All those recent fixes of trains encouraged me to rework eurostar roling stock, as there seem to be some issues with it, of which some will need discussion.
Eurostar e300 is designed to be a very long train of at least in the real world, and the whole power is put on 6 bogies (4 of the power heads and 2 on first and last cars "usual" bogie.
Planned and desired changes in short:
- shorten the car bodies of intermediate cars of e300, so a 20 car set (387m) is as long as 13 tiles (390m)
- lengthen e320 cars, so a 16 car set (390m) is as long as 13 tiles (390m)
- move some part of e300s power from the power heads to the first and last car
- eventually add an unpowered first and last car to e300
- restrict possible configurations of e320 to what is possible to order in the real-world.
- add a first class car to the e320, currently only the power heads are fixed to 1st class.
- cost balancing of e300 and e320.
- validation of technical data, incuding air resistance.
In detail:
car length: shortening e300 should be rather simple, as blends are available, although I suspect car lenghth calculations could strike here again.
lengthening e320 is desired but the blends don't seem to be available, so I suspect we'll have to accept cars to be roughly 1.875m too short.
Moving parts of the power to the first and last car: originally, the e300 has 6 powered bogies (2 powered axles each), of which 4 are underneath the power head whilst the remaining are on the usual bogie of the first and last car. Moving this adds up a little to realism and will allow us more economic short trains.
Restricting configurations to what could be oredered in the real-world:
e300 is part of the TGV family, which usually does not have aditional powered axles on the first and last car and is usually only half as long. The long variant, instead of a pair of shorter trains was mainly is due to channel tunnels security concept. This is not a technical restriction, so I'd add another unpowered first and last car to allow for more cost-effective short trains and with recombination system in mind, also allow two power heads to couple to each other for portion working, as very ferquently done with TGVs in france.
e320 is part of the Velaro family, which is extremely flexible. I'll simply list options that Siemens claims to be possible according to
this Siemens paper Following numbers are always related to the "standard setup" of 8 cars, if not explicitly stated.
Number of cars: 7, 8, 10, 12, 16
Seating and comfort: fully customisable as the whole interior, they list 510 seating/304 standing as "standard" and 596 seating as high-density.
vMax: 320 km/h AC, 250 km/h DC, up to 360 km/h possible.
Power: 8 MW, up to 11 MW
Further, apart from the 7 car configuration, half of the cars are powered. At least in 8 and 16 car configurations, the remaining cars have a pantograph.
I'd suggest to allow 7, 8, 10, 12 and 16 car configurations, allowing them to operate coupled in pairs.
Further, the 360 km/h 11MW option seems very interessting and might be used as a reasonable placeholder for HS2 rolling stock in the near future.
I'd set the seating capacities according to what Eurostart had actually ordered, as adding further variants will blow the depot window.
By default, the Velaro is equipped for two electrification systems, but Siemens seems to only offer overhead electrification types, thus it is arguable if we want them to be defined as multi electrification or not.
Cost balancing:
Currently, e320 got exactly twice the cost per poerkilometer of e300, which must be an error. Combined with 50% more power, this results in tripled costs per kilometer.
I'd rather expect e320s cost per powerkilometer to be slightly below e300, because it's a highly efficiency optimised and 20 years newer.
I'll have to figure out if e300s cost is excessively low or e320s cost is excessively high in any case, before balancing these to each other.
It would bre great if the balancing spreadheed would still be somewhere out there, which made this task much easyer.
Validation of technical data:
The usual stuff. Power, forces, weights, vMax and so on. Power and vMax seems to be fine, the others will need some tweaking.
In adition to the usual technical data, I'll put some reseach on air resistance.
The Velaro is 20 years newer and within that time Velaro platform was greatly optimised aerodynamically and at its first introduction already slightly more aerodynamic than a usual TGV of that time. Later on air resiatance was reduced by a further 20%.
On the other hand, the e300 is not an usual TGV, as it has a different shape and generally a smaller loading gauge, reducing aerodynamics either.
So hard to tell this without absolute numbers or a direct comparisation.