• fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    ☝️🤓 Um, actually, the 4-decade-old “Pacer” (pictured) was retired a few years ago.

    It was replaced by the exciting new “Sprinter”, merely 40 years old.

    Wow! So futuristic!

    • Pilferjinx@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I’ve always loved Britain’s impotent vehicle aesthetic. It’s just so adorable, like watching bunnies.

      • TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
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        15 hours ago

        I used to work at Paddington Station, I’m sure we had streamlined trains.

        Also, don’t we have pendolinos anymore?

        Gotta admit, the old school high air resistance trains look cute though.

        • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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          1 day ago

          It’s very dependent on which region, which route and which train company you’re travelling with.

          From a Yorkshire perspective, if your train runs North-South through bigger cities i.e. Edinburgh, Newcastle, York, Leeds, The South etc, without stopping at small in-between stations, you get 100 people on a 10 carriage long futuristic aerodynamic LNER Azuma Class 800 train, that feels like a luxury private jet and travels at 125mph.

          If your train travels East-West and stops at places like Halifax, Bradford, Wakefield, Selby, Hull, but also stops at little in-between stations called stuff like Boggy Fence, Coaltown, Upper Frogbottom, Chough, Milton-upon-Jeremy and Thribblewick, you get 400 people squashed onto a 2 carriage Northern Rail Sprinter, that feels like a livestock wagon and travels at 30mph. It’s perfectly pleasant outside of commuter times, to be fair.

          When the train is stopping at stations 5 miles apart, there’s not a lot of room for big fancy trains to do big fancy train things like “accelerate smoothly and aerodynamically” and “brake gently and quietly like a falling leaf”.

        • GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
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          2 days ago

          The Class 800 may have seats made from cardboard, but they do at least look like they were designed this century.

    • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I’m kinda surprised there hasn’t been a retrofit of some kind to at least make an attempt at aerodynamics for it. I guess it would be minimal efficiency savings.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Sigh, why did you pick Russia?

    They are using German trains from Siemens.

    You could have put France instead and had a cool picture of the TGV.

  • Destide@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    Well we’ve invested more into HSR than any of those countries combined. Well it’s not quite finished Well it doesn’t run the length of was intended quite a bit shorter Yes cancelled you say right

  • Forester
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    2 days ago

    It’s funny that the country that invented trains has worse trains than the US.

      • Forester
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        1 day ago

        By a mile? How many miles of operational rail do we have? Now how many miles do you have? The US has approximately 140,000, mi. There is approximately 10,000 mi of rail across Great Britain and Northern Ireland…

        As my British friend Tom used to say

        Mate you fucking flunked your maths schooling didn’t ya.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Ehhhhhhhh, considering the UK is basically the same size as ONE midwestern state … it’s highly debatable as to who has failed worse. (note: both are still abysmal failures, but one country has a goal post MUCH closer than the other)