the last few years--although this line has been wrecked by Katrina, and isn't functional now--and work to develop the DC region as a center for the development of new streetcar technologies, especially if Baltimore and Arlington County move forward with streetcar implementation as well.

Index Keywords: transportation