Trains accelerate incredibly slowly and often have a single gear that is optimised for high speed. Similar to trying to pull away in your car in too high of a gear this makes trains really slow and takes along time for them to hit their high speed.
Most cars will often have 4 (for very old cars) – 6 gears to keep acceleration smooth and fast whilst still being efficient at high speed but trains don’t.
I get that electric motors have all of the torque available at low RPMs whilst ICE only have full power at a high rpm but wouldn’t gears still allow trains to get to higher speeds quicker?
In: Engineering
The electric trains around here definitely have more than one gear – or at least something that *sounds* like gears. Perhaps the sound is something to do with switching electrical circuits for a similar effect, rather than actually changing the gear ratio, though…
I wish I could find a youtube video or something of them to share, but would you believe, people don’t seem to upload many videos of naff trains leaving stations 😛
EDIT: not a great sound recording (lots of background noise and there’s a diesel at the same time) but you can year the whine of the electric motor rising then cutting to a lower pitch and rising again several times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQu-nu3tbKU I tried counting how many “gears” the trains around here have a few times and it’s at least double figures of that sawtooth pitch thing…
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