The buyback of the railways has unleashed a torrent of media commentators talking about “train sets.” How very childish. They weren’t calling the truck drivers who filled our streets on Friday “boys with their toys,” which would have been consistent. Just as tiresome are the pro-road fanatics who are again trotting out the line that trains are a “19th Century technology.” This falsehood has even been picked up by people who should know better, such as the blogger Homepaddock , a fellow journalist whose brain would normally engage before she parrots such trite propaganda.
In fact, trains left 19th Century technology behind in the 19th Century. In those long ago days, trains were hauled by snorting, filthy steam engines fuelled by coal that had to be shovelled by hand into a fire box. Coal! In the 21st Century, trains in many countries are electric-powered, high-speed streamlined wonders that, for example, take passengers between the centres of London and Paris or New York and Washington faster than can be managed by jet aircraft. 21st Century trains often travel faster than 200 kmh, with the maglev train that runs between Shanghai airport and the CBD achieving 400 kmh.
It is cars which are the 19th Century technology. Back then, when cars were invented, they were powered by internal combustion engines that needed petrol or diesel. They emitted polluting fumes more noxious than the steam trains of the day. With cars, nothing has changed. Trains have gone from steam to diesel to electricity and magnetic levitation, while cars have remained with internal combustion engines that still emit polluting, noxious fumes. Modern electric trains are clean, fast and emit no fumes at all. The fastest car cannot travel at anywhere near the speed of a 21st Century train. The biggest truck cannot carry anywhere near the volume of goods as the humblest train.
A bit of perspective is needed before trotting out shallow propaganda about train sets and old technology.
25 Comments
July 6, 2008 at 1:12 pm
This is a great post, Poneke – I couldn’t agree more. I read Homepaddock’s post, and felt compelled to leave a comment, supporting your original one.
July 6, 2008 at 3:37 pm
With respect, you are hung up on technology rather than function. For most of human history people have had access to private point-to-point history using things called horses, camels, mules, asses, lamas or whatever. Then, in the 19th C trains and trams allowed the development of far flung cities in which large numbers of people could get into the central city for work. (The Manhattan model). The trouble was the horses caused dreadful pollution of air water and soil, not to mention the stench at a NY gridlocked intersection in mid summer.
The car was a miracle. It got rid of the pollution, and released huge amounts of food to feed people. In 1910 40% of the grain grown in the US went to feed horses. This grain fed the population explosion. which followed.
So the car the was the iron horse – not the train.
You are correct that modern trains are at a higher level of technology than the nineteenth century trains but it only increases their speed and reduces their pollution. It does not overcome the fact that trains do not provide the flexibility of rubber-on- road transport such as buses, cars, and taxis etc. – or indeed, of the family horse.
Anyhow, the rubber-on-road system is about to go through a development phase which will leave the train in (on) its tracks. The next generation of cars will be a computer with four wheels.
You will be able to drive your car (bus) to the motorway where it will link to a position over an underground cable which will guide the car – you will be able to take your hands off the wheel and read, and even use your cellphone. The same cable may use an induction system to supply power to your electric drive system. (You will of course charge your electric car up overnight in your garage overnight).
Then, when you get near to your destination you will put your hands back on the wheel, leave the motorway, go back on to the surface street and complete the trip. If there is no parking you will get out of the car and tell it to go park itself and it will. When you leave your business you will phone it up tell it to come and pick you up and it will.
That it what we mean when we say the train is 19th century technology – it is stuck and cannot make the leap into the 21st century.
July 6, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I’m with you on this one for the most part. But let me mumble away. Its Sunday after all (and I’m procrastinating over some work I should really be doing…)
As you say, you really have to look at the better European and Asian rail systems to see the potential for train networks. To be fair this more readily shows off the passenger services than freight, and its quite right that they cost a fortune to set up and consequently the level and performancee of services they have are better suited to higher population densities than we have.
One point I think needs saying. Its easy to look at other countries’ successful solutions. What’s a little trickier I think is to try “map” what they have onto the local situation to see how it’d work here and if it’d need tweaking. I have to admit I dislike straight-out “copycating”, as it rare that another country’s solution will suit us as it stands. While looking at other successul models is good, I’m wary of borrowing ideas wholesale. (Its another topic entirely, but university fees are a good example of this.)
