Yes, that's the class 800/801/802 trains. Everything in the railways is expensive, because not very many are made and the consequences of failure (even of a driver's seat!) are considered rather high. So I assume that 40k will be amortising the analysis and design costs across not very many seats. (Not actually our area of course, our particular team is looking at the electrification infrastructure rather than the trains themselves.)


Personally I find the seats in the carriages of these trains much more uncomfortable than the old HSTs, but my wife finds them much more comfortable. So just goes to show what a pain it is trying to please everyone in engineering design. However, since my wife's back is a reasonable shape for a human being and mine...isn't, maybe Hitachi have got it about right.


When I talk to school children about engineering I currently use the example of a rail pedestrian crossing protection system I'm currently involved with - I start by setting the scene of a crossing where at the moment all the crossing user has is a pair of gates and a sign that tells them to look and listen before crossing (which is one of our biggest remaining risk areas on the UK rail network). We then work through solutions, and the first solutions they come up with are always a bridge or a tunnel: very sensible, just separate the people from the trains. It is quite entertaining the answers I get when I ask them to guess how much each of those would cost...no-one has yet got it within a factor of 10 of the actual cost, and typically a factor of 100 out.


Cheers,


Andy

Yes, that's the class 800/801/802 trains. Everything in the railways is expensive, because not very many are made and the consequences of failure (even of a driver's seat!) are considered rather high. So I assume that 40k will be amortising the analysis and design costs across not very many seats. (Not actually our area of course, our particular team is looking at the electrification infrastructure rather than the trains themselves.)


Personally I find the seats in the carriages of these trains much more uncomfortable than the old HSTs, but my wife finds them much more comfortable. So just goes to show what a pain it is trying to please everyone in engineering design. However, since my wife's back is a reasonable shape for a human being and mine...isn't, maybe Hitachi have got it about right.


When I talk to school children about engineering I currently use the example of a rail pedestrian crossing protection system I'm currently involved with - I start by setting the scene of a crossing where at the moment all the crossing user has is a pair of gates and a sign that tells them to look and listen before crossing (which is one of our biggest remaining risk areas on the UK rail network). We then work through solutions, and the first solutions they come up with are always a bridge or a tunnel: very sensible, just separate the people from the trains. It is quite entertaining the answers I get when I ask them to guess how much each of those would cost...no-one has yet got it within a factor of 10 of the actual cost, and typically a factor of 100 out.


Cheers,


Andy