Monday’s Friday Reads – 3 June 2019

On By In Friday Reads

• Cutaways of London landmark buildings, incl. KXSP station (Standard)

• Air France cutting short haul capacity 15% (SimpleFlying)

• Austrian rail stations now green powered (RailTech)

• New York subway costs 3 times more to build than in London (NYMag)

• Glamour of Jet Age at JFK’s TWA Terminal Hotel (CityLab)

• Trolley buses better than electric buses in snow & cold (CommonWealthMag)

• Moving a building on rails for LRT line (Metrolinx)

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28 comments

  2. Surprisingly they cite their sources. The number 10 source is an entertaining diversion!

    https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/07/19/rebuilding-no-10-downing-street/

    One example of the entertaining trivia contained within:

    “With the building’s foundations strengthened, the same was true of the permanent on-site carpenter, who had previously been retained to constantly adjust No. 10’s windows and doors as they moved in and out of true.”

  3. Pretty cutaway drawings but no key or description of the various features.
    L Ashwell-Wood must be crying on his grave.

  5. The KXStP cutaway bears bafflingly little relation to the actual station, beyond the basic orientation of the running lines. Has their graphic artist ever actually been to the station?

    The O2 one is also a bit wacky, including some oversized document-storage boxes lying around for no apparent reason. And is it me, or does the 10 Downing Street one eliminate the connecting building that should appear to the left of the cutaway, making it look like the building is freestanding around all three sides of its rear projection? The dormer windows don’t match those clearly visible on Google Maps’ 3D view either. It’s all a bit bizarre.

  6. In Welllington,New Zealand the trolly buses were replaced with battery buses in 2017 to save on the cost of maintenance of the overhead cables,but now there is a plan to use Chinese CRRC ART trackless trams which run in Zhuzhou City,China.
    Mayor James Palmer in March backed a £4 billion scheme to introduce trackless trams in and around Cambridge,142 km lines with 12 km of tunnels and two underground stations.
    During Steve Berry Department of Transport consultation period on light rail in the UK,I sent him links to the Press Release and the excellent article https://theconversation.com/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-replace-light-rail-103690 by Prof Peter Newman,Curtin Uni.Australia as Steve Berry`s article light rail (and other rapid transit option) didn`t mention ART but someone had already sent him evidence.I also recommend watching 24 min docu by New China Tv World`s first smart bus with virtual tracks on youtube as the reporters interview the CRRC engineers (there is no sound for 1 min but it comes back).

  7. I find the “Battery-Electric Trams with rubber tyres” … interesting.
    The critical test of them working is battery capacity / life/ costs …
    And, of course, in colder climes – will they work if the ambient is below 0°C – or will they run out of puff, so to speak?
    And, if you are going to have them, you will STILL need a clear swept reserved path for them, otherwise they are stuck in the same congestion/rut as buses.

  8. I recently ended up an event where a representative of HESS (the major trolleybus manufacturer in Switzerland) was present.

    He had some quite interesting things to say about IMC trolleybuses and how they compare to both battery busses und conventional diesel/hybrid busses.

    The major difference between conventional trolleybuses and IMC trolleybuses is that the IMC trolleybus always powers the engine from the battery, irrespective of whether the bus is under the wires or not. What changes is whether the battery is being charged or not.

    This has several advantages – firstly the current draw from overhead wires when present is far more constant – there are no longer any peaks or troughs when accelerating or braking. Secondly, since the battery can be used to absorb the impact of any voltage fluctuations in the supply (no matter what their cause), there is a significant weight saving in the power electronics (rectifiers, transformers, inverters etc) compared to powering the motor directly.

    Route learning algorithms and trickery can then be used to improve efficiency and decrease costs further.

    Conventionally trolleybuses have always had small internal combustion motors for maneuvering around depots or crawling home if something happens to the wires. In recent years these have been replaced by battery packs. In an IMC trolleybus this is no longer necessary, also resulting in a significant weight saving, even when taking the heavier battery into account.

    Given that conventional trolleybuses are generally lighter than diesel buses, this is an even greater difference.

    The battery itself is designed around a service range of 10km away from the wires, with an out of service range (with heating etc in the passenger saloon turned off) of around 35km.

    This means it is the best of all worlds in terms of diesel, battery or trolley buses. It does require some infrastructure (which is completely lacking in the UK)- but given how many routes in London are trunk routes for buses, electrifying even a couple of major thoroughfares would probably be enough for major benefits). Battery buses are also not without significant capital costs (especially when fast charging is involved).

    As an interesting side note. The acceleration of HESS’s trolleybuses is limited by software to about 0.75m/s^2 (for passenger comfort reasons – the representative, who was an engineer spoke of trying to persuade his superiors to relax this limit). This means that acceleration at lower speeds is actually slightly slower than on conventional buses. The difference is, that the rate of acceleration of a diesel bus tapers off extremely rapidly, whereas that of the trolleybus is completely linear (up to its service speed).

  9. London’s busses could definitely do with an accelaration limiter.

    The drivers seem to be having some kind of competition to see how many people they can throw down the stairs via rapid speed changes.

  11. The KX cutaway is most fanciful, not least with upgrading the deep tubes to take S stock, one of which is clearly seen as not fitting in the tunnel it’s about to enter or just came out of. Nice spatial upgrade of the platforms too; it would deal with the crowds nicely. The thought of perching all the shafts and tunnels on Pirenasian brick vaulted viaduct structures is rather fun.

    The baffling thing to me is that the Opera House one looks quite plausible, so it leaves me wondering what the whole thing is about.

