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310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks in Japan
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zer00eyz 2y agoThere is a reason that freight trains are a thing. Clearly someone has been playing too much satisfactory and not enough factorio
- 6510 2y agoThe conveyor will have to be better than that. There use to be carriages designed to be uncoupled from the rear of a moving train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_coach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_coach It would be nice if the empty containers and trains didn't have to travel back. I'm proposing edible containers.
- rob74 2y agoWith all the recent research effort for self-driving cars, I wonder if there are also projects for self-driving rail cars that could cover the "last miles" to the destination without being part of a train. Of course, one problem is that in the last decades, most companies that might benefit from something like this were built on sites without rail connection...
- zer00eyz 2y agoParallel Systems is a company that proposed to do just that... only it's dumb. (like humane pin dumb)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJNvpG5gktM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJNvpG5gktM
- bluGill 2y agoSelf driving trains have been in real world use for more than 20 years. What makes them easy compared to cars is with rail you just put a fence around the track and there is nothing else to hit so you don't need complex sensors to avoid killing people (more likely you put the tracks in a tunnel or elevated). Of course that gets into why we don't do this to individual houses - either the fences trap everybody in their own house (maybe they can visit a neighbor or 3, but not the whole neighborhood) or the costs to build it is extremely high. Roads are dangerous, but also a lot more flexible than rail and so better for low volume use.
- 6510 2y agoLike with roads rail requires a lot of maintenance if you put the heavy load on it. Having to shut down the transport periodically isn't good for business. Perhaps with containers on rollers it is possible to replace one without shutting everything down. Kinda interesting puzzle, the rollers should fit in the containers. A telescope would make them to weak, picking up the old roller, rotating 90 degrees, bringing the new one, rotate 90 degrees, drop it in place.
- klaustopher 2y agoSatisfactory has freight trains and trucks as well
- rob74 2y agoFreight trains are great for moving huge quantities of freight from classification yard A to classification yard B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_yard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_yard), not so great for moving smaller quantities door-to-door. Ever wondered why, despite the existence of freight trains, there are still so many long-haul trucks driving around? Because freight trains aren't the answer to all logistics questions!
- WJW 2y agoYa but the article is about a conveyor belt, which arguably has even less flexibility than even a freight train.
- ceejayoz 2y agoWe've had sorting conveyor belts for decades. Amazon warehouses are full of them. Way more potential flexibility than a railway. (With downsides, of course.)
- jvanderbot 2y agoSo put a sorting conveyor belt at the end of a train line? I could see a conveyor if and only if it saves a bunch of complexity at source /destination, or if it can be built in places that would be much more expensive to make trainlines. After all trains are just concentrated cargo, and are therefore much heavier.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoStill have the loading from train to sorting container. But yes, if that could be automated efficiently, it would indeed be a good solution.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> So put a sorting conveyor belt at the end of a train line? Done right, a conveyor can fairly seamlessly branch off at arbitrary locations along the way. Individual items can fan out onto smaller sub-branches without any significant delays; a long train has to stop and start to accomplish the same. I think the main challenge here would be the maintenance of such a thing. Rail requires plenty; a conveyor has many, many more moving parts over hundreds of miles.
- unglaublich 2y agoImagine that the conveyor can also transport passengers in funny carriages.
- throwaway0394 2y ago"It's basically just Teslas in tunnels at this point, which is way more profound than it sounds"
- dwighttk 2y ago“Its just a tube with an air hockey table, it’s not that complex”
- 6510 2y agoMore funny would be if they discover how efficient canals are then end up building old world aqueducts with flowing water.
- pornel 2y agoImagine the savings in construction and maintenance costs if you could simplify the conveyor sections to be just two parallel iron rods.
- Closi 2y agoIt probably will be in reality - pallet conveyor is too slow and expensive, so it’s most likely that this would be an electric monorail system or similar. (I work in logistics automation design, 310 miles of traditional pallet chain conveyor just isn’t feasible imo for loads of reasons)
- Dalewyn 2y agoOriginal article: https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/economy/20240623-193996/ https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/economy/20240623-19... Much better than the "AI" spamming, regurgitated garbage that's the current link. Also, since neither article mentions it: The chief driver (pun not intended) behind this is new work regulations drastically limiting how many hours a truck driver can work. It's been called the "2024 Problem" because the law came into effect this year upending their trucking industry.
