Creel: Mixing passenger and freight trains risks derailment due to curve physics
Keith Creel · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · Nov 29, 2022 · at 9:55
Keith Creel, CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway, explains the engineering limitations of running high-speed passenger trains on North American freight rail tracks.
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“You have to super elevate curves. So for a passenger train to go fast around a curve, which the curves are out in, in the geography you elevate the outer rail, and you drop down the inner rail, and it's sort of, you know, as inertia carries, carries you around the curve, you use that geometry to be able to accomplish that speed safely for passengers. If you mix that with a freight train that by nature has to move slower around that curve, you're putting a ton of weight on that low rail, and that low rail effectively will open up the gauge and allow a train to drop in, so there's a balance between the two, and that's the reason a lot of conflict occurs between passenger, mixing passenger and freight.”
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