We copied 1960 technology, declared it revolutionary and act as if we invented it all
The Apple Way.
Just wow… So if you look closely at the picture, you can barely see the number ‘563’ on the train. If you have a look at list of locomotives and railbuses iof DB on Wikipedia, you can see that this train is a Siemens Mireo.
Now, let’s take the headline apart. Is it the first all-electric trai… no! Is it the first accumulator train? Also no, as you can see in the list above, the class 515 exists and the Stadler Flirt Akku has been used on a line since October 2023, Is it the first Siemens Mireo Plus B being used? You guess what, nope. As an example, SWEG is using some of them to bridge non-electrified parts of the track since April 2024.
So finally, what is special about the Gigatrain? (gosh, I actually really dislike that name) In February 2024, the subsidary ‘Smart Train Lease GmbH’ of Siemens Mobility has been announced. There you can also lease two Siemens Mireo Plus Bs. Tesla is their very first client. That’s it
Whoops, got longer as expected. In case I made small mistakes, feel free to point it out
So. It’s Teslas first train. That they bought?
True innovators
That they leased
Train nerds are a weird bunch.
Please never change.
Also if you read the article, it becomes clear that they just copy and pasted the entire thing from a tesla fanboy Blog. It’s this one: https://www.teslarati.com/teslas-all-electric-giga-train-in-germany-takes-first-trip/
I mean, I haven’t seen a “Giga Train” before. Maybe it is the world’s first.
Now I’m imagining the deal between Tesla and Siemens:
Siemens guy: alright Mr Musk, just sign these papers and the mireo will be leased to your company
Elon (in 8 year old voice): woo! I made a Giga train! Choo Choo!
Siemens guy: umm, okay… As I said, the train is a Siemens Mireo. Hopefully this lease agreement will benefit both of our companies
Elon: nuh uh! It’s a Giga train and I invented it! Nobody ever had anything like this for getting around before!
The logo on the front is from the NEB, Niederbarnimer Eisenbahn AG, which runs in German province’s of Berlin and Brandenburg. No way in hell the Muskrat MAGAT is going to build trains.
Apparently it runs from his battery factory and they provided batteries because the overhead line doesn’t run that far. That’s it. Everything else is normal German electric train.
They aren’t saying it’s the first electric train, they are saying it’s the first all electric “Giga Train”.
It’s like how Bros kept trying to imply it was the first gay movie, or even first gay romcom, but it was the first gay romcom that was created and released by a major studio whose initial release was a “wide” release in more than one country.
It’s also just an outright lie. But, I guess that doesn’t matter anymore.
Yeah, it’s not all electric, some of the train is just regular matter
Wait until you learn how molecular bonds work…
this is the internet I don’t learn
The founding principle behind chatGPT.
You could learn this internet if you decided to.
dont make me tap the sign
I did a little digging and it seems like there’s a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn’t need frequent all-day service, even if it’s a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they’ve got doing “editing” at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into “world-first electric wonder train amazes!”
For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to “disrupt” it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.
I guess if by a kernel of truth you mean an existing train was used on an existing track, then you could almost make it make sense? But since all of this existed before, it’s just a lie.
I’ll also point out that anybody introducing battery electric trains instead of just electrifying the remaining parts of rail is making an astoundingly bad choice, but that’s almost certainly Germany and not Tesla.
it’s the Mireo Plus B from siemens. it’s already in use in the north of germany since march of this year.
https://www.nordbahn.de/blog/so-isses/der-norden-begruesst-die-akku-zuege/there’s nothing elon about this train, just that it’s driving to his factory.
they are great for short distances that are difficult to electrify.
The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.
“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”
That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?
lol. They’re promoting their employee shuttle. Classic Felon.
Well I mean, it IS a step up from my current jobs policy which is “Yes you need a car to get here, no we arent providing one and if you don’t have one you don’t have a job”
Generally, I’m against violence towards journalists - but dishonest and manipulative headlines like this tend to make me reconsider my stance, if but for a moment.
