They travel 200 mph and they don’t take off. Do they create downforce? How much downforce?
In: 1
Yes, they create downforce. It’s called “gravity”.
Seriously, these things are heavy. And they don’t really have any lift-generating surfaces. So there’s no risk of them taking off.
F1 cars, to name an example, do have this risk because they are light and flat. Because they are flat, there’s a risk that the bottom of the car can become a big wing, if at any point the nose of the car tilts too far upward (e.g. if the car was going up a slight incline or a gust of wind got underneath), or if somehow you shaped the car like an airfoil (and thus created lift through Bernoulli’s principle). And because they are so light, it doesn’t take much lift to overcome gravity.
Trains, however, are not flat, so there’s no risk that their overall shape is going to act like a wing. And it would take very big wings to lift a train. Even if train cars were built to airplane-like densities (which they aren’t), consider that a 747’s wingspan is roughly equal to its length. And then consider that high-speed trains are typically hundreds of meters long. That gives you some idea of the total area of lift-generating surfaces that would be required to get a train to take off.
Latest Answers