A new Chinese train innovation – How to get on & off a bullet train without stopping.
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“No time is wasted. The bullet train is moving all the time. There are 30 stations between Beijing and Guangzhou, so just stopping and accelerating again at each station will waste both energy and time. A mere 5 minute stop per station (elderly passengers cannot be hurried) will result in a total loss of 5 min x 30 stations or 2.5 hours of train journey time!
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But the Chinese are innovative enough to come up with a non-stopping train concept. When the train arrives at a station, it will not stop at all. The passenger at a station embarks onto to a connector cabin way before the train even arrive at the station. When the train arrives, it will not stop at all. It just slows down to pick up the connector cabin which will move with the train on the roof of the train.
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While the train is still travelling away from the station, those passengers will board the train from the connector cabin mounted on the train’s roof. After fully unloading all its passengers, the cabin connector cabin will be moved to the back of the train so that the next batch of outgoing passengers who want to alight at the next station will board the connector cabin at the rear of the train roof.
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When the train arrives at the next station, it will simply drop the whole connector cabin at the station itself and leave it behind at the station. The outgoing passengers can take their own time to disembark at the station while the train had already left. At the same time, the train will pick up the incoming embarking passengers on another connector cabin in the front part of the train’s roof. So the train will always drop one connector cabin at the rear of its roof and pick up a new connector cabin in the front part of the train’s roof at each station.”
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Thanks to Andrew Panko of CRHA Niagara for bringing this news item to our attention.
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Is this possible?
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A (very) qualified acquaintance of one of our TRHA directors has offered the following comment:
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“Re the latest posting on the Roundhouse site, we had a good laugh at work (Bombardier) with that Chinese idea a few weeks ago. Do the math and you will see that the slow down and speed up tracks need to be about 1.5 km long – each – plus how do you accelerate the departing train unless you have propulsion on it, you can’t just catch hold of a stationary object if if you are doing any kind of significant speed. So a nice idea that doesn’t consider the laws of physics.”
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Posting by Russ Milland
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