The World of Railways and How They're Related

on my recent video about the London overground a number of people commented about how I would categorize it is it London's version of an s-bond system I think what's interesting about Rail and transit systems in general is often the best way of understanding how one works is to just look at a map and so in today's video we're going to look at the world suburban and urban rail systems try to categorize them and see what makes them tick hey there welcome back to RM Transit if you aren't already consider following me on Instagram and sub stack for regular photos and articles I think you'll enjoy it the most basic type of suburban rail system can arguably be found in Mexico City which has a number of different Suburban rail corridors in Mexico City these Lions tend to terminate at stations kind of semi-central to the city or on the edge of the city and then travel outwards radiating into the suburbs and surrounding towns they're called Suburban because they spend most of their time running outside what people would traditionally characterize as urban areas though it's important to recognize that what qualify is as suburbs varies a lot from City to City so not always single-family homes with Lawns out front end two-car garages now while I've singled out Mexico City the idea of suburban rail as lines that mostly just run from the outskirts of a city into the city itself probably at some terminal that's connected to the Subway or Metro system is pretty common women all kinds of cities around the world have systems like this probably most notably in places like China and other Latin American cities like Santiago Chile to be perfectly clear just because these lines are Suburban doesn't mean the service is bad there are still a shocking number of rail services in North America that operate into the city in the morning and out of it in the evening but in much of the world Suburban rail feels like a bigger slightly less frequent subway system trains are probably electric they run from early in the morning to late at night perhaps even overnight on the weekends and you just kind of show up and wait for a train to come when you start looking at more complex networks like bonus Iris and Sao Paulo a few things change from the most basic of systems for one you start to have a lot more lines but they also start to come together and connect sometimes in the city and also sometimes in the suburbs where lines loop back on themselves and other corridors to provide inter-suburban connections you'll also start to see branching where a rail service will split to serve several different destinations the fundamental rationale between branches is that Urban tracks and infrastructure are expensive but Suburban infrastructure is much less so so you can build multiple branches in the suburbs connecting into a single Urban trunk making better use of the most expensive infrastructure you have while systems like this can be super useful they face some common problems for one turning trains around especially large trains at a big Urban Terminal Station is really difficult especially at the high frequencies that you're going to want to you also have the issue of tons of people arriving at your terminal stations and wanting to go to other places in the urban area but not necessarily always having a good way to do so of course you can always run more buses or build tram and Metro routes but the reality is that big Suburban trains are just going to overwhelm smaller Metro trains not to mention trams part of the solution to this is something like the New York area Suburban Railways or the cptm in Sao Paulo where all of the lines are connected to one another even if not in the most logical way that means that for long Journeys passengers don't need to cram into an urban Metro tram or bus to cross the city center and get onto another Suburban railroad instead they can ride to some sort of central Hub or hubs and transfer trains there remaining on more comfortable and higher capacity Suburban trains for the entirety of their trip but there's a big problem with these systems if you do want to make a cross-regional trip which you can see quite clearly in Sao Paulo where if you want to go from the farthest Eastern extent of the cbtm to the furthest Western extent you have to transfer three different times and because in both Sao Paulo and New York Riders have few places to transfer these transfer points are incredibly congested and end up being bottlenecks for the entire region one of the big solutions to this problem is what's typically referred to as through running where trains don't just stop on the edge of a city but continue through it and this generally takes three main forms s-bond systems rer systems and Japanese through running some Subway style systems most famously seen with the Tokyo subway the core idea as I already kind of said with each of these different systems is to have trains that would traditionally terminate at the edge of Metro lions or at the edge of a city center travel through it onwards to other lines these new connections are typically built through some of the densest parts of cities and are generally in tunnels although there are some surface and even elevated corridors that exist out there this obviously has a number of benefits for one Riders headed across a city region can often do so without Ever Changing trains since some trains from one side of the city will continue all the way to destinations on the other this is obviously a nicer experience for Riders but it has other benefits too the busiest stations and core sections of your Urban rail network likely with new tunnels like I've referenced above don't need to serve every single transferring Rider since some can just stay on their train and continue beyond at the same time even when passengers do need to change trains so that they can get onto a different line heading through the city they tend to have a lot more options for stations which they can switch at since usually multiple services will be sharing a city center Corridor even