Tram Trains Are AMAZING | The Karlsruhe Model

few videos have been requested as much and few things have been talked as much about in the comments as tram trains tram trains are a weird and wonderful form of transit that you probably aren't familiar with they've become increasingly popular in recent years but the question is where did they come from and who should actually be building them let's talk about it in today's video [Music] now to truly understand tram trains you have to travel to a small city in germany known as karlsruhe which actually isn't all that far from where my family is from at least half of my family maybe i'm destined to love light rail after all now before i get into the main content of the video i have to give a huge shout out to peter max and julian who provided a ton of photos as well as videos for this video so it should be really visually interesting and who also just provided a ton of great local knowledge they're pretty awesome so thanks so much guys as it turns out a number of videos recently like the one i did in istanbul and some future ones especially ones in europe will also feature viewer provided content and so thank you so much to everyone who's been doing this it actually helps me cover more things in more places which is definitely a goal this year and if you're interested in also helping provide content when i may cover your city in the future follow me on twitter because that's where i typically post about this stuff you can send me a dm if you have something really interesting in your city as well and maybe i can make a video about it no promises but that's the best way to make it happen in the future so let's talk about tram trains now as i mentioned karlsruhe is a small city it's located in southern germany and it has around 300 000 residents which is something you should remember because it will really help put it into context just how small of a european city can have a fantastic transit network i make a lot of noise about the waterloo tram train lrt system in canada because in the context of north america it's a really small region to have an electrified rail system but let's just say that karlsruhe is even smaller than waterloo region and it has a little bit more rail covering it now to be clear the city of karlsruhe has an impressive tram network in its own right there are a total of five different lines over 60 kilometers of track in the built-up urban area and if i'm honest it's a pretty standard tram network standard gauge tracks 750 volt dc electrification all pretty normal stuff and like most european tram networks karlsruhe gives its trams almost 100 dedicated space on the street there's also really lovely stations that are simple but still really attractive and of course there is green track which is everyone's favorite there's also something that you see in a lot of places in europe when a lot of tram routes come together which is these sort of tram hubs where you have a lot of platforms uh next to each other that's something i would really love to see more in places like toronto that while karlsruhe has a great tram network things get downright spicy when you look at the stop on which for the longest time didn't really feel like a shot bond but which now feels like a shotgun so let me explain the karlsruhe stopbond is unique in that it uses trams that can through operate onto the karlsruhe city tram network but which can also serve the mainline railways that travel outside and around the city itself this came to be known as tram train for sort of obvious reasons it's a tram that operates like a train now this practice turned out to be incredibly popular from its introduction in the 1990s which led to karlsruhe building more and more and more tram train lines in a lot of ways this sort of reminds me of the regional rail through running onto the tokyo subway network which i talked about more in this video up here but of course in karlsruhe's case it's using trams instead of subways tokyo is also about a hundred times larger so there's that i'd actually argue too that compared to regional rail and subways there's more difference between mainline railways in europe and trams and so a lot of work to get tram trains to work in karlsruhe was to get trams to work on mainline railways not as easy as you might think at first things actually weren't all that tricky because there were adjacent railways that were either used for freight or electrified using dc power that were fairly easy to roll into the stop-on network but eventually when expansion was hindered largely because the network to the west and the east of karlsruhe belongs to deutsche bahn a lot of changes had to be made so that from both a legal and technical perspective regular old trams well not so regular but trams could operate on that heavy mainline network of course that wasn't easy trams had to be approved for the safety standards of the mainline network but they also had to receive ac power which wasn't simple because especially at the time the equipment for using ac power on trains was fairly large so some early experiments actually went on where parts of trams like the insides where passengers would normally sit were turned over to rectifier units and the like so that the ac power from the overhead lines on main lines could be converted to dc to power the trams if you're not sure about overhead lines ac dc all of this check out my video on how to power your trains up here it's also quite interesting but there are a lot of locations in karlsruhe where the city tram network which is dc power transforms over to the ac national rail network and you have these really interesting mechanisms that allow for that switch over to happen so yeah i think that's quite cool of course the benefit of tram trains wasn't just that they could operate as trams within the center of karlsruhe and as proper trains outside of karlsruhe they could go back to operating as trams again which allowed for a level of urban integration into a lot of small cities that probably wouldn't have been possible with man line rail where you'd be unlikely to push a full main line straight through a city center in like a tunnel or on an elevated viaduct but where that often meant having a station sort of on the outskirts of town but this also meant the network was more convenient with one seat rides from center to center and it could get away with a little less frequency since people didn't need to depend on transfers to be fair as well there's a standardization benefit for a city and region as small as karlsruhe to use something like a tram for basically its entire rail network of course there are longer distance trains that operate with conventional rolling stock but having mainly trams operating everywhere makes things a lot easier because you're building infrastructure mainly for trams and that's a big part of what allows a city like karlsruhe to punch so far above its weight globally with how much transit it has and you'll see shortly going beyond sharing lines the stop-on operator avg actually even acquired some lines for their own use in cases where it wasn't possible to rent space on the tracks now beyond the regular city tram network the karlsruhe stop bond grew to about 13 routes though there are some peak only routes and the likes so the numbers can be a bit fuzzy and the network even connects to other cities with their own small tram train networks which is really quite cool it feels very much parallel to me to that one line in tokyo and i'm forgetting the name which literally operates as regional rail tokyo subway regional rail yokohama subway it's really cool looking at the individual lines s1 and s11 are both entirely dc electrified and they travel from the north through the city to the south s2 is also entirely dc electrified and it travels from east to west meanwhile some routes actually operate entirely on ac tracks which sort of shows you a bit of the standardization benefit that using tram trains had these include the s4 which travels east and the northeast the