- Closi 2y agoThe AI images are completely wrong - these show full containers rather than single pallets.
- cogman10 2y agoThey also show random large boshido buildings in the middle of open fields to give a "Japanese" look.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y agoThis is basically like asking the AI to make an image of "America" and having it draw the Chrysler building in the middle of a cornfield.
- Faaak 2y agoLooks related to what Swissmetro wanted to do in Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro Except that its not underground Afaik, the project looks dead?
- nnoremap 2y agoThere is also https://www.cst.ch/ https://www.cst.ch/, which I think is still active.
- dukoid 2y agoDoesn't seem to go anywhere in the end: https://www.blick.ch/wirtschaft/cargo-sous-terrain-entlaesst-mitarbeitende-schweizer-megaprojekt-vor-dem-aus-id19888790.html https://www.blick.ch/wirtschaft/cargo-sous-terrain-entlaesst...
- andsens 2y agoThis is satire. Right? Right?!?
- voidUpdate 2y agoThe headline saying that it "will" do something, but not having any actual images or even a concept sketch is a little concerning
- ralferoo 2y agoThe article does say "draft outline of an interim report" produced by a think-tank inside a government department. The government clearly likes the principle of the idea if they've announced it, but reading the article makes it clear that haven't got anywhere near the stage of deciding what form it'd take, only that they want to do something along these lines. Normally with infrastructure projects, the next steps would be to invite civil engineering companies to produce plans of what might actually be feasible to construct, and they will do their concept art at that stage, and then the government will select from those ideas what they want to pursue, and then put that out to tender to different companies. Of course, the project may be cancelled way before then when they realise it's probably too expensive.
- dwighttk 2y agoI’ll believe it when I see it
- garrettgrimsley 2y agoTo all those snidely commenting about trains or rail: Do you think that Japan, of all places, is not familiar with railways? The article states that this is for palletized or small-package loads. Give them some credit.
- resoluteteeth 2y agoI'm not sure this idea deserves the benefit of the doubt. People keep proposing ideas like this and none of them have ever worked out, whereas freight trains are basically a solved problem.
- oneplane 2y agoIt worked out in Paris for quite a while, granted it was smaller than pallet workloads but still, a large physical object transportation network (akin to pneumatic tubes) was quite useful. IIRC the downfall was flooding combined with degraded infrastructure due to lack of maintenance, but those are procedural and planning issues, not foundational issues that cannot be overcome. Similar smaller-than-container transportation networks exist elsewhere, even temporary ones used for evacuating tunnels while they are being bored. Even coal strip-mining type of situations have extremely long length conveyor systems that work pretty well. If you forget the nonsense AI picture for a moment, what they are doing is essentially not much more than extra-specialised rail, which when built for a specific purpose makes a lot of sense, especially when you want to factor in autonomy, or per-object routing instead of single-train based routing. It's already done in factories too.
- bluGill 2y agoI'm not arguing you can make something like this work. However it will cost a lot of $$$ and in the end you won't have anything better than known freight trains. Even if you convince every [geographical area the size of Japan] to install one, the scale factors still won't make this better or cheaper than a train.
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- ekianjo 2y agothere's already trains that do a lot of freight. Not sure what's the point of building this kind of things. Except getting into more debt?
- kstenerud 2y agoThis won't actually happen. It's a "we're doing something about it" project that will spend a lot of money on planning and then not pan out (obviously, since the very premise is ludicrous). Then they can say they're doing something about the shrinking worker problem and call it a day. No one need be shamed.
- barelyauser 2y agoSo you are telling me that a certain linear city will also not materialize?
- jackdh 2y agoHey, this worked for me in Factorio (trains instead), I'm sure it could work here as well!
- jacknews 2y agoThis seems insane. Surely just use self-driving trains. Even a dedicated rail link or even a whole network would be much, much cheaper than a conveyor, which are also notoriously unreliable and would halt the entire system on every fault.
- sumtechguy 2y agoFrom the concept pics they have up it looks more like each container is a self contained 'train'. They say it is for zero emissions but it takes energy to move cargo. 'conveyor' belts do not have free energy. You have to move the belt and the cargo. Interesting idea though. I hope they come up with some cool ideas.
