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There is a world where we dig tunnels under federal highways, and stick freight trucks down there. They'd run on a monorail, at 120+ mph. Surface vehicles would
by thechao 3y ago
There is a world where we dig tunnels under federal highways, and stick freight trucks down there. They'd run on a monorail, at 120+ mph. Surface vehicles would be dramatically limited in terms of height, width, and length. Maybe people buses could go down there?
In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
- hnbad 3y agoIf the US rail network wasn't in such a state of disrepair and freight trains weren't miles long to cut labor costs, you wouldn't even need to dig tunnels for them. That also saves the cost of digging those tunnels and actually making them safe (i.e. having service tunnels, ventilation, fire escapes, fire suppression systems, etc etc). And of course with tunnels you'd want rail anyway because you don't want to be stuck trying to extinguish a battery fire in a tunnel 200' under the city.
- resolutebat 3y agoThe US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.
- mschuster91 3y ago> The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ao-24274Jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ao-24274Jw [3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__315.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__315.html
- panick21_ 3y agoYeah sure. That why their is constant derailment.
- klodolph 3y agoThe constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.
- panick21_ 3y agoYes and in Europe nobody cares about money or profit. That's why there is constant derailment there too. Ohhh wait. There are a huge amount of accidents that have to do with bad infrastructure maintenance and bad signaling. > if you operate the trains that way. Yes, if you have badly maintained infrastructure and you run badly maintained trains on it, its gone cause issue.
- Daz1 3y agoThat makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoHave you seen John Oliver lately? Please go watch infoedutainment materials first.
- klodolph 3y agoYou have to understand how profits in the rail sector work. Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents. The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments. There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)
- JohnFen 3y agoThe US has no passenger network. It's all freight rail. Passenger trains run on the freight network (and freight always get priority).
- stevehawk 3y agoAmtrak in the northeast corridor is Amtrak owned track
- MBCook 3y agoWhich is basically the only one in the entire country. Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoUntrue. Amtrak has an entire system https://ontheworldmap.com/usa/amtrak-system-map.jpg https://ontheworldmap.com/usa/amtrak-system-map.jpg What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- MBCook 3y agoIsn’t that a map of Amtrak routes? That’s different from a map of dedicated passenger rail, which is what I was referring to.
- webworker 3y agoBrightline in Florida just started service between Orlando and Miami, with plans to expand to Tampa.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoIt is not in excellent shape. It is riding the coattails of investments made a century ago, optimizing profits through consolidation, relentless squeezing of costs, and minimal investment in growth. Freight rail companies have constantly reduced routes and cargo types while increasing latency, discarding just about everything in order to focus on low-cost bulk transportation of extremely high-tonnage regular loads like coal and grain, while becoming more and more uncompetitive and impractical for transportation of flexible or timely loads like containers, refrigerated products, and manufactured goods. The freight trains have meanwhile gotten longer and slower, and overgrown the rails that they run on. American freight rail is eating its seed corn without investing in the long term. It remains efficient at transporting the bulk goods that it is currently handling, but it's far below what freight rail's potential should be, or perhaps even what it once was. Trucking has taken up the difference, but that's not because trucks are better-suited to such jobs. It's because the highway investments are paid for by the government, and railway investments are not.
- runarberg 3y agoAt the same time the infrastructure and their rolling stock is in horrible shape and in desperate need of upgrades and basic maintenance. Anybody who has ever taken an Amtrak knows all to well the hour long delays experienced because of a broken down freight train holding up the tracks further up. And those are on the shared tracks which are supposedly better maintained, I can only imagine how things are on the rest of the system.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoHave you seen John Oliver lately? Here you go. https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoYou would want put in pure electric rail, since you don’t want to ventilate it to handle diesel fumes from the hybrid electric diesel turbine engines so common in the USA. Since the USA’s rail system is barely electrified at all, it would be a huge undertaking.
- darksaints 3y agoIf you don't want to ventilate, it would likely need to be non-contact electric rail, unless you want the tunnels to have extremely high concentrations of ozone. The arcs from electric contact catenaries produce ozone, which is fine outdoors because of immediate dissipation and short half-life. Put it in a tunnel and you either have to invest in ventilation (what most subway systems do), or mitigation (via contactless power delivery, likely induction).
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThere are lots of tunnels that do electric rail in Europe and China. Even that very long one in Switzerland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel I think it is using overhead wires.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoYes, and that tunnel has massive ventilation systems, not just for emergencies like fires too. Fun trivia: the tunnel is so deep that without ventilation the temperature in it would be 40 centigrade.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt does, but the ventilation is still not designed for diesels. I guess we are just discussing boring, in that case, electric something is required, maybe battery would work out better than overhead or below lines. Or maybe the only way to do this right without any ventilation is via supercooled magnets or air pressure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cowthulhu 3y agoI feel like trains are similar in a lot of ways, and many orders of magnitude cheaper. That’s definitely cool to think about though!