better Urban bound Riders might be able to get to a station that's much closer to their final destination and even if they do have to take a tram or a Metro for the last mile it'll be less crowded because the weight of all of those passengers coming in from the suburbs is distributed about more stations this approach also has huge operational benefits for the Suburban trains because it removes much of the need to operate busy Terminals and take up tons of land for Rail Yards in central areas of course trains still do need to turn somewhere but with Suburban rail through running trains traveling from branches on one side of the city can travel all the way out to branches on the other side and then turn around on each individual Branch meaning that each individual terminal or turn back point along the line has a lot less chance to handle all of this allows for way more train frequency and reliability across the network so much so that the Central City stations that serve all of the lines end up getting an incredible amount of service now I said there were three flavors to this so what are the differences the simplest solution to understand is probably Tokyo's Subway through running we're Suburban trains dipped down into the city's Urban Subways to travel through the dense part of the city before popping back above ground to continue onwards this solution is easy to understand because you're taking a Subway tunnel you already have and allowing Suburban trains to run through it well despite its seeming simple this solution isn't actually all that easy because you can't exactly just take an existing Subway and start running any old suburban train through it with Tokyo's approach incredibly careful planning had to go on to align Suburban railroots with the planning for new Urban Subways so that things like the loading gauge and track gauge as well as electrification was aligned this was even more challenging as often times the infrastructure and trains are owned by several different companies it's really impressive they pull it off in addition somewhat uniquely among the cities that have Urban rail through running in Tokyo there are trains which only travel on the subway portion of the line within the urban center this is in large part because Tokyo has a number of different Subway Lines with Suburban rail through running and some Suburban Rail lines don't actually through run through Subways but rather on Surface infrastructure in the city center all of that means that the urban rail through running happening in subways often consists of one line on each side maybe two and that means that while there is quite a bit the service which through runs on to the suburbs doesn't take up all of the capacity of the tunnels and doesn't always provide a subway-like level of frequency so those additional trains are needed to get you up to that level of service in addition because we're talking about subway tunnels here instead of massive underground Caverns for large Regional trains seen in Europe well there are more lines which have through running which distributes the through running trains across a lot more corridors something that's just generally unique to Tokyo and also definitely has something to do with the fact that it is a gigantic City Tokyo's approach has actually been rather uncommon globally though and that's because Mainline trains in most countries tend to be bigger than Metro trains both in terms of their loading gauge but also in terms of how long the trains are Suburban platforms can be really long whereas ones you're building underground in your city center tend to be pressured to be smaller this is particularly true in Europe where many Metro trains are less than 100 meters long compared to East Asia where there are tons of Metro systems that use trains that are close to 200 meters long so in these cases s-bond systems were developed which generally consist of new city center tunnel infrastructure that connects Suburban Railways on one side of a city to another although there are again surface and elevated examples of this such as in Berlin these stations typically have a few widely spaced stations and that's because it tends to be expensive to build stations for huge Suburban trains underneath a city center at the same time lots of roots are funneled into this city center infrastructure to recoup the major investment made by trying to spread the benefits really widely as trained systems have been incredibly successful especially in German speaking and northern European countries but they aren't without their drawbacks espon systems are often heavily oriented towards the suburbs which doesn't seem surprising but what that does mean is that their City Center alignments wayfinding infrastructure and service patterns are often more useful for people in the suburbs than for urban trips the s-bond is just a nice Urban solution to what is fundamentally a Suburban railroad problem and since it's not uncommon in Germany to see four or more services sharing a single tunnel traveling through a city center it's quite common that Individual Services on an s-bond system aren't all that frequent and since there's a tendency on s-bond systems to name routes based on their final destination rather than the shared Urban trunk it can be a bit confusing to figure out what route you should be taking the alternative to this is the Paris rer especially the most famous line the rera which traces the root of the most used metro line in Paris line 1. rera is sort of unlike a lot of other through running Urban rail schemes in that it fully Embraces its high capacity Mainline style trains and speed to create what is truly an Express Urban Subway useful just as much within the city as on its outskirts and perhaps even more so instead of just being an augmentation of the Suburban rail network that makes it easier to use the rera truly takes the Suburban rail connections it has and elevates them to something higher that gets to be part of a much grander Urban scheme now broadly speaking I'd like to say that rer networks tend to have more urban