Comment by fy20
5 years ago
That's the same as on the London Underground, in 2011 they rolled out 30 trains per hour on the Jubilee line and a few years later on the Northern line.
The Jubilee line is 36km long, and each train is 125m [1] so that means there is on average just over a kilometer between each train at 30 trains per hour. That might sound like a lot, but stopping distances of trains are much greater than cars. First of all the trains weigh around 200 tons plus another 70 tons for passengers, and metal on metal doesn't have as much traction as car tires. Even if you could decelerate as fast as a car, everyone standing up is going to end up in a pretty bad shape after that so you need to do it slower. According to someone on StackOverflow passenger trains are designed to decelerate at 1.2m/s2 [2], which at 100km/h gives a stopping distance of 350m.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_1996_Stock
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-a-train-to-c...
The Victoria line is up to 36 trains per hour at peak times now. (And the Moscow metro runs 60 trains per hour, though some have questioned whether their practices would meet western safety standards).
Can you point to a source for the 60 tph in Moscow? I know Moscow/Russia/ex Soviet Union is always mentioned in that context, but the figures usually given are more in the 40 – 45 tph range.
The pinch point limiting capacity on urban railways normally isn't the plain line between stations, though, but rather the stations themselves: It's the combination of dwell times (doors opening, passengers alighting and boarding, doors closing) and platform reoccupation time that determines available capacity.