  12. Re DM1 – ‘Conventionally trolleybuses have always had small internal combustion motors for maneuvering around depots or crawling home if something happens to the wires’.
    Really? I thought that in the UK at least they had traction batteries for that (SAs excepted). Harold of Hastings was given his 2-stroke TS3 in 1960 so doesn’t really count.

  13. The thing that throws you down the stairs on a bus is not acceleration or braking as such (high values of the second time derivative of vehicle position, measured in m sec^-2). It is so-called “jerk”, the third derivative (m sec^-3). Typically caused by sudden movements of the go pedal or the brake. (The position of either pedal is roughly correlated with acceleration of the vehicle, so high speed of movement of the pedal produces high values of jerk). In more sophisticated fly-by-wire arrangements, such movements, at least of the go pedal, are suppressed – but emergency stops have to be allowed for too.

    Steady vehicle acceleration can be easily dealt with by a passenger, by leaning. But it is hard to suddenly adjust one’s angle of lean.

  14. Littlejohn: You are pretty certainly correct as regards the UK. However, there have been no trolleybuses in service here for 47 years or so, which means that spatio-temporally speaking, the UK has made itself a minor historical footnote in such matters. (It remains true that “generally” would have been a better word than “always”).

  16. @Littlejohn/Malcom – batteries as backup for trolleybuses were well nigh universal globally until recent decades, leading to such delights as battery turns*, although rarely if ever in service. The Kingsway subway battery trip has already been dissected in detail on a different thread here.

    *At least one UK operation in the NE (Sunderland?) used gravity for a longish loop, leading to the bizarre sight of trolleybuses cruising the streets with the poles down, but that is another matter

  17. @Graham H. It seems here were as many as 35 or 36 officially authorised unwired battery turning points on the LT system, although not all of them were used regularly or even at all. On the other hand there were a few which were in frequent scheduled use.

  18. @Littlejohn – Indeed. Old lags like me spend far too much time grazing the “London Trolleybus Wiring” 5 volume series… On the question of the use of diesel rather than batteries, I seem to recall that it was either the Esslingen or Eindhoven systems that pioneered the use of diesel in the ’70s. It seems to have been an essentially “Western thing” – as far as I could tell Skoda trolleys relied on batteries, certainly the 9Tr, and later 15tr /16Tr vehicles with which I was familiar.

  19. @Graham H
    Esslingen was indeed the pioneer of the full “DuoBus” concept, a trolleybus with a near-normal diesel engine, so that routes could be extended beyond the wires. Whether earlier examples had alternative power sources I don’t know offhand, but certainly Arnhem’s trolleybuses of similar vintage had small (I believe petrol) engines for off-route manoeuvring (which brings us back to the original comment).

  20. In my years in Wellington, I have never seen a trolley bus move without power. At best I have seen them being taken across a dead piece by a bloke holding the poles down while the bus coasted across a very short section. He was standing on the back bumper holding on to a loop on the bus with one hand and the ropes to the poles with the other.

    Broken buses were always towed back to the depot by a truck.

    Needless to say a power cut in rush hour was sub-optimal….

    One of the reasons for getting rid of the Trolley buses was that in the suburbs a lot of the equipment dated from when they were first put in and that in turn was from when the tramways were electrified. So more than normal maintenance was required…

  21. I can’t even begin to work out which line is supposed to be which n the Kings Cross cutaway. One of the buses is also shown as facing west on the eastbound carriageway of the Euston Road

  23. DM1
    The complications of the “knitting” in that Zurich film are fascinating to look at ……

  24. Greg Tingey

    Part of the reason regular detaching and attaching to the wires has been introduced at the location shown in the film is precisely to try and reduce the complexity of the wiring. At that point the trolleybus line crosses a tram line perpendicularly. Whilst previously there was a junction in the wiring to deal with this, it was decided when the area was renewed to do away with this and have the trolleybus wires just go over the tram wires in insulated cables (this saves on maintenance costs) . This also provided a useful test bed to see how well the battery and attaching/detaching technology works in day-to-day operations.

    Reliability initially was not ideal, but has improved substantially to the point where the VBZ (the trolleybus and tram operating company) are planning to convert a diesel bus line to a full IMC (In Motion Charging) line using existing wiring next year, and are planning the (partial) electrification of two further lines for conversion to IMC trolleybuses – in particular in order to enable the use of biarticulated buses to increase capacity (the diesel/hybrid versions of such buses are not considered powerful enough for use in the city).

    The plan, if all goes well, appears to be to do away with other complex junctions as and when they come up for renewal.

    The next target is thought to be the Bucheggplatz which at the moment has about 14 tons of copper wires above it.

  25. @DM1 – not to mention reducing the complexity of driving under multiple insulated sections at the crossing points presumably.

  26. @Graham H

    With the newer trolleybuses I imagine that doesn’t really matter anymore. Since the motor is always powered by the battery, it just means charging is briefly interrupted.

  27. For the record, some points re trolleybuses in Wellington:

    – the bus fleet replacing the 60 trolleybuses included just 10 battery ones, the rest being diesel;
    – it was the cost of upgrading the substations that was the killer (the overhead wires were in the best condition that they’d been in for 30 years);
    – all bar three of the trolleybuses had traction batteries, used extensively while the city centre was rewired in the early 2010s;
    – Chinese “trackless trams” have been floated as an idea, but there are as yet no plans to introduce them.

  28. The trolleybus article makes a cogent case for maintaining existing networks rather than switching to battery, especially in areas with severe winters. I am less convinced that building a new trolleybus network is a better option than running battery buses – even if, as suggested, you need more battery buses to cover the charging time. The capital cost of those extra buses has to be compared with the capital cost of installing a completely new wire network.

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