10 ms·

Cargo sous terrain – Underground cargo train in Switzerland

116 points by sschueller 5y ago

noxer 5y ago
I hope they use it to transport garbage or stuff to recycle with any free capacity. All the diesel trucks that just move garbage around is such a waste of resources.
Arnt 5y ago
https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ makes it sound as if they're trying to build small-diameter tunnels like the Boring Company, but using the strengths of the format much more cleverly. The lack of humans means that they can build tunnels with fewer escape routes and almost without regard to ventilation, the centrally coordinated 30km/h speed ought to be cheaper than building for the kinds of speeds one must expect from individual drivers.
- aaron695 5y ago
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  I think your ventilation notion is wrong because intensive use of this infrastructure will mean many, many electric motors generating heat. There will also be refrigerated cars, furthering the problem. Having said that, I strongly suspect that they've incorporated the ventilation solution already. >they're trying to build small-diameter tunnels like the Boring Company, but using the strengths of the format much more cleverly. Agreed. It's scarcely possible to use tunnels less cleverly than by putting large, single-occupant vehicles through them.
  - Arnt 5y ago
    Ventilating well enough to cope with electric motors sounds much less demanding than coping with having both combusion engines and humans in the tunnels. Not to mention letting the humans escape alive in case a vehicle crashes and burns.
    - moralestapia 5y ago
      Yup. "Must be safe for humans" always shifts the costs an order of magnitude.
    - arinlen 5y ago
      > Ventilating well enough to cope with electric motors sounds much less demanding than coping with having both combusion engines and humans in the tunnel. You will always have humans in the tunnel. How do you plan to perform inspections, maintenance, and even emergency support when a cart breaks down and blocks your tunnel?
      - hwillis 5y ago
        The acceptable conditions for "workers in the tunnel performing regular maintenance" and "a continuous stream of random people" are pretty different. Probably >10x less requirement for fresh air when >100x fewer people are breathing it. Ambient humidity might be lower, and even if it isn't the temperature only has to be workable rather than comfortable or at ambient. Worst case, you could shut everything down and let it cool off before sending people in. Certain emergencies would also be much easier to handle without people, like nitrogen purging a fire. Realistically I don't think you'd want to shut down the whole tunnel and wait for hours when you need to fix a problem, but it might work if there aren't many problems. It might work for routine maintenance if it's utilized like most packing facilities- deliveries go out in waves, with packing etc in between.
      - robonerd 5y ago
        > How do you plan to perform inspections, maintenance, and even emergency support when a cart breaks down and blocks your tunnel? With pigs of course. Not the ones that go oink though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      The London Underground actually has a heat problem despite using electric propulsion. Most of the heat in that situation comes from braking.
  - Valgrim 5y ago
    I'm not sure heat is such a problem. The movement of the cargo provides ample ventilation, the surrounding soil has a great thermal mass, and in the worst case it's easier to pump coolant through a pipe than to ensure a breathable, non-toxic atmosphere at all time.
  - hwillis 5y ago
    a 95% efficient electric motor is still creating 15x less heat than a diesel engine, and zero carbon dioxide. Traffic will carry out hot air, heat will leave through the tunnel walls, and convection will also carry out heat. At the very least it is a MUCH less relevant issue.
    - koolba 5y ago
      And any cargo container that requires stricter temperature tolerances itself be better insulated and refrigerated. That’s already how standard containers pulled by 18-wheelers operate.
      - hwillis 5y ago
        OP's point with refrigerated containers is that they are large sources of heat (since creating a cold volume heats up the external volume by a larger amount), not that they are more vulnerable to heat in the tunnel.
        ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        Only if they run their heat pumps inside the tunnel. If they pre-chill and coast through the tunnel they'd extract heat. Overall it seems like a non problem with many solutions if any are actually needed.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    People act like Boring tunnel are designed to only ever allow single Tesla threw. They did that because Tesla are available for them quickly. Do you really think those peope are to stupid to understand that higher occupency can increase threwput?
- snickerbockers 5y ago
  what happens when something goes wrong (or just needs scheduled maintenance) and they have to send a team down to work on it? are the workers going to need scuba gear to breathe?
  - jcrawfordor 5y ago
