<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by luxury:
Too bad the French just don't know how to make trains</font>
From an engineering point of view, the TGV is an excellent design (shared bogies for low weight and trainset rigidity) with an outstanding safety record (2 deaths in 12 accidents, mostly with disabled vehicles on road crossings on non-high speed segments). The ICE's one accident resulted in 98 deaths, and the two design elements which contributed to this toll (non-shared bogies and since-abandoned compound rubber-steel wheels) are not found on the TGV. The Shinkansen, despite being the oldest and highest volume service, has no fatalities in its 40 years.
For information, a 8-car ICE3 trainset costs ~23M, a 8 car double-decker TGV Duplex ~20M, a 16 car 700 Series Shinkansen ~40M, and the 16 car 500 Series Shinkansen, the Rolls-Royce of trains with its 64 motors and brazed aluminum honeycomb construction, ~50M. Note that cost/car is not directly comparable between trainsets with unpowered (TGV/ICE1/2) and powered (ICE3/Shinkansen) cars.
The Japanese trains are expensive due to their design requirements: low load per axle precluding locomotives (related to earthquake worthiness of the elevated tracks, need to limit track wear despite high frequency), emitted noise in crowded areas, and targets for interior comfort (65dB @ 270km/h, a little more than a Lexus LS on the freeway!), with such exotic technologies as active vibration dampers. No wonder the Shinkansen has not had many export wins (Taiwan being the only one), as most operators are not about to pay for such refinements in their first generation of high speed trains!
In short, the TGV is an intelligently designed train on which the little details were not sweated out as on Japanese trains; nor was it needlessly overengineered, or lavishly appointed, as the ICE. Parallels could be made to the respective countries' auto industries. I tend to attribute some of this to the 14 year Socialist rule in France, which saw the end of the luxurious French TEE trains, replaced by the egalitarian TGV's.
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">when the tracks bank to make a large turn, so does the train</font>
And the alternative would be? Straight tracks are only possible in Australia and North America
[This message has been edited by monahos (edited Feb 22, 2004).]