High speed rail requires a metric ass-load of power to continuously fight wind resistance and keep the train moving. Diesels aren’t as efficient as they’d need to be to produce enough power to run a HSR train in the size we want those trains to be.
We absolutely could design a diesel-electric HSR locomotive. It’d be a fuck-off huge landwhale of a train with a generator that would make an ocean-going supercarrier blush guzzling enough fuel to run a thousand traditional diesel trains, but it’d run!
But using the track gauge and vehicle length restrictions we have, diesel just can’t make the power needs required for high speeds.
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