    My guess would be portable ventilation equipment - already commonly used for maintenance access to underground utility infrastructure. They will probably need to provide access to the tunnels from above at reasonably frequent intervals for maintenance access (e.g. to "unstick" disabled vehicles) but since these wouldn't be used for evacuation of more than a small number of people requirements would be very relaxed. The same accesses would serve to run blower ducts when work is being performed, and workers would wear gas monitors. This is all pretty standard for telecoms tunnels, sewers, etc. Safety evacuation requirements are also easier to meet when you limit tunnel access to a trained workforce under a permit system, compared to a situation where you have the general public in the tunnels. Emergency rebreathers, for example, can become part of your plan. A higher level of safety can be assured for workers since a permit system means that a control center will have positive accountability of everyone in harm's way.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Exactly. Miners have an elaborate safety setup that doesn't have to be anywhere near what passenger tunnels have, because the miners can be trained and react to the situations as necessary, whereas the best you can hope for passengers is they remember the safety briefing and how to exit the vehicle quickly.
      - bobthepanda 5y ago
        Also, miners can be told to wait in a safety area with supplies stocked for the very predictable amount of miners, and so can go a longer without extraction. Obviously you still want to extract them as quickly as possible but it’s easier to manage.
  - hwillis 5y ago
- arinlen 5y ago
  > https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ makes it sound as if they're trying to build small-diameter tunnels like the Boring Company, but using the strengths of the format much more cleverly. This is ancient technology, literally over a century old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway No need to name-drop the Boring Company, as it's just a marketing company who bought a COTS tunneler. Nothing that this company presented was novel. The critical aspect of putting together an railway network through tunnels is a) it's collosal construction and maintenance costs, b) property rights. The numbers of putting together a tunnel network hardly add up, and ultimately projects fail because there is no way to make the numbers work unless you expect to fleece local and central governments. It's also quite strange that CST's marketing brochure does not mention at all two of the main solutions to p2p logistics in urban environment: hub and spoke model with the last mile delivered with small electric cars/scooters/bicycles (Amazon already employs this heavily), and drones.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    > as it's just a marketing company who bought a COTS tunneler. You mean a marketing company that built their own tunneler, surely. The one they originally bought isn't being used anymore, as far as I know.
    - robonerd 5y ago
      They have two now apparently, one in California and one in Texas. But public information on these is sparse, I've not been able to find out much about them. This seems uncharacteristic for an Elon Musk company; Musk and SpaceX talk at length about their rockets for instance. There is a different level of public interest between rockets and boring, which might explain why there is more public information about the rockets. Still, I'm not surprised people are skeptical (or ignorant to the existence) of these bores.
      - sandworm101 5y ago
        >> There is a different level of public interest between rockets and boring Or the simple practicalities of the later. I'm a member of the public. What I know of the boring project comes from the youtube videos of the traffic jams in the current Vegas tesla tunnel project. Building an underground tunnel to bypass above-ground traffic problems worked only on the Simpsons (Stonecutter episode). In the real world such tunnels are just another 1-lane road subject to all the same problems as they would on the surface, plus a bunch of bonus problems. It isn't interesting because it isn't practical.
- numtel 5y ago
  It's closer to what Magway is doing in Britain https://www.magway.com/ https://www.magway.com/
QuarterReptile 5y ago
This reminds me of when they opened the Gotthard Base Tunnel maybe 5 years ago. It replaced an old mountain railway that connected the North and South ends of the country, and did so at great expense connecting by a straight tunnel that made the route much faster. It takes an incredibly prosperous and stable place to make achieve that increment of improvement. And this feels like more of that same story. I envy them greatly. The US should be building 5-10 copies of this same system in various regions, connected by a functioning freight rail system for long haul. Our diffuse development pattern and the enormous accompanying expense will be our downfall.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  > It takes an incredibly prosperous and stable place to make achieve that increment of improvement. fwiw, the Italy and Austra (with EU contribution) are building a similar in the same mountain range a few km eastwards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    I have very little knowledge of Italy or Austria (pretty little of Switzerland, for that matter), but I gather that Italy can reasonably be understood as a very stable place in exactly the opposite way that the US is stable. Italian places seem very stable, but the wider governance is not enduring, whereas much of the US is held together by a strong national government despite the fact that the places are constantly in flux with most places built cheaply and not for permanence. Also, it presumably required EU funds to push the project through. My read of GBT and this new CST system is that both are private ventures. That is to say, I take the Swiss projects to be at the tail end of careful analysis, whereas the others may be the result of political desire absent a compelling business case, sort of like trying to make rail transit work in Southern California.
