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Don't feel like the lone ranger, a lot of people don't. Yet, none of them have ridden the TGV and ICE. I have a feeling you might change your mind if you rode the high speed train between Florence and Rome. A lot of winding track and tunnels, but the speed is fast..... Information from Oliver Keating: All high speed lines are fenced off. Indeed in the UK all railway lines are fenced off anyway, however on continental Europe many railway lines are easy to get onto. High speed lines are fenced off for obvious reasons, to eliminate the risk of any animal or people wandering onto the railway line. Note: Germany is the exception to this, high speed lines in Germany are surprisingly unfenced. Foundations for high speed lines are much deeper than conventional railways. Usually a layer of concrete and tarmac is put down (like a road) and then the ballast is put on top. This is to try and stop movements in the ground from affecting the alignment of the railway. The wide spacing between the lines is important because when two trains pass each other the speed difference can be as much as 600km/h or 370mph. If the two trains are too close together this causes at first a burst of air pressure when they first pass and then a drop in pressure during the coaches. Although this isn't enough to pu***he trains off the track, repeated stress on the windows may cause fatigue and mean they break eventually. So for safety reasons two tracks in each direction are placed further apart than on normal lines. Gentle curves are key in what high speed lines are about. Tight curves on TGV lines have a radius of about 3 miles or 5 km. This is large but at speeds near 200mph can be felt. Curves are also banked up a lot more than on conventional lines. This is because slow trains will not run on them and it is extremely rare for a TGV to come to a stop because of a signal. This is noticeable when travelling on TGVs by watching the horizon and seeing it change (just like when on an aircraft). Since the degree of banking is calculated to exactly balance centrifugal forces at running speed the TGV you can detect no changes on the forces on you. Perhaps surprisingly greater gradients are allowed on high speed lines than conventional railways. There are two key reasons for this, first of all modern high speed trains are extremely powerful, TGVs generate as much as 12,000hp, steam engines were no where near as powerful (about 1,000hp) in the era when conventional railways were built. The second reason is that the faster a train travels the less it will slow down for the same rise in height. This is because as it is going fast it takes less time to climb the hill and so gravity has less time to act to slow the train down. Generally speaking engineers try and avoid tunnels on high speed lines. This is because when a train enters a tunnel at speed it causes large pressure changes. This can be painful and harmful to passengers ear drums. A solution was thought to be to pressure seal trains as with the TGV Reseau, however with very high speed trains (300km/h or 186mph) the pressure changes can be so large it can shatter the windows, particularly when two trains pass in opposite directions in a tunnel with a closing speed of 600km/h or 372mph in a confined space. However German and Italian high speed lines include tunnels but they have subsequent speed restrictions.
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