The Fastest Thing Since High-Speed Rail?

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Hello guys, neeraj here! (The guy who shot rrts) I am open to questions which are not extremely deep in the transportation-field. Also, I suggest people living in delhi-ncr to give RRTS a visit. I am pretty sure you would be surprised how great everything is.

High Speed Metros can act like suburban rail and urban express rail at the same time, where the metro can go very very fast but connect various destinations. GO Transit and the TTC need to build more high-speed metros and regional rail instead of peak-hour commuter rail and slow legacy metros. This is because Toronto's geography and urban sprawl call for a fast system with a flexible route.

In a sense, the Shinkansen is like a high-speed metro because of how frequent the service is.

At this point us Aussies and Canadians are probably better off doing our long distance train journeys with Kangaroos and Moose respectively! We'll probably see teleportation implemented before we see HSR in either country.

It's surreal to ride the outer sections of the DC metro. Especially the Orange and Silver lines. I took the Silver out to Dulles and it was so nice to see the metro going faster than the cars on the highway

I think Guangzhou Metro Line 18 and Line 22 are the best examples of high-speed metro. They are planned and constructed as both a suburban rail and a metro. They use suburban trains with metro interiors. Stations spaced slightly close together in Guangzhou and far apart outside of it. They are planned to reach other cities (as far as Zhuhai and Shenzhen). They run almost fully automatically (GoA3). And they run with Local and Express service (no express on line 22 at the moment as it's too short but have provision for that)

Note regarding the RRTS in Delhi - It also becomes a conventional metro corridor when it enters the state of Uttar Pradesh, where it will become parellel to the Meerut Metro, i.e. both the RRTS and the Meerut Metro will run on the same tracks. While the RRTS will only use 4-5 stations after entering Uttar Pradesh, the Meerut metro will consist of other stations not included as RRTS stations. The rolling stock for the Meerut Metro is like a conventional metro rolling stock with operational speeds of 80 km per hour, manufactured by Alstom in India. Basically it means that while acting as a high speed metro overall, it becomes an express metro after entering Uttar Pradesh.

7:17 The comparison to skipping landlines and going straight for cellphones is pretty good since many of these recently developing places are doing exactly that. Building the infrastructure for a cell phone tower is far cheaper than connecting every single home directly. For end consumers used or simple cell phones are also about as cheap as a landline phone and when it comes to internet access a simple android phone can usually do more than some bottom-spec computer in the same price brackets. Mobile infrastructure is far more important in these places than in wealthier parts of the world that already have decades worth of legacy infrastructure that they can modify or reuse.

don‘t forget highspeed Regional Trains. Here in Germany we have a few of them like the IRE200 from Wendlingen to Ulm with a top speed of 200km/h on the highspeedline where ICE are only 50km/h faster. Other Routes are from Munich to Nürnberg or Nürnberg to Erfurt, all the use parts of ICE highspeed lines :)

I feel like your definition of suburban rail is just that "it already exists, and it's mostly old". What is the technical difference between a brand new suburban rail network, built from scratch, and a brand new high-speed metro system, built from scratch? Is it just the metro style seating layout? Or is it that it goes through the city centre in a tunnel? If the Elizabeth Line was built from scratch and didn't use existing lines in the East and West of the city, would you then call it High Speed Metro? It just feels like you're inventing a category for the sake of it. What am I missing?

RRTS has changed Meerut-Ghaziabad commute. Once its complete, it will become very popular

São Paulo made it in early 2000's. CPTM L11 line is a former suburban railway converted to semi "high-speed" metro where trains can reach top speed up to 100 km/h

Excellent video idea. I was just mulling over this yesterday when stumbling over an old document calling Sydney Metro "Sydney Rapid Transit". Probably important to nominate the 3 things that create speed: 1. Top speed 2. Average acceleration 3. Dwell times It's the 3rd one that makes Sydney Metro's new timetable quicker than the old Sydney Trains timetable on the SAME line, EVEN for the express service that skips stops — which Sydney Metro never does. That's thanks to more doors and fewer seats (and no stairs). But don't undersell the 2nd one — have you seen the travel time improvements on British Rail with the new locomotives that accelerate harder? They've been able to stop using tilt trains in some cases because the top speed wasn't as relevant in a winding-road situation; the engines pull harder and they're still making less time than the old tilt trains despite having a lower top speed (or top speed in the curves: TBC). This slow-fast-slow-fast experience is sort of analogous to stop-start-stop-start, and we used to have single-deck trains in Sydney too, before 1994. But they were FAR slower at departing, and even the trains that we received in the 2010s (A sets and B sets) you can FEEL the kick of the acceleration more than everything that was made before 2010.

The GTX actually looks more like a metro than the Chinese high speed metros because it has more standing room. I do wonder what the safety regs will be like, since one of the lines apparently interlines with the tail-end of the SRT high speed line into Seoul. That being said, I was surprised to learning that people are able to stand on some higher speed rail like the Arlanda express. I knew that some 160 km/h trains in China allowed standing because of how high the capacity numbers are, but did not expect it for 200 km/h trains.

"The flexibility of metros with the speed of suburban rail" feels like overselling it a bit. Legacy suburban rail lines had the same flexibility when they were first being built, and in many places they're built either on viaducts or on cheaper embankments just like these high-speed metros are. If you ignore the history and only focus on current operations, then the Copenhagen S-trains have a bunch of similarities with these high-speed metros, albeit at a smaller scale due to the city being smaller, and I'd argue the same goes for the RER. They're not so different, the difference is mainly whether the line was built first and had city grow around it, or if the city grew first and had the rail line built afterwards. Also, the high-speed metros do make a tradeoff - higher top speeds mean longer stop spacings, which also means less coverage and longer last-mile trips. This is often only a worthwhile tradeoff for large cities where there's already a more traditional metro with tighter stop spacing. High-speed metros are really just logical way to build a brand-new commuter rail line today in places without legacy infrastructure.

Basically an S-Bahn. The S-Bahn in Hamburg and Berlin go to 100 kmh while the other proper S-Bahns even reach up to 140Kmh.

Back in the 1930s/40s, NYC realized close metro stops made the IRT lines (1/2/3/4/5/6 trains) too slow. That's why the IND lines (ex. A, C, E lines) were spaced farther apart, and it's why, if the Second Avenue Line is full built down the east side of Manhattan, it will act as an high-speed metro version of the Lexington Avenue Line.

Tokyo and Kansai regions have tons of operators that do 90, 110, 130 km/hr for long stretches and no one calls them rapid metro for the simple reason that there isnt the need to. Compare that to Seoul or say Beijing where there are many metro lines but traversing from one side of city to the other is still a pain because of the low speed and the 6-8 car trains can't handle the demand. So you can see why they would look to a high speed alternative. Singapore's Cross Island line looks to address the same issue through longer spaced stations although the line itself does not go anywhere important.

Seoul - GTX Delhi - RRTS Guangzhou - M18,M22 Istanbul - Hizray ,M20