    - seszett 5y ago
      > My read of GBT and this new CST system is that both are private ventures The Gotthard Base Tunnel was built for the national Swiss railway company, which is fully state-owned. CST seems to be private, although among the largest investors are three state-owned companies (La Poste, Swisscom and the Swiss railway company). These kind of projects today are always largely funded with public funds in Europe (including outside the EU). It is simply not realistic or desirable to leave them to private entities.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The big competitor to this is autonomous EV trucks. I'm surprised that hasn't got more attention. Seems like a game changer.
- jhugo 5y ago
  One goal of a project like this is to reduce the number of trucks on the road, which reduce quality of life for people living near and using the roads, regardless of what powers them.
- cloudify 5y ago
  Probably because EV trucks would need to go through the current Brenner motorway, that is a very trafficked road, from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass#Motorway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass#Motorway ): The ever-increasing freight and leisure traffic, however, has been causing long traffic jams at busy times even without border enforcements. The Brenner Pass is the only major mountain pass within the area; other nearby alternatives are footpaths across higher mountains at an altitude of above 2,000 metres (6,600 feet). As a result, air and noise pollution have generated heavy debate in regional and European politics. As of 2004, about 1.8 million trucks crossed the Europa Bridge per year.
  - nick238 5y ago
    There's an alternative to only on motorways and never on motorways: sometimes on motorways. 90% of the time you can use ordinary roads, with autonomous driving acting like a normal truck, giving the meat bags plenty of space. The most congested 10% you can build restricted access paths only for your smart trucks where they can act more like a train, with minimal spacing, increasing the traffic capacity of the road/tunnel/bridge/whatever so the extra cost of constructing it pays off sooner and/or it's cheaper in the first place because it's not built for drivers so doesn't need to be as safe.
- roydivision 5y ago
  My thought as well, trucks will always be more flexible, using existing road infra. It’s hard to see how tunnelling is a better idea, cool as it sounds.
Markoff 5y ago
Not a train, it doesn't have railway tracks, even on website they call it "vehicle" since it has regular wheels. Also they PLAN to start operation in 2031, which is so far it might as well never happen.
- markvdb 5y ago
  Swiss time, not Musk time. Sorry, couldn't resist.
- sschueller 5y ago
  The Gotthard Base Tunnel was voted on in 1992 and work started in 1999. It was finished 2016. Switzerland plans very long ahead into the future even for local transportation systems. A lot of time is invested in planning which pays out big time in the end. This project is under evaluation in some Cantons (St. Gallen and Thurgau) for viability and may never be completed.
  - Markoff 5y ago
    Gotthard tunnel was just regular tunnel, not trying to reinvent the wheel with new kind of vehicle
scarier 5y ago
I’m always amazed every time someone tried really hard to invent new technology that’s just a worse train. I love the overall concept, but damn they’re making it way more complicated than it needs to be.
- go_elmo 5y ago
  have you factored in the cost of human labor in your judgement? I mean swiss-level salaries. Thats 4k+ usd / month for retail workers. Thats what makes autonomous infrastructure cheaper in the long run than having anyone loading anything on an already overcrowded train net.
  - scarier 5y ago
    The issue isn’t how automated it is— it’s easy to automate trains and automatically load pallets. Making each car responsible for autonomous navigation in two dimensions and self-loading becomes a much more complicated engineering problem.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    More like 7-8k/month if you count true employer's expenses on average employee for persons operating & maintaining complex machineries/connected IT systems.
- folkrav 5y ago
  How is this a worse train?
  - scarier 5y ago
    Because it needs far more complicated and expensive cars for no real benefit.
    - ddalex 5y ago
      The benefit is the modularity - trains don't solve the last mile problem, individually router containers on autonomous drives do.
graupel 5y ago
Reminds me of the 2' wide electric trains that moved cargo under the Chicago loop for many years: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/under-your-feet/chicagos-freight-tunnels/ https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/under-your-feet...
- griffinkelly 5y ago
  I have a friend of mine who works for the city and he's been able to go into the tunnels. He was working on a big repair project on one because it flooded--they were sealing it and pumping the water out.
rosetremiere 5y ago
Anyone knows the relation with the swissmetro project (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro though it very much reads like an ad) ?
- andbberger 5y ago
  neither will ever happen
lom 5y ago
This is dumb. Another one of those trains but less-efficient and more costly. Digging tunnels is expensive, even more so across an entire country. Taking out ventilation or escape routes will cut the price, yes - but not enough. And what if something happens inside the tunnel, batteries aren’t famed for their incombustibility…