s5 s51 and s52 which also travel to the northeast the s6 and s7 to the southeast and the s8 straight to the south of course some of these routes are variants of one another where they use different tracks maybe in the city center or maybe outside of the city center you get what i'm saying to make things more complicated there are also tons of other routes in the area including with neighboring cities and regions which again threw operate onto the same tracks that the karlsruhe stop-on trains operate onto and so it can be very hard to distinguish how many lines there are or where the service stops or starts it's kind of a giant mega region all around this area of germany that's all connected up with rail it's really cool but also makes it hard to make videos about now if you thought getting trams to operate on mainline electrification was the whole battle you'd sadly be wrong you see unlike trams mainline trains in germany use this sort of mid-height platform of course i talked more about platform heights in my fundamentals video up here now the different platform heights of the mainline rail network and the modern trams operating on the rest of the network which board from a much lower platform is solved in a sort of inelegant way the dual system trams as they're called which are really the ac and dc powered trams have a higher floor height a sort of mid-level height that aligns with mainline rail platforms on much of the national network but not the entire national network because germany has two main floor heights for its national rail network it gets confusing the way this is solved within karlsruhe tends to be through having a platform which has a raised section for boarding from these mainline compatible trams it's not perfect but it gets the job done and allows level boarding for most services interestingly though since i mentioned germany has two mainline platform height standards in some cases there are actually dual platforms where you'll have a stop-on platform next to a mainline rail platform in cases where the mainline rail platform was higher than the sort of lower level mainline braille platform height again confusing in addition to this since many stops are in these really low density rural areas or in tiny villages there are actually request stops on the network which maybe isn't all that unconventional because it is fundamentally a tram network but maybe more interestingly there are also stops which you can only board from if you indicate to the driver via a switch that you're interested in boarding this is largely due to the high speeds that the network travels on in areas outside of city centers this was really important because as the network expanded parallel bus services were often discontinued as they were no longer necessary with all of the fundamentals locked in in karlsruhe trams from mainline railways are able to through operate onto the city tram network along with the city trams and there are a ton of routes crisscrossing the region as you've seen everything was great at first but then came disaster the system was simply too successful you see with karlsruhe's tram and stop-on services proving so convenient they became very popular and lots of services were run this created issues operating quickly and conveniently through karlsruhe city center which also created safety concerns because the city center like many great city centers in europe is pedestrianized things get even more complicated because through the center of karlsruhe the network is shaped like a t so there are junctions and trams need to switch tracks and it gets tricky when you're operating a ton of tram services through the solution to this a substantial tram tunnel making the network feel like a proper stop bond this is again in the heart of a city of just 300 000 residents now this tunnel was constructed over the last several years and just opened literally right at the end of 2021 after i actually filmed my awards video if you're wondering why it didn't appear there now to be clear not all tram services have been moved underground but the ones that were operating through the central section of the city have been including all of these stop-on services now as you can see these stations in the tunnel are pretty magnificent with their stark white walls and the interesting wire hung lighting fortunately accessibility has been built in from day one and so a portion of the platforms in the tunnels can be used to board part of the mainline capable trams in an accessible way while another part of the platform is fully low floor for boarding low floor trams all in all this is a huge win and a great project to improve and make more consistent what is already a fantastic rail system now all of carlson's success has inspired a lot of other systems paris's tram network which i talked about in a dedicated video that not enough people watched so go check that one out featured a lot of the same issues that carlsrews did especially operating on the mainline sncf network and ac power of course another big hurdle i haven't really mentioned for tram trains is they need to be able to operate quite quickly because mainline trains operate quickly and over mainline distances you're going to want to operate quickly that said tram train routes are something we're seeing more and more of globally and i think the question worth asking is where do they make sense the first thing to recognize is that like lrt tram trains should not be used everywhere the flexibility of tram train systems means they could be really powerful in a small region like say carl's route but in larger regions that flexibility means you're trading off efficiency and the ability to move a lot of passengers which is pretty important furthermore if tram trains are to operate through city centers you have to remember that that city center section can't be too long otherwise the route becomes sort of unattractive for people who might want to just pass through the city center on their way to the other side this is the main difference between say an s-bond and a tram train s-bonds typically have a tunnel or some sort of elevated viaduct or any other kind of dedicated corridor that allows trains to quickly pass through the center tram trains get away with this because in smaller cities and towns it doesn't take too long for a tram to cross now of course karlsruhe has fixed this by digging a city center tunnel but the problem is that if that ends up generating more demand karlsruhe might have to start looking at bigger and bigger trends which can create other problems this is why having a small city is pretty cute that being said tram trains are obviously a great solution for tying together smaller cities and towns and making use of disused or underused rail corridors while an s-bond station might be relatively affordable in the suburbs much like a tram stop in the city center again building an espan tunnel or a dedicated railway is going to be incredibly expensive and that's another benefit of tram trains they can be built affordably which means they are within reach of smaller cities and municipalities and that's where tram trains really shine so with that we have karlsruhe and its magical tram train system let me know in the comments down below where you'd build a tram train system and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 111,076

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, tram, streetcar, light rail, lrt, karlsruhe, karlsruhe stadtbahn, karlsruhe tram, tramway, karlsruhe method, stadtbahn, Germany, tram train, Urban planning, public transport, public transportation, public transit

Id: 9sGHqsD0DRM

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/werfigoka]

Auch"the Karlsruhe Model" genannt, gibt sogar einen Wikipedia. Artikel weil's scheinbar soll besonders ist

[u/made3]

Bauhaus 3x in Karlsruhe sag ich mal

[u/CarlosTheBread]

Komme aus Bayern und bin so hin und weg von dem öffentlichen Nahverkehr den wir hier ham. Mache jedesmal Tram Propaganda am Esstisch wenn ich bei meinen Eltern bin.