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So I did some math. A railroad based on concrete sleepers would use about 265 m³ of concrete per track mile. Thus, were the North East Corridor fully 4 tracked

So I did some math. A railroad based on concrete sleepers would use about 265 m³ of concrete per track mile. Thus, were the North East Corridor fully 4 tracked and used concrete instead of wooden ties, it would consume about 50,000 m³ of concrete. A single airport runway at a major airport consumes about 55,000 m³ of concrete. That's more concrete than the entire trackage of an entire major rail line. Sure, there's a lot I'm not accounting for, but... railroad station infrastructure is far smaller than airport terminal infrastructure. And there's another dozen major airport runways worth of concrete to chew through, and I haven't even started tallying up the taxiways or terminal pads or staging areas, etc. I doubt there's enough viaducts, bridges, and tunnels along the railroad to make up all that extra concrete.

kkfx 4y ago
That's not the math I mean, that's the math of comparing a single railroad with some large airports hubs. Try comparing a sparse Riviera where most activities are remote or local, so at a very short range, typically with cars on 20km radius, and some other small activities are made by STOL witch do not demand much of airport, just a surface, a grass one is not the best but still work, the taxiways just a path to a space where you can park not differently than a car parking lot. The non-local part can be served by water (when possible) or by rails from a small hub to another depending on the territory. In such setup you still have commercial transports but people ones are FAR different than now, so the relative infra is far different. Since roads are mostly for short range activities there are no large viaduct, bridges, tunnels because there are no highways, no big cities to serve and so on. There are rail stations, harbors, sure, but FAR little than the actual large ones because there is no need to concentrate the network. In IT terms: did you remember the evolution from mainframe to clusters? Well does clusters demand more resources than mainframes? Are them concentrated? Networks in general have a common set of properties from roads to LAN/MAN/WAN passing through biological "networks", try the math in such terms.

kkfx 4y ago

That's not the math I mean, that's the math of comparing a single railroad with some large airports hubs. Try comparing a sparse Riviera where most activities are remote or local, so at a very short range, typically with cars on 20km radius, and some other small activities are made by STOL witch do not demand much of airport, just a surface, a grass one is not the best but still work, the taxiways just a path to a space where you can park not differently than a car parking lot. The non-local part can be served by water (when possible) or by rails from a small hub to another depending on the territory. In such setup you still have commercial transports but people ones are FAR different than now, so the relative infra is far different. Since roads are mostly for short range activities there are no large viaduct, bridges, tunnels because there are no highways, no big cities to serve and so on. There are rail stations, harbors, sure, but FAR little than the actual large ones because there is no need to concentrate the network. In IT terms: did you remember the evolution from mainframe to clusters? Well does clusters demand more resources than mainframes? Are them concentrated? Networks in general have a common set of properties from roads to LAN/MAN/WAN passing through biological "networks", try the math in such terms.