- andrepd 3y agoYeah but they're not techno-cool and futuristic and entreprenourial-capitalist! They're boring.
- darksaints 3y agoMuch like highways and trains, the tracks are the easy part. The hard part is in routing and termination - think interchanges, onramps, and offramps. Being underground compounds the routing and termination problem dramatically.
- _cenw 3y agonot to mention tunneling costs. if you need a benchmark, look up what it costs the swiss build.
- thfuran 3y agoI think it also massively complicates the failure modes. Freight trains pretty frequently lose cargo and or derail. That's probably way more annoying to deal with if it's in a really long tunnel.
- Symbiote 3y agoOnly in the USA. Derailments are rare where the tracks are properly maintained, and train lengths aren't excessive.
- yigithan 3y agoRight, they can even do this for within city delivery. Imagine each home having a tube box, like a mailbox, that is vertically connected to the network of tubes underground. Small electric vehicles running through the tubes and carrying parcel from warehouse hubs to homes and even vice versa. Amazon Instant Delivery!
- notahacker 3y agoThey built a tunnel just for mail trains between postal offices in London in the 19th century. You can even go down there now https://www.postalmuseum.org/event/tunnel-walks/ https://www.postalmuseum.org/event/tunnel-walks/ I'm... not convinced it scales well, cost-wise!
- wardedVibe 3y agofunny that one of the better f u t u r e ideas in this thread got heavily downvoted. This is probably one of the more efficient ways to automate package delivery, up to a small-ish size, and requiring a pretty high density. If NY wasn't a clusterfuck when it comes to getting projects built, they might actually have the density to justify the maintenance costs. > Small electric vehicles why not just use pneumatics? It's a proven technology used in sufficiently large facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_us...
- 1920musicman 3y agoA similar sentiment to other commenters in this thread... Why re-invent something incredibly resource-consuming like building specialized tube boxes? If I were to invest into something today it would be medium size (about a tall van size) autonomous containers that can drive at night within city limits and drop off small reusable containers at delivery points such as apartment buildings. Case in point: Luxer One is a fairly common setup in SF today, the next step would be to stop delivering individual packages and, instead, deliver daily boxes for the whole building.
- huytersd 3y agoThen the first time one of those little shuttles gets stuck in the tubes you’re gonna have to start digging things up. Not to mention the bad actors that have a pipeline to deliver all kinds of dangerous things right into people’s homes or you know just mess up the pipe system completely. It’s a terrible idea. Why not just have functional drone delivery, it just makes way more sense.
- korse 3y agoContrarian take, but tons of truck traffic on interstate highways makes driving far more fun (as long as there isn't road maintenance or undue stoppage). I'm actually looking forward to future me being able to ride my motorcycle around a freight-train's worth of semi-automated cargo-haulers on interstates that are mostly devoid of vacationing families.
- askonomm 3y agoTo each their own, but as a fellow motorcycle rider myself, I absolutely shit myself around huge trucks that won't be able to even see me.
- bombcar 3y agoI guess you’re supposed to reenact the space whale scene from treasure planet.
- strictnein 3y agoAn absolute gem of a movie. Didn't see it until I had kids and it was one of the few movies that I didn't get tired of rewatching again and again with them.
- bombcar 3y agoIt really is one of the top-tier movies and it’s quite sad it didn’t get the recognition it deserves.
- hughesjj 3y agoWith all this expensive AF gear it's humbling to know that a single tire can still end me quick enough I wouldn't even know it happened.... In the best case.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoOnly in Wyoming where, unlike Texas, truckers have the sense to stay to the right. Also, there is de facto no speed limit there because there are only a handful of WSTs. I suggest avoiding Wyoming <-> Colorado unless you have nose plugs or no sense of smell.
- kevingadd 3y agoSeattle has some underground light rail tunnels that are shared with buses
- dmoy 3y agoUsed to be, not anymore
- runarberg 3y agoThe Downtown transit tunnel (better known as the Bus tunnel). It was built for both buses and light rail, however it only hosted buses for the two decades of operation. Shared buses and trains only lasted for 10 years. A couple of years ago the buses were kicked out of the tunnel and it only services light rail now. To my knowledge it has never serviced freight, only transit. I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne...
- FireBeyond 3y ago> I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept. Go through the Bus tunnel and Ride the SLUT.[1] [1] South Lake Union Transit. I presume all the paraphernalia around 'ride the slut' is semi-official at best.
- alangibson 3y agoThat was a horrible hack that was understood at the time to be unworkable. Much ink was spilled in The Stranger about it.
