Hello,
i would be glad if a high speed tunnel could be added for the late game (>1985) as the fastest tunnel only permits 160 km/h.
Is there such a thing as a high speed tunnel in reality?
Oh yes, James, of course there are!
For instance Tunnel de Saverne in France to cross Les Vosges between Baudrecourt and Strasbourg at the Eastern part of the LGV Est Européenne is build for a regular speed of 320 km/h.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_de_Saverne
And the even longer Schulwaldtunnel at the SFS Köln-Frankfurt can be used with a regular speed of 300 km/h.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulwaldtunnel
And for an earlier example, the 10 km long Landrückentunnel at the SFS Hannover-Würzburg was started 1981 and finished 1988 and has a regular speed of 250 km/h.
The much shorter Pfingstbergtunnel near Mannheim was build even earlier: between 1976 and 1985 and has the same speed limit.
...and this is only a random list of the ones i have in mind right now. I bet that Japan and France had Tunnel at the same speed limits even earlier.
Oh and by the way: Not only Tunnels, but also switches are available for high speed rails. Today's new build switches have a speed limit up to 200 km/h for teeing (!) trains. And this limit doesn't require any tilting functionalities of the train.
So for instance in everyday use at the station Bitterfeld at the route between Berlin--Halle (Saale) with the teeing to --Leipzig.
Switches with a high speed between 160km/h and 200km/h for the teeing ast are constructed and in use since 1984 here.
In 1960's switches had a speed limit of 130 km/h at the new build station of Ludwigshafen.
(Ehm, this is just a short summary of this wikipedia article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenbahnweiche )
...To make it short, i guess that the speed limits in simutrans for tunnels and switches are too low and this especially matters on high speed routes from the 1980's until today.
Interesting - I was not aware of those. It is noteworthy that there are no UK precedents for this, which is why these tunnels may well not be in Pak128.Britain. I have moved the topic to the general (rather than the Experimental specific) Pak128.Britain board for further discussion.
Okay. How about those Tunnels and Switches at the HS1?
Hmm, interesting: I had not thought of that. This would need new graphics, I think.
I think that the Severn Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel both have such low speed limits due to them being under-water tunnels with special conditions and issues associated therewith necessitating a more limited speed (as well as the mixed-traffic, I presume). I know some of the rather lengthy tunnels on new high-speed lines in China have speed limits of 350km/h.
(The in-game Maglev had its speed limit throttled a while ago to a very low level as I recall, 200km/h.)
Hang on - there are already 350km/h HS tunnels in the game - or at least there should be. Can you give more details?
Hello,
sure:
I am using the half height branch from here:
https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-pak128.britain/tree/half-heights
together with simutrans experimental:
https://github.com/pipcet/simutrans-experimental/tree/berlin
The fastest tunnel is shown ingame as "RailTunnelHighSpeed" and has the named maximum speed of 160km/h.
If you give me the file name of the 350-Tunnel i can search within the file directory wether it exists here or not.
Greetings
Are these in Standard but not in Experimental? If so, I shall have to port them.
They have been in Standard for about 5 years (or more) I think!
It's very unlikely that they are absent specifically from Experimental, in that case.
They are definitely in Standard (nightly and latest release). I notice that Experimental has different tunnel definitions to Standard though. The one labelled "High Speed" is 350km/h in Standard but only 160km/h in Exp.