- mschuster91 5y ago
  It's Switzerland, tunnels there always have the secondary use of being usable as bunkers in a war. Also... it's Switzerland, half the country is mountains. These guys know how to build tunnels for cheap, if anyone can scale this to being cheap enough it's them.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Im concurring with you and dissenting with lom. Switzerland is very mountainous that trains laid on the surface will actually be a very very stupid proposition, with active gearing and such and with reduced cargo weight to match. Yes, they have indeed perfected trains on rugged slopes, but only because back then tunneling is a very slow and manual operation that it's not economically and technologically feasible. Lom would be right if the mountains are gentler slopes, but I think lom haven't visited the Alps and appreciate the problem. In this case, the tunnels are actually a far better and more economical solution than overground trains.
    - stardenburden 5y ago
      Interesting perspective. I have been to the Alps several times, and do realize how limiting it can be. That's the reason the CBT and Gotthard base Tunnel is so important and plays such a central role. The problems start there, upgrading these two massive pieces of infrastructure to support these new types of trains (also note the vendor lock in through novel systems) would be costly and probably not possible without delays for current freight.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Trains are great, but are losing out to trucks, so I think there's a lot of promise in "trains, but small" approaches, even if none of them have taken off so far. Manual access is a concern, but from what I can tell the vehicles are powered by induction instead of batteries. The cargo might be the bigger fire risk.
exabrial 5y ago
Ah I see: poke holes in the ground, much like Swiss cheese.
paganel 5y ago
Even more things consumed won't help with climate change, quite the contrary, otherwise nice little project.
astrobe_ 5y ago
For those learning French who might be puzzled by the spelling, the correct french word for something underground is "souterrain" (it is also a noun for an underground tunnel). Probably they chose that spelling to suggest that it is not cargo buried underground, or something illegal (there's that meaning too, like "underground economy": économie souterraine).
marstall 5y ago
cooler and more sensible notion of underground transit than that promoted by mr musk!
mrsuprawsm 5y ago
Building new trains is always great, but I'm curious why they chose to go for what appears to be a small loading gauge, thus preventing them from using shipping containers. I was under the impression that containerisation and palletization of cargo leads to huge efficiencies, but surely this setup would require much more labour-intensive (or machine-intensive) loading and unloading than just slapping a shipping container on a rail-car?
Animats 5y ago
This is very strange. Long distance tunnels for small cargoes. Now, doing that under a city might make sense. Chicago had a system like that.[1] There was dense coverage under downtown Chicago, with most streets tunneled and connections to many buildings. But this was before trucks. It was a solution to the "last mile" problem, getting goods from the railroad stations to business buildings. The costs of unpacking big trucks or freight cars to put things in small containers would dominate the transportation cost. Manhattan has that problem. There's a whole industry that unloads tractor-trailers in New Jersey and repacks the contents onto smaller trucks for delivery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company
- rtkwe 5y ago
  This could move packages and mail easily. Those are already containerized, packed and repacked multiple times as they move through the mail system. Larger shipments could be palletized to a form that fits inside these vehicles and be quickly moved too.
kkfx 5y ago
I'm always skeptical to such big-infra projects for a reason: they are not flexible. We design something today that will be ready after more than a decade on scale hoping to have correctly projected future needs. Surely trains are very efficient and commercial-only on-rail transports for non perishable/non urgent goods can ALSO run on renewable when there is enough energy also stabilizing the grid and leaving perhaps a side channel for perishable/urgent goods, a thing no other practical means can do BUT they are still not flexible. We design a network hoping that in a decade and for more decades it will be useful to pay it back. That's why I'm for air and water transports: a plane/chopper/drone a ship/sub/* can go anywhere on air/water, we all needs infra on departure and arrivals places. They cost more in operational terms, but they are flexible and cost far less in infra terms. Development of "flying cars/taxis" and "new cheap ships" seems to prove that such line of thoughts have various advocates. Surely that scale only in a distributed and not that densely populated world, are we heading to a mass genocide perhaps?
kortilla 5y ago
Is there a way for a train geek to score a ride on a cargo train with the engineer?
andbberger 5y ago
just as dumb as all of the other 'definitely not a train' startups, but what makes this one particularly funny is that switzerland already has the best freight rail system in the world.
fuzzythinker 5y ago
This is a much better video than the marketing one they post on the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11X-zMF_pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11X-zMF_pc (Non-English, use subtitle)

