A visual demonstration of FRA weight penalties

While doing a bit of research for a future post, I came across this video of a Hungarian Railways Bombardier Talent accelerating. While shorter than Colorado Railcar's former offerings, it is still broadly comparable (and working in multiple units they should be able to alleviate any passenger capacity shortcomings with negligible acceleration downsides).

Now compare that to the example of the FRA compliant Colorado Railcar as given in the Fairmount DMU study. With two single level multiple units and two trailers, Colorado takes 123 seconds to accelerate to a speed of 60 miles per hour. The Talent, however, has blazed past Colorado, reaching 95 km/h (~60mph) in 40 seconds. Indeed, by the time that Colorado has reached 60 miles per hour, the Bombardier Talent has reached the FRA's normal speed limit of 130 km/h and been cruising at top speed for 50 seconds. Indeed, it reaches 130km/h in just a hair over a mile compared to Colorado's 1.35 miles and by the time that the Colorado Railcar reaches 60 miles per hour, the Talent is 0.8 miles and 20 miles per hour ahead of it.