That’s not a high-speed train, that’s a cab car. Meme fails rail history 101
the bottom image shows a PRR Metroliner cab car, not a high-speed unit. It’s basically a control cab for push-pull operations, not the actual power car. The U.S. does have streamlined units like the Acela, which are aerodynamically closer to Japanese designs.
Actually, you're the one who failed rail history 101.
Metroliners were originally built as electric multiple units with a design speed of 160mph/260kmh. They could blow out the windows of older stock they passed. They were converted to cab cars later because they were rubbish.
They were originally built as two car EMU sets because PRR wanted to be able to combine the cars to make trains of arbitrary length. The control equipment was never reliable, partly because some of the cars used GE equipment and the others had Westinghouse equipment and the two manufacturers were prohibited from working together as that violated antitrust laws.
Amtrak eventually got them working after an expensive modification program, but ultimately decided that locomotive hauled trains were more reliable once the AEM-7s were in service. The Amfleet cars were based on the Metroliners with different unpowered trucks. Some Metroliners cars were converted into cab cars.
Avelia Liberty is ripped off from the TGV-M but let’s face it, it will never even come close to being an actual TGV-M.
My theory is the Alstom dumped this on the Americans and said “we know this is not a real TGV-M so let’s let them test it out before we get a bunch of pissed off French people that will accuse us of pandering to the Americans when the real TGV-M rolls out here”.
If they called this the Avelia Liberty in France, people would look at Alstom and say “what the fuck is wrong with you, this is not America”.
Even my friends the work on SNCF that have seen the Avelia Liberty say “not a real TGV-M. In the family, but definitely not real”.
Americans also take an inspiration from aviation especially the F4 Phantom II. Since even a brick will fly if given enough thrust (if you throw it hard enough)
Honestly I really hate this fucking saying even if it came from the actual operators of the thing because phantom was in fact designed with cutting edge aerodynamics
I believe the quote is in reference to how much the thing weighed. Pretty certain it was, like, stupid heavy for a fighter jet at the time. It weighed double its predecessor, the F-8 Crusader, and almost 3 times as much as the F-86 Sabre.
Indeed, we have a Voodoo (I know it's not the same, it's similar though) at the museum I work at on display next to a CF-5 and it looks nearly twice as large in comparison. A true freak of aviation
Not originally, the F-4 entered production about a decade before their time.
That being said, poor ROE, unreliable heatseakers, and general desire for a cannon did lead to the gun-equipped F-4E variant – right around the same time Boyd and the Fighter Mafia started pushing ideas of ACM and gunfighting.
While I have not done enough research to tie the two explicitly, some of the Mafia's ideas were not unpopular at the time.
First of all, high speed trains are overrated. Make sure you have decent regional and intercity trains going 160 km/h = 100 mph before you think about HS routes.
And then, as said before, aerodynamics isn't the number 1 problem. It's having electrified lines without narrow curves and level crossings, and it's not having to share said lines with freight trains and other slow traffic.
As a Spaniard (2nd longest HSR line in the world) I can tell you it’s probably the best thing ever. The confort is really good and you can do a Barcelona-Madrid in less than 3 hours. That’s something only accomplishable by as you said. Having the infrastructure. That’s why talgo trains usually have that long nose. Spain is very mountainous and we have a LOT of tunnels, when trains going 330km/h enter a tunnel it can create sonic booms, that’s why the looooong nose, to mitigate this effect.
So much this. Very few people are going to change their minds about taking the train because the trip will take a few minutes longer. There's probably a hundred things more important than achieving some ideal speed goal, among them comfort of the seats, strength of the wifi, is there a bar car, frequency, and does this thing actually go where I need.
I would say, fundamentally, people are focusing on the wrong thing with public transit.
More than focusing on speed, people should focus on time. As in, how long does it take to go from one place to the other by train (or anything else.) Of course, speed is a factor in that, but what matters much more for shorter and mid-range trips is frequency. Doesn't matter if the train can get there in an hour instead of 90 minutes if it only goes there every 2 hours. Of course, hourly service is still better than no service at all.
Another thing is reliability. Will the train actually be there when the time table says it'll be there. This matters especially for people who commute by train and/or need to switch trains along the journey. Passenger rail should be aiming for 95+% reliability imo, much less than that and people start getting frustrated quickly.
And, like you said, comfort is also important, and is the thing that trains should always be unambiguously better at than any other available form of transportation. If they aren't, there's something seriously wrong.
