161
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
161 points (96.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
12317 readers
1879 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Taking the french Aérotrain advantages:
The trouble is you have to replace existing infrastructure which means as soon as you start ripping up old rail lines you can no longer run traditional trains so the level of service is actually going to go down not up. Hence why it was abandoned.
Any revolutionary train technology is going to have to work on the existing infrastructure, or it's not going to happen regardless of how revolutionary it might otherwise be.
Yea no i ddont think that a train with a turbine that uses kerosene is so great. With regeular trains you can recouparate while braking. Why would the aeotrain brake faster than a regular train?
You're talking about a 70's prototype, but that does not mean it would need a kerosene turbine if it was made nowadays. Actually, the Aérotrain S44 used a linear electric motor.
A train brakes by blocking the wheels on two relatively small rails, and the wheels can lose traction.
An aerotrain reverses its propulsion, using it as a brake. No slippage possible here.
It can also bite the rail, having a way bigger braking surface, as well as having an interface dedicated to braking directly on the rail instead of a brake on a wheel on a rail.
And in emergencies, you can even stop the suspension and let the aerotrain rest directly on the rail to brake. That's a bit brutal and causes damages (at least back in the 70's), but that stops the Aérotrain quite fast and is way better than derailing or hitting something.
Ok so first if all anlinear electric motor is really expensive all the things that you said that were good about the aérotrain then dont apply annymore.
The amount of thrust you have to generate to stop a decently sized train is huge, that kind of turbine would be super loud and blow tons of debris around. If you brake with biting the rail you will also have lots of wear.
I dont even get why you would need to brake that fast? With a vehicle that heavy you will never be able to brake so fast that you could stop if something happened a hundret meters in fro t of you. And even if you bite down on the rail to stop near instantly the kinetic energy of a few hundret tons moving at lets say 70km/h would just destroy the rail.