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That's quite a good Google translation, by Google standards!

Yes, they used to own half of the company through a company called Tognum. Mercedes had the other half and sold out to RR a few years ago.

£25m for 140 power packs. Granted a power pack includes a Voith transmission, a conventional ZF automatic or an alternator and associated bits according to taste, but £175,000 odd per unit seems an impressive amount of money for a truck sized engine with some off the shelf add ons.

Don't know about high speed, but otherwise in daily use.

Their last trip in France was Dec 2004 on the Lyons- Bordeaux route by which time only a few were left. They were replaced by loco hauled trains which increased the journey time by an hour or so, partially because they had to change direction repeatedly. Interestingly the last five were sold...

The French used several varieties of the Turbo Train which Wiki will tell you all about. They had a pair of helicopter gas turbines but turned out to be far too thirsty so they got the bright idea of replacing one of the engines with a bigger and thirstier one. Why? Because they could then use...

Just take the CDG Val shuttle train (no driver!) to terminal 3 and buy an RER ticket from one of the many machines. They talk English. The ticket includes one metro journey using as many lines as you need so don't throw it away. Then just go down to the platforms. All trains go to Paris. Oh, and...

A diesel with 50-60% efficiency would be a wonderful thing to have! Huge two stroke marine diesels achieve a little over 50% but road and rail going ones would do well to get into the mid 40s.

Indeed, but the nearly 38% efficiency of AC motors is described as being something of a good thing. That's still dreadful.

18% efficiency is an impressively dreadful figure. So you're saying that ignoring other power losses along the way a 1,000 bhp engine will only get 180 bhp to the wheels in a DC diesel electric? Why does anyone make the things if they're that bad?

For reasons unknown the very idea of these units, which seem an interesting and potentially useful idea to me, seems to inspire loathing in some quarters.