116 points by sschueller 5y ago

I hope they use it to transport garbage or stuff to recycle with any free capacity. All the diesel trucks that just move garbage around is such a waste of resources.

Arnt 5y ago

https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ makes it sound as if they're trying to build small-diameter tunnels like the Boring Company, but using the strengths of the format much more cleverly. The lack of humans means that they can build tunnels with fewer escape routes and almost without regard to ventilation, the centrally coordinated 30km/h speed ought to be cheaper than building for the kinds of speeds one must expect from individual drivers.

aaron695 5y ago
QuarterReptile 5y ago
I think your ventilation notion is wrong because intensive use of this infrastructure will mean many, many electric motors generating heat. There will also be refrigerated cars, furthering the problem. Having said that, I strongly suspect that they've incorporated the ventilation solution already. >they're trying to build small-diameter tunnels like the Boring Company, but using the strengths of the format much more cleverly. Agreed. It's scarcely possible to use tunnels less cleverly than by putting large, single-occupant vehicles through them.
- Arnt 5y ago
  Ventilating well enough to cope with electric motors sounds much less demanding than coping with having both combusion engines and humans in the tunnels. Not to mention letting the humans escape alive in case a vehicle crashes and burns.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    Yup. "Must be safe for humans" always shifts the costs an order of magnitude.
  - arinlen 5y ago
    > Ventilating well enough to cope with electric motors sounds much less demanding than coping with having both combusion engines and humans in the tunnel. You will always have humans in the tunnel. How do you plan to perform inspections, maintenance, and even emergency support when a cart breaks down and blocks your tunnel?
    - hwillis 5y ago
      The acceptable conditions for "workers in the tunnel performing regular maintenance" and "a continuous stream of random people" are pretty different. Probably >10x less requirement for fresh air when >100x fewer people are breathing it. Ambient humidity might be lower, and even if it isn't the temperature only has to be workable rather than comfortable or at ambient. Worst case, you could shut everything down and let it cool off before sending people in. Certain emergencies would also be much easier to handle without people, like nitrogen purging a fire. Realistically I don't think you'd want to shut down the whole tunnel and wait for hours when you need to fix a problem, but it might work if there aren't many problems. It might work for routine maintenance if it's utilized like most packing facilities- deliveries go out in waves, with packing etc in between.
    - robonerd 5y ago
      > How do you plan to perform inspections, maintenance, and even emergency support when a cart breaks down and blocks your tunnel? With pigs of course. Not the ones that go oink though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    The London Underground actually has a heat problem despite using electric propulsion. Most of the heat in that situation comes from braking.
- Valgrim 5y ago
  I'm not sure heat is such a problem. The movement of the cargo provides ample ventilation, the surrounding soil has a great thermal mass, and in the worst case it's easier to pump coolant through a pipe than to ensure a breathable, non-toxic atmosphere at all time.
- hwillis 5y ago
  a 95% efficient electric motor is still creating 15x less heat than a diesel engine, and zero carbon dioxide. Traffic will carry out hot air, heat will leave through the tunnel walls, and convection will also carry out heat. At the very least it is a MUCH less relevant issue.
  - koolba 5y ago
    And any cargo container that requires stricter temperature tolerances itself be better insulated and refrigerated. That’s already how standard containers pulled by 18-wheelers operate.
    - hwillis 5y ago
      OP's point with refrigerated containers is that they are large sources of heat (since creating a cold volume heats up the external volume by a larger amount), not that they are more vulnerable to heat in the tunnel.
      - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        Only if they run their heat pumps inside the tunnel. If they pre-chill and coast through the tunnel they'd extract heat. Overall it seems like a non problem with many solutions if any are actually needed.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  People act like Boring tunnel are designed to only ever allow single Tesla threw. They did that because Tesla are available for them quickly. Do you really think those peope are to stupid to understand that higher occupency can increase threwput?
snickerbockers 5y ago
what happens when something goes wrong (or just needs scheduled maintenance) and they have to send a team down to work on it? are the workers going to need scuba gear to breathe?
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  My guess would be portable ventilation equipment - already commonly used for maintenance access to underground utility infrastructure. They will probably need to provide access to the tunnels from above at reasonably frequent intervals for maintenance access (e.g. to "unstick" disabled vehicles) but since these wouldn't be used for evacuation of more than a small number of people requirements would be very relaxed. The same accesses would serve to run blower ducts when work is being performed, and workers would wear gas monitors. This is all pretty standard for telecoms tunnels, sewers, etc. Safety evacuation requirements are also easier to meet when you limit tunnel access to a trained workforce under a permit system, compared to a situation where you have the general public in the tunnels. Emergency rebreathers, for example, can become part of your plan. A higher level of safety can be assured for workers since a permit system means that a control center will have positive accountability of everyone in harm's way.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Exactly. Miners have an elaborate safety setup that doesn't have to be anywhere near what passenger tunnels have, because the miners can be trained and react to the situations as necessary, whereas the best you can hope for passengers is they remember the safety briefing and how to exit the vehicle quickly.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      Also, miners can be told to wait in a safety area with supplies stocked for the very predictable amount of miners, and so can go a longer without extraction. Obviously you still want to extract them as quickly as possible but it’s easier to manage.
- hwillis 5y ago
arinlen 5y ago
> https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ https://www.cst.ch/en/what-is-cst/ makes it sound as if they're trying to build small-diameter tunnels like the Boring Company, but using the strengths of the format much more cleverly. This is ancient technology, literally over a century old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway No need to name-drop the Boring Company, as it's just a marketing company who bought a COTS tunneler. Nothing that this company presented was novel. The critical aspect of putting together an railway network through tunnels is a) it's collosal construction and maintenance costs, b) property rights. The numbers of putting together a tunnel network hardly add up, and ultimately projects fail because there is no way to make the numbers work unless you expect to fleece local and central governments. It's also quite strange that CST's marketing brochure does not mention at all two of the main solutions to p2p logistics in urban environment: hub and spoke model with the last mile delivered with small electric cars/scooters/bicycles (Amazon already employs this heavily), and drones.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > as it's just a marketing company who bought a COTS tunneler. You mean a marketing company that built their own tunneler, surely. The one they originally bought isn't being used anymore, as far as I know.
  - robonerd 5y ago
    They have two now apparently, one in California and one in Texas. But public information on these is sparse, I've not been able to find out much about them. This seems uncharacteristic for an Elon Musk company; Musk and SpaceX talk at length about their rockets for instance. There is a different level of public interest between rockets and boring, which might explain why there is more public information about the rockets. Still, I'm not surprised people are skeptical (or ignorant to the existence) of these bores.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      >> There is a different level of public interest between rockets and boring Or the simple practicalities of the later. I'm a member of the public. What I know of the boring project comes from the youtube videos of the traffic jams in the current Vegas tesla tunnel project. Building an underground tunnel to bypass above-ground traffic problems worked only on the Simpsons (Stonecutter episode). In the real world such tunnels are just another 1-lane road subject to all the same problems as they would on the surface, plus a bunch of bonus problems. It isn't interesting because it isn't practical.
numtel 5y ago
It's closer to what Magway is doing in Britain https://www.magway.com/ https://www.magway.com/