- paulsutter 2y agoThey’re looking for proposals, the title is misleading > One possibility is to use massive conveyor belts to cover the 500-km (310-mile) distance between the two cities, running alongside the highway or potentially through tunnels underneath the road. Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts.
- ralferoo 2y agoI remember being really impressed with Adelaide's public O-bahn bus service back in 1999, I'm sure it's improved since then and a quick google shows it still exists, so it's obviously been a success. At the time these were slightly modified busses that could disconnect the steering (or maybe the driver just let go of the wheel), and were fitted with rubber bumpers and/or wheels on the corners (I can't quite remember) and drove in a concrete channel a bit wider than the bus, but not much, and the bus just kind of bounced off the wall until it settled in a straight line. The bus driver just disengaged the wheel and floored the accelerator and it sped along its section until it got to the suburb it needed to be, then he slowed down a bit, the walls got a bit further apart and he re-engaged the steering wheel and just carried on driving normally as the concrete sidewalls ended and it turned into normal road. Looking at the pictures now, it seems they've revised this design a bit and there are now 2 sets of concrete channels that the wheels sit in and the concrete doesn't go high enough to require bumpers and just operates against the tyres instead. I guess they discovered that it didn't cause enough tyre wear to be a problem, or they have extra thick sidewall tyres or something. Also possible I've just misremembered that detail after 25 years! Anyway, these weren't driverless, but there's no real reason why they couldn't be. They could just slow down and stop in a bay at the destination city and then have a driver hop in to take it the last leg of the journey. To fulfil their green ambitions they should maybe add charging and power rails to power the vehicle along the route (also helps avoid inconveniently having one run out of fuel halfway and cause everything behind to be blocked up) and leave the battery with plenty of charge for the local part of the journey.
- mech422 2y agoHuh - TIL :-) It does sound pretty neat though...
- vasco 2y agoIf the trucks are used for last mile, as long as you have the same number of end destinations, don't you still need roughly the same amount of trucks? I'm assuming in trucking short-haul the largest amount of times are in receiving / dropping cargo and shortening the distance by 100 km doesn't make much difference but maybe it does? In my mental model the trucks just have to go "somewhere else" to pick up the cargo, which might be a bit closer, but that's it?
- Spooky23 2y agoNot necessarily. Because each container is an atomic unit, you can presort at the origin or some other point. I’d envision this like the old USPS Railroad system. In those days they’d drop a sack of mail at each station and pick up outgoing mail with a hook without stopping. You’ll have small stations and you send the pallet off the main conveyor. That might be directly delivery, or a van or some other arrangement. The big thing is you avoid cross docking and middlemen, LTL type freight.
- Someone 2y ago100km is 200km round-trip. At 100km/hour that’s 2 hours (which, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Japan#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Japan#Summary, is the absolute best possible) Also, they’re talking of 500 km, or 1,000 km round trip. That’s easily a day of driving.
- spywaregorilla 2y agoThe trucks going from distribution center to end destinations are not the same trucks running from tokyo to osaka.
- nabla9 2y agoThe problem is to move small cargo between Tokyo and Osaka (500 km). They end up choosing rail or light rail. Other options are just early spitballing for PR like they always do. They might go for narrow rails if land use is important. Steel rolling on steel track is just too good solution for that distance. Other proposals like carts on a tunnel, converter belts are too slow or too expensive if fast enough. Having small carts move on wheels just wears down the wheels in no time. Same for conveyor belts. The cost of rail per km is cheaper than alternatives. They may end up loading wheeled carts on the train and wheel them off at destination, but they don't run them for 500 km. The all other options listed are just for show and PR.
- wildzzz 2y agoConveyor belts are expensive to maintain. A family friend in WV was getting paid upwards of $150k a year in a town where most people lived in poverty simply because he was the guy to call when a coal mine's conveyor belt was broken. Not only was he paid so much because of the critical need (no coal coming out = no money coming in), but because every job was a big job since there was never much time for maintenance.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago> [the guy] was getting paid upwards of $150k a year in a town where most people lived in poverty simply because he was the guy to call when a coal mine's conveyor belt was broken So... most of the people there had to live in poverty just because that one guy gets paid so much for broken conveyor belts?
- wildzzz 2y agoIt wasn't a mining town, it was just cheap to live there. He would travel all over the place doing jobs.