- hughesjj 3y agoI really wish the link stopped at the old 9th Ave stop to connect with busses Less now that I've moved out of premiere on line, but still
- panick21_ 3y agoOr you know, build like a normal as train along side the highway.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoSSSH! Stop making sense doing things the easy, conventional, cost-efficient way. It must be completely new, expensive, unproven, and different!
- thechao 3y agoI suggested this to my US Representative, but I'm pretty sure he's a Lich, so it didn't go anywhere. I think the tunnel thing might be more his style: dungeony.
- yuliyp 3y agoThat sounds like railroads but worse. What's the advantage? Tunneling is incredibly expensive to do, yet you're proposing it in a situation where it'd need enough coverage so as to ban large freight transport over roads.
- anonporridge 3y agoThere's not. Tunnels probably only make sense in cities, not wide open rural spaces.
- XorNot 3y agoRight of way acquisition is still one of the most expensive and time consuming parts of constructing new railways though.
- some_random 3y agoDon't worry, once you factor in tunneling expenses it won't be!
- MBCook 3y agoThe one advantage I can think of is no weather to deal with like snow/ice.
- abathur 3y agoPerhaps not no weather--water intrusion/management will still matter.
- bobthepanda 3y agoAlso as a practical matter, a lot of systems stop running to discourage traveling; the underground may be safe but you still have to travel on the surface to your final destination
- 3y ago
- trhway 3y agoWhy go underground (expensive 3rd dimension down) when we have the whole 3rd dimension up almost unused? The freight can be trucked by large Zeppelins for example (and electric at that with the most of the energy generated by the solar panels covering the upper surface of the Zeppelin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017937). The issues are pure engineering ones. These freight Zeppelins can be fully automated, flying around any densely populated places.
- thfuran 3y agoA train car carries about a kiloton of cargo. How many zeppelins would that take? Edit: Actually, I can't count. Only a few hundred thousand pounds. That's still probably a bunch of zeppelinworths though.
- trhway 3y agoHinderburg-like at 100 ton itself can carry about 120 ton payload, ie. payload of 2 train cars.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoAnd where does one dock this massive beast in a city with controlled airspace?
- trhway 3y agoIn a distribution center outside of the city the cargo is transferred onto local electric Amazon/UPS/etc. delivery trucks/vans.
- dragonwriter 3y agoSo, the equivalent of a 100 car freight train would be a 50 Hindenburg zeppelin fleet?
- hughesjj 3y agoIt's actually fairly easy logistically imo Design the Zeppelin for literal tons of ballast, trade out sandbags/dirtbags for product or waste on docking, andaybe add an aerodynamic shield if you don't care about speed as much We already sacrifice significant speed for boats, but I grant they're several orders of magnitude better at balancing buoyancy with cargo given they flot in the water rather than atmosphere
- alangibson 3y agoWhy do people keep trying to invent more expensive, less traffic dense railroads. Did they stop teaching arithmetic in school?
- mynameisnoone 3y agoBecause a controversial centibillionaire didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation and proclaimed it to be so. Also, people hate people like Thunderf00t who tear down dumb ideas that people desperately want to believe in because feelings and tribal toxic positivity > logic.
- titanomachy 3y agoHectobillionaire, “centi-“ means 1/100
- eesmith 3y ago"Centi-" as a prefix can mean 100, though metric use is more common. For example, "centipede" nominally means 100 feet, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede says "Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number." Centibillionaire is the obvious extension of centimillionaire, and "centimillionaire" has been around for a long time. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-chicago-daily-tribun_1883-01-19_42/page/n3/mode/2up?q=centimillionaire https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-ch... shows a use in 1883, explicitly referencing $100,000,000 of Vanderbilt capital. (A Google Books search finds two other uses of centimillionaire in the 1800s.) Another old word using centi- to mean 100 is "centimillennium", for 100 thousand years. Here is an 1882 use: https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/mode/2up?q=centimillennium https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/m... and Wiktionary adds several more recent uses at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium .
- withinboredom 3y ago> didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it? Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough. It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.
- mplewis 3y agoYou have, once again, described an expensive and bad train.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoTODIL cargo ships are slightly cheaper to operate than good trains. I still haven't seen the math to prove ground effect aircraft are less efficient than cargo ships, but I suppose it's true or it would've been done already.
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- huytersd 3y agoBut why? In the US we have so much room it just makes sense to lay more surface rail, which we already don’t seem to be able to do efficiently.
- Akashic101 3y agoI like the idea but why underground? Why not above it so they can be easier serviced and managed. Also it makes repairs in case of incidents lots easier. Also we could stick multiple trucks together to safe space and make then run at a more similar speed. We could also remove the need for each container to have its own pulling engine, lets put a strong one at the front. I just invented trains again didnt I? Whatever you do, you always end up with trains