I think its pretty obvious that higher-performance commuter services would have to be restricted to just a few cities in New Zealand, possibly not even a handful. And you’d think that we don’t really have the population, population density or traffic levels to connect the cities in the fashion that, say, the larger European centres are.
With that in mind, I don’t see the point of going to the extreme of the 300+ kph services in NZ, the need just isn’t there. (So pointing at them in some isn’t helping the larger argument—?) But better rail, definitely. I can see an argument that train services running at, say, 150-180kph are a worthwhile complement to road traffic and surely that’s acheiveable—?
I’ve always thought that smart investment in “light” rail around (some of) the main centres would be excellent.
I also think that opening all roads to truck-trailer units was a bad move. It would have been wiser to restrict them to the roads that are genuinely able to support them (sufficient passing lanes, not too many windy sections, etc.) and to keep them out of the cities. (England has a policy similar to this, but they also have the issue that outside of London, etc., central city roads there can be quite narrow, being based on very old cities. They also have built up good ring road systems that support their solution which for the most part we don’t do well in NZ.)
And I could bore you with anecdotes of travel on train in various parts… great way to roll… But this has already gotten too long!
July 6, 2008 at 5:14 pm
One little niggle – the Shanghai magleav only reaches the outskirts of the CBD which is a bit of PITA. But agree that the modern trains of Asia are amazing and nothing like the North Korean rolling stock everyone seems to claim!
July 6, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Poneke,
You give a good description of 21st century rail. Unfortunately, Cullen bought a system designed for and of the 19th century.. upgraded slightly to Soviet era trains.
There’s neither the money, population, gauge, tunnels, bridges, rolling stock, trains, freight, or passengers to support a 21st ideal. Moreover, there’s not the slightest public interest in creating the 40-100 million people to justify such a system.
JC
July 6, 2008 at 5:43 pm
I admit that I was seduced by the rhythm of the sentence: 19th century technology fuelled by 20th century ideology and funded by 21st century tax payers.
I have admired and used modern trains in other countries, and would choose a train rather than a bus. Every time I crawl along the road from Auckland airport to the centre of the city I think, wouldn’t a train be better?
But, and now I am treading on eggs since you’ve declared this a politics free zone, I am not convinced that, regardless of who owns it, NZ can afford or has the population to justify, the multi billion dollar rail systems other wealthier and more populous countries have.
July 6, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Ditto homepaddock above. This is NZ not Europe, we have one large population centre and a lot of small ones. Their probably are some rail lines that are viable for large volume homogenous freight haulage e.g. milk, timber & coal but we probably don’t need to maintain the whole network.
A quick bit of Googling of the words “Euro 5″ will show you just how quickly truck engine technology is evolving in the areas of emission control & fuel economy. Furthermore it will be private capital invested in upgrading to these technologies not taxpayers.
Let’s also not forget how much money we have already spent on bailing out rail. Quoting Roger Kerr: “in 1990 $1.2 billion of debt was written off and a $360 million cash injection had to be made to keep it afloat.”
July 6, 2008 at 9:17 pm
I’ve noticed that whenever TV news has a story on some campaign to introduce light rail/trams, there’s inevitably a clip of some old news reel footage showing what trams were like the last time they ran in New Zealand.
So instead of sexy the sexy and sleek trams running in Melbourne, we see some black and white footage of old Bob the tram conductor tipping his hat as a rickety old wooden tram clatters its way along Courtenay Place.
Or if we are treated to contemporary footage, it’s still of the historic tourist trams at MOTAT in Auckland or Christchurch.
And we think, “Trams? No way! What a stupid idea!”
July 6, 2008 at 9:31 pm
“Modern electric trains are clean, fast and emit no fumes at all.”
What latte liberal head in the sand piffle. When electricity is produced without by product, only then will the power source of electric trains be pollution free.
July 7, 2008 at 10:44 am
And we have so much coal too… such a pity.
July 7, 2008 at 10:44 am
70% of NZ’s electrical energy is derived from hydropower, geothermal power and wind energy. The other 30% could be generated from tidal generators. All of those are near enough pollution free or could be made so.