routes than the typical s-bond systems and a lower number of branches that tends to make it easier to use for urban trips now this isn't cheap or easy and requires a major investment into infrastructure you can really see that in Paris where there are currently four Cross City RAR routes more or less and one being built with the re it's a big investment but it has been enormously successful so then the main forms of through running Regional Rail are the Tokyo form where you have individual Rail lines typically paired up with Urban Subways to create a mesh of through running lines that go across the city the German style with the s-bond where you tend to funnel a lot of suburban railroads through a single or perhaps two Cross City tunnels or corridors or the Paris model where you essentially create Mainline capable Urban Express Subways which can then travel out onto Suburban branches to provide a wider range of service now to be clear in some cities a problem arises often because of geography or an unbalanced rail network where more train lines are on one side than another and in this case you need to find a way to run trains into the City and then get them back out quickly without using an inefficient terminal as I talked about before and this is where we introduce lots of Loops a Vestige of the streetcar era but for heavy rail to be clear I'm not talking about the type of rail Loop that travels around the city but the type of loop that allows the train to travel in a balloon shape in the city center and then travel back out on the rails it came in on or at least ones that are nearer to the rails it came in on interestingly Loops are quite common in Oceania with Sydney and Melbourne quite famously having them for their Suburban Railway networks while Auckland and New Zealand is actually building one building a loop more or less turns two lines with traditionally dead ended into the city into one long line that has a kink in the middle and to be perfectly clear this isn't exclusive to English-speaking Island countries there are European systems which have loops for example the Hamburg s-bon which we talked about in a recent video as you might imagine there are other oddballs like Zurich zurich's network is called an s-bomb but it's really not like most other s-bond systems for one counter to the common Mantra that frequency is King many Zurich espan Roots Run only half hourly if not hourly and what's more is that the number work in the city is shockingly chaotic there were tons of very impressive tunnels but all kinds of rail Loops single tracking and other interesting infrastructure that manages to interweave tons of different routes at the same time Zurich is rather unique and rather extensively using double decker trains even ones pulled by locomotives on its s-pont Network and a lot of that is just because the way Switzerland does Railways is different since services are precisely timed to interoperate and connect more different Services can run but each with less service frequency on what often feels like skeletal Railway infrastructure Switzerland basically does minimum viable Railways now the ultimate Suburban rail system in my eyes when you don't just look at size because in that case Tokyo is the Berlin s-bomb to be clear the s-spawn isn't really the quintessential s-bon that might be the Munich espon for example but it is really special it has a cross in the center with two Cross City corridors and a loop known as the ring bond which encircles the central area of the city instead of just having looping trains the ring Bond even plays the role of carrying some of the radial Loops from place to place and because it's been around so long the Berlin espon is tightly integrated into the city's urbanity especially the dense parts of the city surrounded by the ring bomb and yet it has a lot of the espon features like rather low frequency branches connections to the Berlin airport and even at the silly obsession with naming every single different service pattern differently including both directions on the ring Bond having different names so then let's return to the question we had at the very beginning of the video what is the London overground is it an s-spawn well I wouldn't say so indeed the London overground is a mostly surface Railway with some tunnels which is also true of most s-bond systems but when you're trying to categorize and understand Urban rail systems it's more about how trains interact with one another and where they're routed as opposed to what they actually look like because of that the overground you might argue is kind of like like the cbtm in Sao Paulo it's just kind of a collection of lines but the overground is different because it isn't all connected up through the center of London instead it's really just a collection of urban Rail lines that in some ways feels like an extension of the underground into orbital Roots those roots just don't make sense to coalesce into a single City Center tunnel or even onto a number of shared corridors sure the East London line does have some branches but that's all they are branches there isn't a general funneling of all of the overground services across the East London line now you could argue that the Elizabeth line which as I mentioned in my recent overground video uses very similar trains to the overground is kind of like the rer in Paris but that's why I asked the question how is it going to interact with the overground in the long term will there be some degree of service overlap might there someday be overground trains which run through the Elizabeth line or through other City Center rail tunnels perhaps but that's really a question for the future so with that I'd love to your comments down below about what you think the London overground is and thanks for watching [Music] thank you

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 104,416

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, s-bahn, london overground, overground, berlin, paris, paris rer, tokyo, jr rail

Id: E5p6mClrjFY

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023