My New Job (Was: Social Thurs 8 Jan 2009)

[Abigail]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 02:00:54PM +0100, Robin Berjon wrote:
> On Jan 30, 2009, at 12:05 , Abigail wrote:
>>> How long will the journey be once they've finished it ?
>>
>> Eventually, when the trains run at full speed over the entire leg,
>> about 2.5 hours. But I think that initially, if the first trains
>> start running over the high speed line, it'll be around 3h20m.
>
> Is there a vague ETA on those? when I first interviewed with Joost (to  
> work some of the time in Leiden while still residing in Paris) they told 
> me that it was expected Real Soon Now. That must have been in 2006.


Ah, 2006. I think they hadn't figured out then yet the locomotive
maker didn't know about the new signalling system. [*]

I think the current ETA is "Real Soon Now". Of course, in the first
phase, they're just going to *use* the tracks. At 160km/hours. The
300km/hours will be later.

Still, I expect the trains will be driving there before Christmas.
Probably a sooner Christmas the one of perl6.


[*] Hey, you think they wouldn't repeat such a mistake, would you?
    Wrong. Recently, they opened an extension of the 'Betuwelijn'
    (the 'Betuwelijn' is a dedicated high tech freigth connection
    between Rotterdam and Netherlands/Germany border). The extension
    (westwards) was supposed to solve a large bottleneck in the 
    Rotterdam harbour system.

    Except that the signalling system (different from the high speed
    line, IIRC) is a system no locomotive was equipped for. So trains
    now bypass the bottleneck at a crawling speed....



Abigail