3 ms·
It'd be awesome if we could get the utilization ratio up. Any given section of highway has a vehicle over it let's say 1% of the time. Rail's utilization factor
by rektide 3y ago
It'd be awesome if we could get the utilization ratio up. Any given section of highway has a vehicle over it let's say 1% of the time. Rail's utilization factor has got to be 1% of that.
My Sci fi dream is carrier trains, where a car is disaggregated into a pod and a skateboard. But one can drive their vehicle to a train & the pod comes off & mounts onto the train with standard mounting & then gets dropped back onto a rental skateboard at the destination.
Or maybe if we had right sized e-transit with ebikes & small e-cars, we could just ride on/off regular trains, quickly & efficiently.
- aww_dang 3y agohttps://www.amtrak.com/auto-train https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
- rektide 3y agoIt's not a fast nor available option. No one is going to commute this way regularly. We're talking about trains, and to me, the occasional trip is not the active question: it's what we do day by day. This ain't it.
- crote 3y agoIt really depends on the railway line. A lot of Europe is running enough passenger trains that there literally isn't enough space to add more cargo trains into the mix. In my country the minimum train-train spacing is five minutes, because any less and a train won't be able to stop if the preceding one has an accident. A substantial part of the network is already being limited by this, and we are seeing more and more quad-track sections. Your "carrier train" already exists, to an extent. It is called "intermodal shipping containers".