Trains in Anime - Arcane Season 2
As you may have heard, the second season of Arcane is out. Arcane is a complex and amazing show about love and loss, about power and class, about friends and family, about playing god and being god. It’s amazing, it’s beautiful, it’s heartbreaking, it’s an ad for a game you should never ever play, it sets the benchmark for what animation can be and do in this decade and beyond.
But most importantly, it has trains. Let's talk about them.
Prison Train
Apart from a few new angles on the funicular we already know from season 1 and some mine carts, there are two interesting train-like thingies in this season. The first one appears in episode 4 and is used to bring prisoners and main characters to the prison island. And it's weird.
Individual train cars run on two parallel lines of… something, with an overhead line ostensibly providing electric power (there are sparks from it). The running lines are not directly supported by anything, they run between pillars in the sea, and there, they're placed on some roller structures.
The main thing that gets me about this is structural. Are these ropes or steel beams? Either way, why don't they bend?
It's easy to say this is wrong and just move on, but it's more interesting to think of ways this system can make sense.
Personally, I choose to interpret it as a variation of the Aerobus design.
Picture: Rowema AG, CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Aerobes is a classic gadgetbahn, a thing where an inventor said, "trains are boring, let's do a new thing that's exactly the same but proprietary, untested and less practical". In this case, it was a Swiss aerial cable car designer who came up with it. The design is that the train cars run on either two parallel steel beams or cables that are above it, and that are themselves suspended in the air. The resulting thing doesn't look too different from e.g. the Wuppertal Schwebebahn or similar systems (not that there are many), but with a much lighter infrastructure based mostly on steel ropes. Two commercial lines were built in the 1970s, one in Québec that lasted surprisingly long, one in Mannheim, Germany, for an exhibition, and that was where it stopped.
With the weird roller thing, I'm choosing to interpret this prison transport system as a similar thing. In this case the carrying rails/ropes are underneath the vehicle, but that doesn't change much. The vehicle is probably self-propelled and the rollers are just there to deal with heat expansion. I'll assume it's some magic steel so the wires don't move perceptibly as the vehicles pass over it. The vehicles themselves are only run singly, never as trains, presumably to avoid overloading the system.
There are two vehicles, one with a ramp, one with doors that open outwards. It's possible that this represents the totality of that system. Somewhat unusually for a prison train, the system is fully automated and can be used easily by escaped prisoners and by bloodthirsty alchemical monsters trying to break in. It looks cool though.
Intermodal transport
The other rail thing I want to talk comes at the end of the show, episode 9, and here Netflix really screws me over. It was basically impossible to take screenshots, even though it worked just fine for episode 4. They ended up crazy blurry, of the wrong moment, whatever. I've been making use of Fancaps.net, whose collection is exhaustive, but sadly they tend to focus more on important character moments and cool stuff and less on rail infrastructure. So please excuse the wall of text.
At that point in the show a big invasion is happening, and our heroes are trying to defend themselves. One of the means they have is an innovative form of multimodal container transport. The shipping container is brought to the loading station by rail. From there, it is lifted by magic, through a magic gate… and then fired at high speed at the enemies. Fun!
The shipping container and the flat car are both designed to be a bit fantastical, not a direct copy of our modern world, and I can respect that, even though I don't know how these angle brackets are actually supposed to hold the container in place.
But then… look at that truck. Or bogie. I'd give you a better angle but Netflix insisted on making it blurry. Hell, I'll give it to you anyway.
Ignore the foreground, that's just characters frantically trying to save someone's life. What's important is the railroad truck. And as you can sort of see, that's clearly a Y25!
Okay, back up a bit, let me explain. So most rail vehicles have four axles. To go around corners easily, these are not directly attached to the main body. Instead two axles in the front and two in the back are attached to a special frame that can swivel and pivot; the truck or bogie. I think one of these terms may be British and the other North American, but as someone who is neither, I don't actually know, as far as I can tell both are in use.
As the part that holds and guides the axles, provides most of the suspension, takes all of the shocks that the suspension can't, holds braking equipment and propulsion equipment, the bogie of a train is super important. There is a lot of research and development in that area, with designs being constantly refined and improved.
Except when it comes to freight cars. For freight cars, there are two bogies: The French one, used in Europe (excluding the former Soviet Union, probably Finland, and for the UK it's difficult), and the American one, used everywhere else.
This division isn't quite accurate, but it's accurate enough. It's not a law by any means, people keep inventing new trucks for freight cars all the time. But they rarely get sold much. The standard designs are good enough, they get produced in large numbers for cheap, and since they're so standardised, if you use them, you can skip a significant number of steps the approvals process that otherwise come with inventing a new type of rail vehicle.
I am somewhat lying here, in that both the French and the American design are actually large families with many different types, and I assume in particular American rail fans will be angry when I say all their bogies look the same to me… but I'm correct anyway, sorry.
I don't have any good pictures of the American style, so have one from a model railroad car instead:
These are known as Bettendorf-style or sometimes "three piece bogie", their central part is that they have two side frames that hold the axle ends, and one central bolster connecting them. The springs are between the side parts, the bolster isn't directly fixed to them. Rides well on rough tracks, which is why you'll sometimes, rarely, see them on maintenance of way equipment in Europe (although generally beefier versions of the same design. Same in the US).
In contrast, the French version is the Y25.
It also consists of one bolster and two side frames. However, it also usually has additional relatively weak parts at the front and end. The bolster is fixed to the side frames, but it's designed to flex in itself. The springs are between the side frames and the wheel bearings. A characteristic part for the standard type is the "belly" between the wheels, and the hole in there.
Arcane is made by Fortiche, Fortiche are French, and thus their rail car gets a Y25. They spaced it up a little, and in the course removed the suspension and brakes and added a plate over the hole where the central bolster attaches, but it's still clearly a Y25 type bogie.
The rest of the track is a bit weird. The train car doesn't have flanges, instead it runs in grooves in the ground. It's also unclear how it's moved there; it seems to be some kind of winch (you need to turn a handle really hard or push the train car with superpowers). Most importantly, it's unclear why someone built a container delivery railway to the top of the city's tallest tower in the first place. But I am absolutely delighted by the Y25 freight car bogie there.
If you are interested in the wide world of freight car bogies, and you speak German, I strongly recommend Drehgestelle.de, a delightfully old-fashioned website by a single guy who really cares very much. He charts the history of the Y25, the Bettendorf bogie, the earlier Diamond bogie, the German counterpart to the Y25 that used to be popular until it got outlawed, and all the various weird other things that have been tried.
All in all, a good show, I can recommend it.