QuarterReptile 5y ago

This reminds me of when they opened the Gotthard Base Tunnel maybe 5 years ago. It replaced an old mountain railway that connected the North and South ends of the country, and did so at great expense connecting by a straight tunnel that made the route much faster. It takes an incredibly prosperous and stable place to make achieve that increment of improvement. And this feels like more of that same story. I envy them greatly. The US should be building 5-10 copies of this same system in various regions, connected by a functioning freight rail system for long haul. Our diffuse development pattern and the enormous accompanying expense will be our downfall.

ithkuil 5y ago
> It takes an incredibly prosperous and stable place to make achieve that increment of improvement. fwiw, the Italy and Austra (with EU contribution) are building a similar in the same mountain range a few km eastwards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  I have very little knowledge of Italy or Austria (pretty little of Switzerland, for that matter), but I gather that Italy can reasonably be understood as a very stable place in exactly the opposite way that the US is stable. Italian places seem very stable, but the wider governance is not enduring, whereas much of the US is held together by a strong national government despite the fact that the places are constantly in flux with most places built cheaply and not for permanence. Also, it presumably required EU funds to push the project through. My read of GBT and this new CST system is that both are private ventures. That is to say, I take the Swiss projects to be at the tail end of careful analysis, whereas the others may be the result of political desire absent a compelling business case, sort of like trying to make rail transit work in Southern California.
  - seszett 5y ago
    > My read of GBT and this new CST system is that both are private ventures The Gotthard Base Tunnel was built for the national Swiss railway company, which is fully state-owned. CST seems to be private, although among the largest investors are three state-owned companies (La Poste, Swisscom and the Swiss railway company). These kind of projects today are always largely funded with public funds in Europe (including outside the EU). It is simply not realistic or desirable to leave them to private entities.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

