>Trains used to go up to 55mph with no systemic problems.
During the age of steam, express passenger trains regularly exceeded 55 mph. For example, during the 1930s the Burlington Zephyr regularly exceeded 85 mph. For example it made the Chicago to Denver run in 1934 in 13 hours rather than the 18 hrs it takes today.
Realistically speaking, you are talking about two different use cases here.
A long distance train benefits from very high top speeds, because it spends a lot of time at those top speeds. Conversely, increasing the high speed of a subway train is subject to the law of diminishing returns, since the train has to comfortably accelerate and decelerate within the span of half a mile. With subways, the main concern is that every single train operates in pretty much the exact same manner WRT acceleration, deceleration, and speed, since the headways on subways can be measured in minutes, or even seconds.
This makes me sad about missed potential. I've taken the ski train from Central London to the French Alps - was great. With high speed rail it should be possible to get a 8hr overnight train from Chicago (or Dallas & Houston) to Winter Park CO. I'm guessing it'll never happen
Running the ski train in Europe makes sense because it's leveraging high speed rail that was built and is mostly used for other things; very little new stuff was needed.
Chicago-Denver, as a city pair, is so sparsely populated and so far apart that new HSR doesn't pencil out, nor does building it out incrementally (it's hard to justify KC to Denver or Omaha to Denver)
The original rail network was on par with airplanes in terms of relative improvement of speed of travel. The highway network did the same for travel to areas unlikely to ever get a rail connection. (There aren't that many sparsely populated countries with a rail connection to every town; even fairly dense countries don't manage this.)
In today's world, HSR fills a very specific market niche; planes are much faster for long distances due to higher speed and small requirements for land acquisition, and cars are just as competitive for short distances due to the last-mile problem. So I don't think it's reasonable to connect every possible city pair in the US with HSR, but rather it's much better to just build strong regional networks of HSR that work on their own. There's no reason to build a continent-spanning HSR network.
The parent is talking about subway "trains" (sets of coaches, with each car having its own small electric engines, all powered by a common third rail); not, er, train trains (vehicles that pull themselves along two rails using a locomotive.)
High speed aside, in the UK, i think pretty much all inner and outer suburban main-line trains are electric or diesel multiple units (eg if you get a train from London to Cambridge that takes 45 minutes, that's an EMU). According to some random report i found on wikipedia [1], in 2011 there were 1248 locomotive-hauled carriages, 2892 DMU carriages, and 8046 EMU carriages. I could tell you a great many more particulars but suppose that you are tired of it by this time.
Loco hauled are very rare - HSTs from the 70s mainly being replaced on GWR mainline, a little use on WCML and cross country 2 or 3 sets?) and I think the east coast does them too. And Eurostar of course.
Aside from those it's freight and the sleepers isn't it?
If you're counting HSTs then everything on the east coast, plus great Eastern main line, the sleepers, East Midlands HSTs, Chilterns trains, 4 xc sets, the new transpennine sets that are being built, a few Cumbrian coast services, and within a few weeks the great western pocket rocket HSTs and the scotrail ones. Less popular than they used to be, but very rare is overstating it a bit
During the age of steam, express passenger trains regularly exceeded 55 mph. For example, during the 1930s the Burlington Zephyr regularly exceeded 85 mph. For example it made the Chicago to Denver run in 1934 in 13 hours rather than the 18 hrs it takes today.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/05/stop_th...