Re: HST's, pollies and dreamers.

[dbromage@metz.une.edu.au (David Bromage)]

Tell (telljb@ozemail.com.au) wrote:
> Perhaps you would like to rattle off all the overseas
> 300 Kph freight lines with gas turbine locos.     

The proposal is for 300km/h passenger trains and 200km/h freights. 300km/h
passenger trains run every day in France, Spain, Belgium, Italy and Japan.
Freights at up to 160km/h are common on general use (i.e. not high speed)
tracks so 200km/h is no big deal.

TGV001 (the protptype) was gas turbine and out of 5200 test runs reached
300km/h on 175 occasions. The top speed was 318km/h in 1982. They
locomotives used both 3760kW TURMO IIIG and 4400kW TURMO X gas turbine
engines, the same as used in Sud Aviation's Super Frelon helicopter. 
Unlike Union Pacific's 8000hp gas turbine locomotives, the engines ran at
a constant speed to there was no excessive noise when powering. The
production run TGVs were to have been gas turbine, but the oil crisis of
1974 caused the change to electric traction.

The principle of high speed non-passenger traffic has been demonstrated by
the TGV La Poste trainsets which run at 270km/h.

Cheers
David