Hype over fake news like this is one major reason how tesla’s stock price has gotten as high as it has.
Based on this dumpster fire of a headline, I think the take-away can only be that Siemens and other train manufacturers have to start calling their trains “OMEGA RAIL” and “CHUNGUS 3000” or shit like that so it’s worth a news article.
I’d ride the CHUNGUS 3000.
Crap, now I have to change all my passwords.
What the… this is so infuriating to a railfan. It’s like they are trying to attach a 2x viewer multiplier by putting Elon-related keyword in it when Tesla has so little to do with it.
It’s not a Tesla train, nor a battery from Tesla, nor operated by Tesla, not even a new route (but granted an expanded timetable)
I wish media hyped trains like this in general and not limited to implicitly attributing it to Musk (who made hyperloop specifically to distract from High Speed Rail, mind you)… “GIGA TRAIN brings commuters to work”, “Hyper train first electric regional service in California - you won’t believe the capacity!”
Now, imagine this revolutionary improvement: Find a way of putting the energy source outside of the train somehow, and save on weight by not hauling those heavy batteries around.
Christ, the amount of times techbros and tesla fanboys have accidentally “invented” trains and trams these past few years is beyond stupid…
Well a battery electric train is probably useful for those routes with a section that isn’t powered.
Not sure if it would be awfully cleaner than a diesel electric train, because those are already pretty efficient as I understand it.
If you’re already laying tracks, why not lay electricity as well?
Because there already are tracks without electricity where I live. When coming from a nearby major city by me, the train has to stop for 40 minutes while they switch from an electric to diesel power car. Same process while taking a train into the city, switching from diesel to electric.
I’m not a rail expert, but I thought for some reason that rails without electricity would be too old/unmaintained to be allowed to serve passenger traffic, lol.
40 minutes? I would have imagined that everyone would hop off at the station, they’d then drive out to a parking junction, and then drive back the electric train to the station for people to load in again. Isn’t it also very expensive to take the train (you’re from the US I assume)? Not weird that no one wants to take it when it’s in such bad situations :/
There are definitely use cases for battery-electric trains:
- We have these in Germany usually in areas with low traffic. E.g. if a train line is only serviced a couple of times a day, it’s more cost-effective to carry the batteries with you than to electrify the line.
- Another use case are train ferries. They are the reason why Germany also had Diesel-powered high-speed trains for a while.
- Another challenge in Europe is the lack of harmonization of power supplies of train lines between countries. In cross-border traffic, trains have to be adapted to work with different energy supplies. Battery-electric trains can add flexibility for these scenarios. E.g. Germany uses AC 15 kV 16.7Hz, the Netherlands DC 1.5 kV on low-speed and AC 25 kV 50Hz on high-speed lines. When a train goes from the Netherlands to Germany, it disconnects from the Dutch system and reconnects to the German system on the fly. For a moment in between, the train loses power. If the train lacks momentum or has to stop unexpectedly, the train is stranded and has to be pushed over the border by another train that is independent of the power supply.
Is this like how Apple invented the headphones?
And tablets
And touchscreens
And Mp3 players
And Bluetooth earbuds
And small form factor PC stacks
God the list just keeps going. At least with them the marketing is annoying but the products are usually good. Instead of Elon promising the moon and delivering a pile of dog shit.
NO WAY! Did they just copy the Siemens Mireo and made it a double decker
It looks even more obvious in the German version of the site where the first picture is literally this one:
Edit:
Now that I have taken a closer look I question if the “Tesla” train is even a double decker or actually the Mireo
Edit 2:
And I am unsure if Yahoo just used a random train as their cover or if this is the Tesla train in question. I am so confused O.o
Edit 3:
Soo it’s not a double decker and it is “Tesla’s train” sooo… If I was Tesla I’d get back to the drawing board because I doubt Siemens will be happy with what they did here
From the industry journal I linked in another comment – it’s literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That’s it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it’s serving a spur line connecting Tesla’s factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.
That’s literally the train I use everything I get to uni (and back).
I think I see you in the window there, mate.