July 7, 2008 at 11:11 am
I wish we could have the train system you’re imagining. Don’t think it’s possible, though, on a national basis.
July 7, 2008 at 11:13 am
RE Trams/ Light rail.
Light rail works where it operates on wide avenues within an essentially flat city – like Melbourne.
Now look at Auckland. Light rail takes out two lanes of traffic from the street. Imagine K’hape Road with two fewer lanes – or indeed any Auckland Rd with two lanes taken out. Typically you end up with only the parking lane many of which are now bus lanes – so what do you do with the buses?
Also light rail is murder on cross town traffic. If you are on St Lukes and come up to Manukau Road you stop for the red light and wait and wait and then just as the light turns green the rail light comes on and the barriers come down because the light rail is coming. Which is when you realise they are really slow rail.
The cross town congestion increased dramatically in Minneapolis and when people complained they were told that this congestion would help get people out of their cars. But there is no cross town public transport.
So, if we are going to look at alternatives for Auckland and Wellington etc we have to compare apples with apples – and learn from other people’s experience.
July 8, 2008 at 10:36 pm
The car’s in 19th century are provided with internal combation engine’s.
July 8, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Er, those maglev trains use about 3-4 megawatts of power. Where are you going to get the coal for that?
Trains are fine, and I love seeing them tootling about. But none of the technology inventions you site are just for trains. The reason it is possible to put an electric motor into a train is that it is on rails and has a power line above it. If cars were constrained in such a way then I’m sure we could do the same – witness the electric bumper cars.
You are suggesting that cars have not kept up with technology. Watch this space.
But that wasn’t your real point anyway. To win this argument you also need to show that trains are what we want these days, in our modern economy. They aren’t.
It isn’t about how much freight you can pack into a single train. If that were the only consideration then we would dig massive canals instead of streets and the milkie would deliver to my gate by oil tanker.
It’s about what is actually useful for the task at hand. And measured by that score, trucks leave trains for dead. Given the woeful passenger stats and massive subsidies needed to keep public transport afloat, it seems that cars are well ahead of buses and trains in New Zealand, also.
Trains are old-fashioned and outdated technology not because they have old engines, but because the cost of getting freight moved around by them (including loading/unloading) is higher than the alternatives. For people, they are outdated because they generally don’t go where you want to go.
July 9, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Poneke: I share your frustration with the generalised notion that trains are old news. They may have fallen out of favour, but they’re far from useless. I’m fully in favour of expanding rail use, regionally and nationally. There are geographical issues and marginal population outside the major cities, but pushing freight by truck is part of the reason why food prices are increasing. In terms of moving people, which is my main concern, I consider Wellington to be especially suited to regional rail for commuter traffic.
The Optimist implies and Owen says it explicitly: people expect point-to-point, personal and private. Unfortunately, there is a scalability problem. Unless you’re talking about bikes and scooters, personal and private adds a lot of overhead to the equation. 1 engine and a ton of metal to move 1 person is a lot. (I know that there is family traffic and car-sharing going on, but the bulk of the people coming into Wellington in the mornings are alone.)
What we need is a series of metrics:
1) Energy required to transport 1 person 1 km.
2) Bandwidth of a transport artery. Number of people transported per hour at arterial capacity.
3) Financial costs: run-time cost per person and infrastructure.
4) Accessibility to transport methods (including parking facilities).
Convenience is very important, and I’m not discounting it, but it’s impossible to quantify in a meaningful way. Once the metrics are in place, start designing a system that maximises the benefits.
Bring this back to Wellington in specific. It’s this design that is missing. WCC and GWRC are dismissing light-rail from the start in the draft plan, so we’re not likely going to see a useful high-capacity network at all. Owen has one point that I’ll agree with (did I say that?): light rail takes space. It doesn’t need to be as dedicated as he implies, but some space will need to be reserved for it. I’m guessing that the Basin Reserve flyover proposal is going to kill any chance for light rail to the hospital forever.
Owen: your point about LRT being murder on cross-town traffic is rubbish. Trams can wait at lights just the same as cars, which allows for proper traffic phasing. I lived happily with this situation in Calgary, if you need an example. In any case, I believe it is Karo Drive that is murder on cross-town traffic.
