keyboardkat wrote:Please forgive my ignorance but what does CBTC stand for? The last two letters are probably for "Train Control." Is it "Computer Based Train Control"? And what's wrong with real, live human train crews?Communications Based Train Control, also known as the moving block system. in short, human crews will still be at the controls monitoring and ready to take over in case of failure, but this system will help to reduce headways, increase speed, and increase line capacity.
Railroad Forums
R160's
- Discussion relating to the past and present operations of the NYC Subway, PATH, and Staten Island Railway (SIRT).
Moderator: GirlOnTheTrain
The Alstom cars have this weird "piccolo music" carrier wave sound that seems to play a tune, but doesn't seem to have relationship to motor speed or braking.The Alstom and Breda rehab cars in Washington, DC and the Alstom cars in Warsaw, Poland also have that carrier wave sound that you mention. It seems the majority of Alstom based motors have it but never understood what it does or why the motors do that.
Gotta love Alstom. Every year on opening day of hunting season, it is a paid holiday! 
tommyboy6181 wrote:The sounds heard are just the result of the frequency at which the AC current is being delivered to the motors by the IGBT inverters. certain designs seem to favor smooth frequency increases with intertwined phase changes, while others (alstom) tend to sport choppy phase changes and frequency plateaus.The Alstom cars have this weird "piccolo music" carrier wave sound that seems to play a tune, but doesn't seem to have relationship to motor speed or braking.The Alstom and Breda rehab cars in Washington, DC and the Alstom cars in Warsaw, Poland also have that carrier wave sound that you mention. It seems the majority of Alstom based motors have it but never understood what it does or why the motors do that.
if you listen carefully to the alstom propulsion, you can still hear the traction motors accelerating with the typical rolling sound behind the IGBT inverter whine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWb9-rA6Du8
Head-end View wrote:I actually like the R-160 despite the full-width cab. Now that they're running extensively on the F line, I rode them the other day over the Smith-9th St. viaduct. What's interesting is even though the cab door window is dark/blurry glass, you can reasonably see thru it outside the tunnels in daylight. (The glass is half full for now at least, unlike PATH's new cars) And it's a nice car in general. Good interior colors somewhat reminiscent of the R-40/42's when they were new 40 years ago. I wish they would have gone with transverse seating like the R-44/46's. And the electronic route/progress maps are a great feature, but I wonder if they will be kept in-service for the life of the cars. I can easily see them breaking down in a few years and not getting fixed and eventually getting covered over with cenventional paper strip maps.I also like them as well, with the NT stuff equipped, it's just like the MBTA's Red Line 01800s of Bombardier, and the R160 RFW is fine too, as long as motorpersonnel don't keep on puttin' newspaper clippings or ad posters (they put the latter on the MBTA 01800s RFW)