The big competitor to this is autonomous EV trucks. I'm surprised that hasn't got more attention. Seems like a game changer.

jhugo 5y ago
One goal of a project like this is to reduce the number of trucks on the road, which reduce quality of life for people living near and using the roads, regardless of what powers them.
cloudify 5y ago
Probably because EV trucks would need to go through the current Brenner motorway, that is a very trafficked road, from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass#Motorway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass#Motorway ): The ever-increasing freight and leisure traffic, however, has been causing long traffic jams at busy times even without border enforcements. The Brenner Pass is the only major mountain pass within the area; other nearby alternatives are footpaths across higher mountains at an altitude of above 2,000 metres (6,600 feet). As a result, air and noise pollution have generated heavy debate in regional and European politics. As of 2004, about 1.8 million trucks crossed the Europa Bridge per year.
- nick238 5y ago
  There's an alternative to only on motorways and never on motorways: sometimes on motorways. 90% of the time you can use ordinary roads, with autonomous driving acting like a normal truck, giving the meat bags plenty of space. The most congested 10% you can build restricted access paths only for your smart trucks where they can act more like a train, with minimal spacing, increasing the traffic capacity of the road/tunnel/bridge/whatever so the extra cost of constructing it pays off sooner and/or it's cheaper in the first place because it's not built for drivers so doesn't need to be as safe.
roydivision 5y ago
My thought as well, trucks will always be more flexible, using existing road infra. It’s hard to see how tunnelling is a better idea, cool as it sounds.

Markoff 5y ago

Not a train, it doesn't have railway tracks, even on website they call it "vehicle" since it has regular wheels. Also they PLAN to start operation in 2031, which is so far it might as well never happen.

markvdb 5y ago
Swiss time, not Musk time. Sorry, couldn't resist.
sschueller 5y ago
The Gotthard Base Tunnel was voted on in 1992 and work started in 1999. It was finished 2016. Switzerland plans very long ahead into the future even for local transportation systems. A lot of time is invested in planning which pays out big time in the end. This project is under evaluation in some Cantons (St. Gallen and Thurgau) for viability and may never be completed.
- Markoff 5y ago
  Gotthard tunnel was just regular tunnel, not trying to reinvent the wheel with new kind of vehicle

scarier 5y ago

I’m always amazed every time someone tried really hard to invent new technology that’s just a worse train. I love the overall concept, but damn they’re making it way more complicated than it needs to be.

go_elmo 5y ago
have you factored in the cost of human labor in your judgement? I mean swiss-level salaries. Thats 4k+ usd / month for retail workers. Thats what makes autonomous infrastructure cheaper in the long run than having anyone loading anything on an already overcrowded train net.
- scarier 5y ago
  The issue isn’t how automated it is— it’s easy to automate trains and automatically load pallets. Making each car responsible for autonomous navigation in two dimensions and self-loading becomes a much more complicated engineering problem.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  More like 7-8k/month if you count true employer's expenses on average employee for persons operating & maintaining complex machineries/connected IT systems.
folkrav 5y ago
How is this a worse train?
- scarier 5y ago
  Because it needs far more complicated and expensive cars for no real benefit.
  - ddalex 5y ago
    The benefit is the modularity - trains don't solve the last mile problem, individually router containers on autonomous drives do.

graupel 5y ago

Reminds me of the 2' wide electric trains that moved cargo under the Chicago loop for many years: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/under-your-feet/chicagos-freight-tunnels/ https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/under-your-feet...

griffinkelly 5y ago
I have a friend of mine who works for the city and he's been able to go into the tunnels. He was working on a big repair project on one because it flooded--they were sealing it and pumping the water out.

rosetremiere 5y ago

Anyone knows the relation with the swissmetro project (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro though it very much reads like an ad) ?

