HSR Boarding....On the fly!

[trainmaster611]

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e6b_1271317575

This is an interesting concept video of how to speed up travel times of HSR trains by avoiding making intermediate stops while still picking up and dropping off passengers. Basically passengers get into a capsule and the train picks it up as it passes underneath the capsule while another capsule of passengers that are getting off is detached. In concept, it works like the flyby mail exchange of the old RPO services. The video is in Chinese but the graphics facilitate understanding.

[61653]

Two axles per vehicle, is this the long awaited chinese Pacer replacement

[audigex]

Sounds good - until more people want to get off than the capsule can hold.

Presumably the whole train would stop at major stations, but what if an intermediate has higher than expected capacity?

Very interesting concept though. I can't see it reducing problems such as station saturation, but in terms of pure end-to-end speed it makes some sense.

[Kevo00]

Seems unlikely that a lot of passengers would want to get off at a smaller intermediate unless there was some sort of special event - anyway, I doubt you would fit seats to the capsule as passengers would only be in it for a minute or two - so you could potentially get quite a lot of people in it I would imagine, perhaps over 100.

[trainmaster611]

Eh, I don't really think its practical, just novel

The problem is that the capsule would have to be moving at the exact same speed as the train before they could rendez-vous; if you had the train grab it like a mail catcher, the force the passengers and the train would be subjected to probably wouldn't be survivable. That would be a tremendous engineering feat in itself.

The way the video depicts it, the capsule is in fact "caught" by the train but the train has a track on its roof that gives it some buffer room for inertia. Once the train catches it, it would still need some way to rendez-vous with an entry point in the train which probably isn't easy to do with a wheeled vehicle on top of an already moving train.

Either way, I think the train would still have to slow down A LOT for this to happen.

[noofnoof]

slip coach.
a lot easier concept getting off than getting on.