Category: Transport

Why trundle at 186 when you can whizz along at 300?

The age of high speed rail finally reaches London on November 14th, when the final section of High Speed 1 – or HS1 to its friends – opens, to complete the link from London to Paris and Brussels. This will cut the travel time to just two and a quarter hours, and even less to Brussels, by allowing high speed operation on the final 39 km of route from near Gravesend in Kent into London. But why have the media missed the opportunity to use even more impressive big numbers?

Continue reading “Why trundle at 186 when you can whizz along at 300?”

Boeing’s Dreamliner – grounded by US units of measurement?

The delay in Boeing’s “787 Dreamliner project” has been widely reported. Now an article in The Seattle Times has given rise to speculation about a link between Boeing’s problems and the units of measurement used in the US.

Continue reading “Boeing’s Dreamliner – grounded by US units of measurement?”

Driver location signs – possibly coming to a motorway near you

Martin Vlietstra, a regular contributor to Metric Views, draws our attention to a trial of driver location signs, to be conducted by the Highways Agency. Martin notes that these signs are metric, and draws attention to the explanation for this. 

Continue reading “Driver location signs – possibly coming to a motorway near you”

Britain’s new Highway Code. Updated but outdated – a victim of the measurement muddle

The new Highway Code is an example of the consequences of the Britain’s measurement system muddle. Its mixture of units from the imperial and metric systems brings confusion, when clarity should be a foremost requirement. The UK Metric Association (UKMA) has looked forward to the completion of the metric changeover, and produced a simplified, metric version of the Highway Code to illustrate the clarity that one system makes possible. (Press release issued on 27 September 2007.) Continue reading “Britain’s new Highway Code. Updated but outdated – a victim of the measurement muddle”

World rail speed record, 574.8 km/h

The world rail speed record was last set on 3 April 2007 by a French TGV train, reaching a speed of 574.8 km/h on a special record-setting attempt on the TGV Est route between Paris and Strasbourg.

This is well above the fastest normal TGV operational speed of 320 km/h and also beats the UK rail speed record of 334.7 km/h, set by a Eurostar train, by a very long way.

At this incredible speed it would take just under an hour to travel the 530 km between London and Edinburgh. In comparison, this route is currently operated by InterCity 225 trains which, although capable of over 225 km/h, are limited by signalling to a top speed of only 200 km/h; only 2/3 of the typical TGV speed and barely 1/3 of this world record!