July 10, 2008 at 10:37 am
If light rail has to stop at all the lights it becomes even slower rail.
BUt here is the other situation. Where minor roads meet arterials you have to ban all right hand turns across the rail line for safety and rail efficiency.
Again good traffic engineering can reduce the impact of this on wide avenues with many lanes but not in Auckland.
We looked at light rail back in the sixties and it just doesn’t cut it for Auckland.
[Poneke: There has never been a light rail study for Auckland. The ones in the 1960s and 1970s were for heavy rail.]
July 10, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Owen: what is your basis for “slow” rail? Are you thinking velocity of the carriage or the length of time occupying the crossing? I ask because it strikes me as no different from private vehicle traffic. My vision for LRT in Wellington is the same as what I’ve experienced in Canada as trains crossed at street level: where segregated, travel at 70km/h, given priority light phasing; where not segregated, travel at 50km/h, no priority phasing. In the former, for a train of 3 carriages, the crossing time would be on the order of 45 seconds, including time to drop and raise the barriers. Again, don’t see how this is any worse of a statistic than waiting on Taranaki St for the bypass. It may be worth mentioning that right or left turns were not barred for those crossings, either.
A friend of mine working at Beca mentioned being part of a team revising the rail plan for Auckland a couple years ago. A plan exists for a loop from CBD and around Newmarket. I don’t know if it was a conversion of heavy to light rail, or staying as it was. It was apparently put on hold because of the difficulty with property managers originally, so the route had to be modified several times. It exists and it’s just waiting for someone with the political guts to pull it off.
July 16, 2008 at 5:23 pm
A couple of points.
Gregory,
If trains are moving at 70kph they are heavy rail. 70kph is a top speed for light rail but they don’t travel at anything like that speed on a road like Karangahape Rd or even Manukau rd.
Light rail is not heavy rail and top speeds and average speeds are much lower.
In Houston I was on a bus moving along a major road past the medical district which extends many miles. We happened to enter the long straight route at the same time as the light rail. We won.
Poneke – the public studies were for heavy rail but I was in the traffic design team and we looked at light rail systems internally and the problem in Auckland is inescapable. The roads are built along sheep tracks and bullock tracks. They are narrow and in the CBD area face very steep hills – but not steep enough to justify cable cars. Light rail in Auckland must displace the buses and why would you do that given that buses have the flexibility in route and size. There was a good reason why they tore up the tracks in the fifties and those reasons are as good today as then. So rail has to spend much of its time underground and that can only be justified by high speeds which means heavy rail.
(A bit crude but in the time and space available …)
July 17, 2008 at 10:23 am
Owen:
If trains are moving at 70kph they are heavy rail.
I think you are mistaking cause and effect.
My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that speed has nothing to do with the definition of heavy/light rail. Heavy rail is HEAVY – bigger engines (that go faster, yes), stronger structure to withstand crashes at higher speeds. But saying that 70kph is a top speed for light rail is not at all true.
July 17, 2008 at 10:28 am
Not meaning to be rude to Owen as I enjoy his views on many subjects and he is a nice guy, but he knows nothing at all about rail, except that he doesn’t like it. He has spent a decade going through contortions trying to “prove” that one of the most successful light rail systems in the world (Portland Oregon) is a failure, for example. It is beating one’s head against a brick wall trying to explain any facts on this subject to him.
July 17, 2008 at 4:49 pm
You are correct that the connection between light rail and speed is not direct. But the fact is that light rail running at high speed does not give a comfortable ride. When you have steel wheels on steel rails then you need a combination of mass and suspension to give a comfortable ride. Even when a light rail train is perfectly safe at high speed it does not feel safe to the passengers inside.
Also, if you are sharing road space with cars, as in most light rail systems, light rail is easier to stop in a short distance than heavy rail – and even then speeds should not be too high or accident rates climb.
So I was making an observation (rather than a law) that if you are sitting watching a train go buy in an inner city area and it is moving at 70kph then it is almost certainly “commuter rail” of the “heavy rail” variety and will be on a track on its own right of way rather than trundling down an avenue with cars driving on each side. Once that same train gets onto to a dedicated rail bed then it could well have a top speed of 70 kph or more.