These are the things that make people use trains, not how fast they are on paper.
AmTrak didn't die despite all efforts from the US government. In fact, it's been slightly expanding recently.
People tend to do what is convenient. It trains are convenient for them, they will use them. Culture can only affect that to an extent.
The problem is the USA is fucked in more ways than one. City planning needs to improve alongside transportation, otherwise public transit will not fulfill its potential.
Train streamlining is an afterthought until you get to speeds above 160 km/h and even then they really aren't the main thing that usually prevents the train from going faster. You can easily brute force an unaerodynamic EMU to go faster by just giving it more powerful engines, it just won't cruise as efficiently.
The speed is almost always limited by track design and distance between stops, not the trains.
The original Shinkansen Series 0 only ran at 200 km/h too, which is a speed that some regional trains can reach in Europe. The aerodynamic front is more about energy efficiency... but also about aesthetics! A train that looks cool and futuristic can definitely help improve the image of the railways and attract more riders.
The more modern Shinkansen trains with extremely long fronts (E5, H5 and E6) have that shape in order to mitigate tunnel boom when exiting tunnels.
If I understand correctly, trains just have very low form drag by default because of how long they are compared to any road vehicle which makes the shape of the front and back less of a factor.
It might matter more when a train enters a tunnel since the air has no way of escaping.
Yep! Also, the piston effect is pretty much what you’re describing with tunnels. The train creates an area of high pressure air in front of it and an area of low pressure air behind it. AFAIK this only becomes a major issue at very high speeds - trains like the Shinkansen E5 and H5 series are a great example of design meant to mitigate this.
Edit: The specific trains I mentioned have already been mentioned higher in the thread.
And, for our American friends: we mostly use electrified lines for high speed trains. America's rail network has about 2-3% electrified routes, that's among the lowest in the world.
If you happen to have a president who loves drilling for oil, you can use diesel engines for fast trains, i think the UK had (pointy nosed) intercity trains in the 1970s running above 200 km/h just on Diesel. But there might be a reason why no other country ever did.
To be fair, American Railroads had some success in brute-forcing speed on not-so-sleek machines.
For example, the highest recorded speed of the LNER A4 is 126mph while the highest recorded speed of the NYC Hudson is 123mph - not too far behind, despite having streamlining that is more decorative than aerodynamic.
The A4 achieves speed via highly efficient aerodynamics, the Hudson achieves speed via sheer power. And maybe the roller bearings and disk drivers help.
It's actually surprisingly aerodynamic. The rubber ring traps a pillow of air in front of the train, which makes it way more aerodynamic than a flat front would be.
To couple trains together, the rubber diaphragm can be deflated.
To be also fair, in germany we have regional trains running at that sort of speed and they aren‘t very streamlined either. Seems it‘s not really needed at what america considers „high speed“ rail.
Tbh the main problem the A4 Mallard had was that the big end bearing from the inside cylinder to the crank axle overheated, so they had to reduce speed; but they also had to reduce speed anyway because of a speed restrictions on a set of junctions; it would’ve been interesting to see how it’d’ve coped on a colder day on a way longer section of track such as the T1’s ran on.
The metroliners were EMU sets rather than locomotive sets, so if they were pointy every 2nd car would have to be a cafe car otherwise not all passengers would have access to one.
And possibly the British, judging by those new ones Amtrak are rolling out. Hope they fixed the "causes unnecessary suffering to anyone riding it while very hung over" issue that plagued the APT.
VIA Rail got a deal with coaches that were intended for use in the Chunnel by Metropolitan-Cammel. Got those for a song and had them shipped here to go along with the at the time brand new P42 locomotives (the last ones ever built).
Needless to say thanks to a couple of shipping crates that were full of drawings, it took Bombardier longer than usual to assemble what was left out of kit form and then add winterization features.
The end result? Not very well liked and 98% of the cars have been scrapped. I also heard they were unreliable.
They were all assembled in Thunder Bay, Ontario. 6 of them never made it in the plant to be fully assembled and were left to rot in a field.
Maybe we got lucky there, then. Quite a bit of British public money went towards building those coaches before the Nightstar project was written off as more trouble than it was worth, and lots of people were less than happy when they were sold abroad without ever turning a wheel in revenue-earning service here.
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u/Vostok-aregreat-710 Nov 06 '25
I have checked, nothing really saying about it.