Washington Metro held a Press Tour of the new 7000-series railcar. Here is what Metro is calling a modern “21st century” railcar:
As you can see, they got rid of the carpeting . But other than that, it is basically the same 1970’s design.
Two years ago, blogger Matt Johnson enumerated all the ways the disappointments with this new design. The biggest problem is that these are not articulated railcars, Even more surprising was to read that passengers won’t be able to move between cars at all.
Except for the USA, articulated railcars are becoming the norm. Articulation increases the usable space on the train, and eliminates “hotspot” crowding in one particular car. Articulation posed no technical problems because Metro already operates trains in married pairs, and the new railcars are not intended to be backwards compatible with earlier cars.
So what possible reason did staff have for not using articulated trains? Yonah Freemark asked that very question, and the answer is that Metro staff just hates change:
Metro spokesperson Lisa Farbstein: “We have not designed our cars that way. It’s a choice we made when we started the system decades ago. No plans to change it just to change it.”
The articulating Berlin S-Bahn cars are wonderful for distributing passengers, and makes the space feel larger.
So, has Metro fixed its train control software yet?
What about their train control software was broken?
look at the banner image of this blog.
Introducing actually articulated train cars can bring a variety of issues. Because of tunnel clearances, cars with shared bogies need to be somewhat shorter, which means that you have a different multiple of train length now. This works fine on a system with fixed-formation trains, and/or ones where you’re either replacing all the old trains, or have no old trains to replace. Unfortunately, Washington Metro is neither: they vary the length of trains based on demand, and new trains will run on the same lines as old ones. Still, they could’ve gone with a walkthrough design like S stock in London, at least within married pairs, and maybe done something like what BART has between the pairs.
You dredged up all the myths of articulated trains (someday I should do a posting called ‘Articulated Trains Myths’).
Train length: Washington Metro — like every other transit agency — runs fixed train lengths. Off-peak that would be (usually) a single 4-car train. During peak demand, they will couple two 4-car trains together. I really don’t see an issue here.
Tunnel clearance: Articulated trains are running all over Europe, on a wide variety of metro systems (some of which are very old). If it is feasible there, it is certainly feasible for Metro.
Washington has very wide curves, so even long articulated or walk-through cars are no big deal. According to Alex Block the minimum radius is 755′, or 230 meters. In Paris the minimum is 40, and the trains on the minimum-radius curve are walk-through, with 15-meter cars. For a fixed maximum gap length the curve radius needs to grow as the square of the length of each car. So based on the Paris example, Washington could run walk-through trains with 36-meter cars; in reality the cars are only 23 meters long, so it’s no problem whatsoever.
I’ve seen 4, 6, and 8 car trains on Washington Metro, but maybe they’ve entirely phased out 6-car trains in favor of 8-car ones by now, in which case 300′ articulated units would make sense. And you could have a BART-style walkthrough passage in the middle. I don’t get what you mean by “fixed train lengths” though, especially in reference to “every other transit agency”. I’ve seen every train length between 3 and 10 on BART, and I’ve certainly seen transit agencies adding and dropping cars mid-run too (LA Metro definitly used to do this, and I believe VTA does as well).
BART is going to uniform 4+4 and 5+5 system-wide eventually.
There was no reason — other than fogey-ism of superannuated agency olde tymers in the glaringly inefficient maintenance division — that its new fleet couldn’t and shouldn’t have been 85m and 107m long semi-permanent sets rather than a big pile of “boxcars” that get shunted about arbitrarily in the sprawling collection of elephantine maintenance yards.
Try again in 25 years!
Anyone know if BART is doing or could be doing articulated cars for their new train order?
Yes, BART could be doing articulated cars.
But NO, BART is not ordering any articulated cars.
Sao Paulo’s newest subway line 4 uses super high capacity, articulated, driverless trains made by CAF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_(S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Metro)
Interestingly they use overhead busbar intead of 3rd rail. The train is like one long tube inside, with the intercar passageways being barely noticeable (except for a slight narrowing and lack of seats).
Apart from being the world standard — London is getting articulated trains now — walk-through trains are even used in some of the newer public transportation systems in the US. There is some very, very out-of date thinking at some of the pre-1980 agencies in the US
[…] if the gifts under the tree were exactly what you wanted. In that regard, the 7000 series design falls short. The good news is that there will be more railcar procurements in the near […]