But motorists driving along Manukau Rd would not expect to see one going by them at that speed – and nor they should.
There are plenty of successful rail systems in the world and I have used many of them, and will continue to do so. I have also ridden on some of the abject failures. In most new world post-Ford cities rail does not deliver on its promises but certainly delivers on its costs.
Its horses for courses. A passenger train from Auckland to Whangarei is just a joke and yet people are talking about it as though it will go into operation next week.
But the New York subway makes money and New York could not function without it – but you do not to be an urban economist to realise that New York and Whangarei are not the same kind of city.
Trains need high concentrations of employment. New York has that. Los Angeles has a higher population density that New York but no concentration of employment to match Manhattan and so the LA lines make a loss and run near empty much of the time.
The Hong Kong and Singapore systems work well too but again look at the employment concentration.
Wellington is something of an anomaly for such a tiny city because the topography and being a capital city gives a much higher concentration of employment than would normally be the case.
Good on them. But don’t think you can export it.
July 17, 2008 at 5:45 pm
One solution to locating light rail I’ve long admired is to build it above the median land of major motorways, as they have done in Singapore. The land is already owned by government, the train advertises itself well and travels along existing arterial routes with less issues of conflicting with other traffic flow. Expensive engineering, I imagine, though—?
I don’t believe displacing the existing services completely is a key point: look at any major cities with underground and they still have all the other options. More relevant I think is moving large numbers on the key routes. (Ditto for freight.) Other services will always serve the less frequently used or physically awkward routes better.
Incidentally, there was mention in the ODT of the Mosgiel-Dunedin-Port Chalmers line a few days back with regards to a commuter service. (I find it hard to think its got the numbers to justify it, I’m just mentioning it; the revamped Dunedin-Mosgiel motorway would make this less appealing than it might otherwise be, too.)
July 17, 2008 at 9:19 pm
As someone else of whom rail expert Poneke would state “ but he knows nothing at all about rail, except that he doesn’t like it. I would add the following comments.
Colin said: Heavy rail is HEAVY – bigger engines (that go faster, yes), stronger structure to withstand crashes at higher speeds. Well this is also not really true. As outlined on Wikipedia
The term light rail was devised in 1972 by the U.S. Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) to describe new streetcar transformations which were taking place in Europe and the United States. . . . Light in this context is used in the sense of “intended for light loads and fast movement”, rather than referring to physical weight, since the vehicles often weigh more than those on so-called heavy rail systems. The investment in infrastructure is also usually lighter than would be found for a heavy rail system.
I have also seen another US definition that Heavy Rail is fully-grade separated and powered by a third rail (the two are obviously related).
In fact, given the light loads and lack of grade separation, if either Auckland or Wellington’s passenger rail systems were located in a country with real heavy rail passenger lines like the BART (USA) or the the London Underground (UK), they would most likely both be also classified as Light Rail systems !
Colin’s comment “that 70kph is a top speed for light rail is not at all true” is itself not correct. Sure, the Houston Light Rail vehicles could go faster than 70kmph . . . but, as the schedule clearly shows, in reality this line takes 30 minutes to travel the 12.1 km length giving a real world speed of only 24.2kmph. The real world times being much less than maximum vehicle speed holds true for most transit systems (bus or rail). But given real world difficulties with street running transit keeping to schedule times, I believe Owen when he claims he saw the bus beat light rail !
As for Portland’s Light Rail success, opponents claim it doesn’t work and supporters say it does. Here is one such claim highlighting that Portland’s own 6th Avenue Bus Service delivers 4 times the passengers using the busiest Light Rail Line. I am sure Poneke can link to equally compelling evidence of success
[Poneke adds: There were three identical versions of this comment in my spam filter. I have noticed that fanatics with a cause (global warming is one such subject) pepper their comments with multiple links designed to promote their cause, as Tony has done. Askimet sends them to the spam queue, from where I rescue them if I can. It's much more sensible to avoid multiple links.]
August 27, 2008 at 7:01 pm
19 th century technology is still good…