It's costs thats all.

You can engineer systems to cope with much larger swings in temperature, other counties some of which have already been mentioned have done so for years. These contries run solid high speed lines as well.

But we can't keep our current track right never mind anything more complicated.

The French system has 200mph capacity, all the safety sytems are transmitted via data transmission directly to the trains cab where the driver can look at his LCD displays. The drivers know of any up and coming problems, speed restrictions, signals, other trains etc. This technology has been around for 20 years or so.

When the trains enter the UK its 120mph if your lucky and the driver has to look out for hard wired track side signals and traffic lights.

Its like other countries using Pentium 4's and the UK hasn't even got a Sinclair ZX80.

Lee

 

A train derailed in France last month cos the track buckled under extreme heat,so even one of the so called best networks have problems too.

Just one thought,would you rather derail at 60mph or 20mph??if it ever happened to me,i'll take 20mph.

 

especially in a british train lol

 

Was reading the IT supplement in the Times last night about the automation of cars. One of the suggestions was to replace the rail tracks with roads emitting signals that your car could pick up and travel down autonomously. With consistent speeds and, hopefully, a much lower rate of accidents, traffic jams would be non existent and you could still read the paper on the way to work. A far better use of space IMO

 

Anyone have any idea how delayed the trains have become? Trying to find out but no luck so far!