Can you explain "profitable, but not economical?"
Comment on The train that never came; how maglev technology was derailed
InevitableList@beehaw.org 5 days ago
I feel that even if someone succeeds with Maglev it will at best be the Concorde of the railways due to the higher costs and inconvenience of using a niche technology with a limited supply chain and limited number of engineers available to build and maintain lines. Proprietary tech also limits your ability to shop around or negotiate better prices. Remember that Concode was profitable but was retired because it was uneconomical.
I also wanted to draw attention to the diminishing returns higher speeds deliver: 100km/h train = 4 hour journey 200km/h train = 2 hours 300km/h train = 1 hour 20 mins 400km/h train = 1 hour 500km/h train = 48 mins 600km/h train = 40 mins
This ignores acceleration and breaking times and the faster your train the sooner it has to start decelerating in order to avoid overshooting it’s destination. One overlooked time saving that HSR delivers is that the need to build straight tracks and skip stops to maintain speed means a more direct route to your destination delivered at the expense of the places in between. High speed service is actually a downgrade for many communities as the trains no longer serve local stations.
Sxan@piefed.zip 5 days ago
InevitableList@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Concorde only flew 2 routes; NYC to London and NYC to Paris so in exchange for training pilots and engineers and securing supply chains for the aircraft you got a tiny return on investment. BA also kept a spare aircraft permanently parked in New York that could step in if there were any problems with the primary craft, another significant expense.
Installing lie flat beds and suites in standard jumbo jets provided similar profits with way fewer headaches.
Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
Doesnt make as much money as theoretically possible and god forbid a single cent is left on the table
Sxan@piefed.zip 5 days ago
Oh. Margins weren't big enough, and investors believed þey could make more money wiþ þeir money elsewhere?
LukeZaz@beehaw.org 4 days ago
Kache@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
If you worked a shitty job that only earned $1 a day after accounting for work-related expenses (e.g. transportation, professional equipment, taxes, etc), it would be profitable, but not worth your time.
tal@lemmy.today 5 days ago
Maybe. Presently, the savings in human time is not worthwhile, but the value of human time does tend to rise over time, and it’s possible that someone might find cargos for which time savings are more valuable.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
It feels like you’re scoring returns logarithmically as you move the scale additively here. The faster you go, the sooner you arrive, it’s linear. I’m not actually sure if acceleration and deceleration has been a big issue at the scales involved.
ook@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
Yeah, how is it so unbelievable that when you go twice the speed you are twice as fast but when you go a third faster in speed you only go a third fast in time. Diminishing returns is something else, like you would go a third faster in speed but arrive only a quarter faster.
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 4 days ago
No, the other commentator is right.
What they said is that you add 100 km/h, and you gain 2h when you add it to a slow train with 100 km/h, but if you add 100 km/h to a fast train with 400 km/h, you only gain a few minutes.
That is called diminishing returns.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 days ago
That’s not diminishing returns in terms of time and speed, which is CanadaPlus’ point. 100km/h faster is 100km/h faster, not 100% each time. It would be diminishing returns if doubling the speed each time didn’t halve the travel time, but “diminishing input = diminishing output”, or 100% -> 50% -> 25%, etc, is not diminishing returns, that’s linear.
An actual example of diminishing returns would be the cost to speed ratio, where doubling the budget each time will not result in a doubled speed.
pheet@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
It is not linear but some sort of hyberpolic function as the OP is describing: double the speed and you halve the travel time, you move closer to zero travel time but never reach it. With a linear relation you would reach zero travel time at a specific speed point.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
Travel time is distance/speed. I suppose that’s only linear in distance in the technical sense, being inversely proportional to speed, but the point that there’s no dark magic or non-elementary school math involved stands.
pheet@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
InevitableList@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Doubling the speed turns a 4 hour journey into a 2 hour journey saving you 2 hours. Double speed again and it drops to 1 hour so you only save 1 hour, double again and you save 30 minutes. So the time saving is cut in half each time.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
Sure. And now the question is if halving the travel time is worth whatever it costs to double the speed.
In some cases, it is. There’s a grand total of one ocean liner left in the Western world, for example, despite the energy efficiency. The concord had problems with energy use getting ridiculously higher right after the sound barrier, which made it not worthwhile, and which is why 21st century passenger jets fly just below it, so that’s a straight example. I guess I just take issue with it being represented as mathematically inevitable.
InevitableList@beehaw.org 4 days ago
I read an article about China’s HSR that stated that a line with a top speed of 350km/h was 90% more expensive to build than a line built for 250km/h. The trains don’t spend much time at top speed during short journeys either. economist.com/…/china-has-built-the-worlds-larges…
A cubic meter of air weighs 1kg according to a Big, Bigger, Biggest episode about France’s TGV. Japan’s new Maglev is significantly smaller than the Shinkansen and the tunnels it runs through are 20% bigger since standard HSR already has problems with tunnel boom that can be mitigated at the tunnel entrance and exit. I also wonder how trains traveling in opposite directions will handle passing each other at 1000km/h given China is already working on next gen trains with that speed as a goal.