andbberger 5y ago
neither will ever happen

lom 5y ago

This is dumb. Another one of those trains but less-efficient and more costly. Digging tunnels is expensive, even more so across an entire country. Taking out ventilation or escape routes will cut the price, yes - but not enough. And what if something happens inside the tunnel, batteries aren’t famed for their incombustibility…

mschuster91 5y ago
It's Switzerland, tunnels there always have the secondary use of being usable as bunkers in a war. Also... it's Switzerland, half the country is mountains. These guys know how to build tunnels for cheap, if anyone can scale this to being cheap enough it's them.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Im concurring with you and dissenting with lom. Switzerland is very mountainous that trains laid on the surface will actually be a very very stupid proposition, with active gearing and such and with reduced cargo weight to match. Yes, they have indeed perfected trains on rugged slopes, but only because back then tunneling is a very slow and manual operation that it's not economically and technologically feasible. Lom would be right if the mountains are gentler slopes, but I think lom haven't visited the Alps and appreciate the problem. In this case, the tunnels are actually a far better and more economical solution than overground trains.
  - stardenburden 5y ago
    Interesting perspective. I have been to the Alps several times, and do realize how limiting it can be. That's the reason the CBT and Gotthard base Tunnel is so important and plays such a central role. The problems start there, upgrading these two massive pieces of infrastructure to support these new types of trains (also note the vendor lock in through novel systems) would be costly and probably not possible without delays for current freight.
wongarsu 5y ago
Trains are great, but are losing out to trucks, so I think there's a lot of promise in "trains, but small" approaches, even if none of them have taken off so far. Manual access is a concern, but from what I can tell the vehicles are powered by induction instead of batteries. The cargo might be the bigger fire risk.

exabrial 5y ago

Ah I see: poke holes in the ground, much like Swiss cheese.

paganel 5y ago

Even more things consumed won't help with climate change, quite the contrary, otherwise nice little project.

astrobe_ 5y ago

For those learning French who might be puzzled by the spelling, the correct french word for something underground is "souterrain" (it is also a noun for an underground tunnel). Probably they chose that spelling to suggest that it is not cargo buried underground, or something illegal (there's that meaning too, like "underground economy": économie souterraine).

marstall 5y ago

cooler and more sensible notion of underground transit than that promoted by mr musk!

mrsuprawsm 5y ago

Building new trains is always great, but I'm curious why they chose to go for what appears to be a small loading gauge, thus preventing them from using shipping containers. I was under the impression that containerisation and palletization of cargo leads to huge efficiencies, but surely this setup would require much more labour-intensive (or machine-intensive) loading and unloading than just slapping a shipping container on a rail-car?

Animats 5y ago

This is very strange. Long distance tunnels for small cargoes. Now, doing that under a city might make sense. Chicago had a system like that.[1] There was dense coverage under downtown Chicago, with most streets tunneled and connections to many buildings. But this was before trucks. It was a solution to the "last mile" problem, getting goods from the railroad stations to business buildings. The costs of unpacking big trucks or freight cars to put things in small containers would dominate the transportation cost. Manhattan has that problem. There's a whole industry that unloads tractor-trailers in New Jersey and repacks the contents onto smaller trucks for delivery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

rtkwe 5y ago
This could move packages and mail easily. Those are already containerized, packed and repacked multiple times as they move through the mail system. Larger shipments could be palletized to a form that fits inside these vehicles and be quickly moved too.

kkfx 5y ago

I'm always skeptical to such big-infra projects for a reason: they are not flexible. We design something today that will be ready after more than a decade on scale hoping to have correctly projected future needs. Surely trains are very efficient and commercial-only on-rail transports for non perishable/non urgent goods can ALSO run on renewable when there is enough energy also stabilizing the grid and leaving perhaps a side channel for perishable/urgent goods, a thing no other practical means can do BUT they are still not flexible. We design a network hoping that in a decade and for more decades it will be useful to pay it back. That's why I'm for air and water transports: a plane/chopper/drone a ship/sub/* can go anywhere on air/water, we all needs infra on departure and arrivals places. They cost more in operational terms, but they are flexible and cost far less in infra terms. Development of "flying cars/taxis" and "new cheap ships" seems to prove that such line of thoughts have various advocates. Surely that scale only in a distributed and not that densely populated world, are we heading to a mass genocide perhaps?

kortilla 5y ago

Is there a way for a train geek to score a ride on a cargo train with the engineer?

andbberger 5y ago

just as dumb as all of the other 'definitely not a train' startups, but what makes this one particularly funny is that switzerland already has the best freight rail system in the world.

fuzzythinker 5y ago

This is a much better video than the marketing one they post on the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11X-zMF_pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11X-zMF_pc (Non-English, use subtitle)