- dehugger 2y agoNo, the town was in poverty because the business owners had leverage to squeeze most of the workers. Conveyor belt guy had the skillset and gumption to actually get paid for his labor, because there was no alternative. Blame the corporation that squeezes its employees for every dime, not a front line worker who actually manages to get paid appropriate compensation.
- rspoerri 2y agoThe Swiss CST (Cargo Sous Terrain aka. Cargo Under Ground) is planning to have a first 70km tunnel between a major cargo hub (Härkingen) and the biggest city (Zürich) in Switzerland by 2031. The automated vehicles should to be driving some 30km/h. In the long term a underground system of 500km between the biggest cities is planned. https://www.cst.ch/ https://www.cst.ch/ and various other media articles
- dukoid 2y agoLooks like that particular Gadgetbahn is not going to go anywhere: https://www.blick.ch/wirtschaft/cargo-sous-terrain-entlaesst-mitarbeitende-schweizer-megaprojekt-vor-dem-aus-id19888790.html https://www.blick.ch/wirtschaft/cargo-sous-terrain-entlaesst...
- rspoerri 2y agoApparently i missed that, thanks for the update. Well lol, the news just came out 3 hours ago...
- po 2y agoThere are a lot of doubters in the threads here and I think a lot of it has to do with the generative art that accompanies the article. They haven't picked a technology and it may actually end up being driverless cars on dedicated lanes, or automated rail technology. The point is non-stop driverless tech. The country is very well aware of the coming labor shortage and is going to rely heavily on automation in the future. Anyone who has ever stepped on a Shinkansen can understand that Japan has a way of getting shit done. It may start a bit later than other countries, but when they finally decide to execute (and this is still in planning stages so it might not), it happens surprisingly quickly. I've watched them totally revamp Shibuya station over the past 10 years in ways that make it utterly unrecognisable to someone who hasn't been here since then, all while never taking down-time. There is another article on the HN front page titled "Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes" right now... that's perhaps coloring people's expectations of the possible.
- Bluestein 2y ago> with the generative art that accompanies the article. About that, I also noticed.- Has anybody looked into how the lowering of the "illustration threshold" for visualizing ideas might influence how many, or which, or how hard it might be to bring them to reality? Or securing investment? I am almost certain it is having some influence.-
- le-mark 2y agoThere’s a long history of users and consumers having unrealistic ideas of technology true capabilities. How many times have we encountered users who think poor quality images can be computer “enhanced” to show detail that’s not really there, because countless murder mystery movies and tv shows do exactly that? The blurred line between fantasy/hallucinations and reality will only become worse, I fear.
- Bluestein 2y agoTrue. At some point, the illustration of the thing becomes the thing.- PS. I am fond of "confabulation" meself, for AI-generated slush.-
- ArchitectAnon 2y agoEveryone is missing the point. It's not the form of the conveyor that matters it's the loading and unloading system. You need a set of standardised parcel sized containers first. Then you can design robotic handling equipment that can load and unload them easily. You can take the containers and feed them into your postal system and gradually automate more parts of the system reliably once you have standard reusable containers, bonus points if the containers are collapsible like some crates you get for fresh produce. You can imagine them clicking magnetically into totems on the street where they could be collected robotically more easily. Or in high traffic locations you might feed them hole in the wall that takes them into an underground system of some kind that transports them to a rail or truck depot. You can also imagine that parcels services might be reintroduced on local trains because you don't need an extra person to load and unload the containers at stations if this can be done robotically. There are endless possibilities for varying degrees of automation, but the key thing is that there has to be a standard interface for picking up a container of a known size. The parcel is the interface; the physical specifications of the standard containers are analogous to an API. The technology already exists for this in airports[0][1]; when you check in a bag in a big modern airport after the gate agent sticks the sticker on the handle it won't be touched again by a human until it gets chucked into the aircraft hold. Your bag goes through the curtain and it is dropped into a standard bucket which is conveyed around under the concourse on a rollercoaster like automated rail system to screening then either to an automated vehicle for transfer between terminal buildings or to an automated storage system for people who have checked in too early or have a long transfer, finally to the stand/ramp for loading into the aircraft. Big international airports like Amsterdam Schipol, Paris Charles de Gaul, Madrid Barrajas and Heathrow all have systems like this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVesQ07GrRY&list=PLWwq_41dNVWD5RklgfMZ7_fL1o7V87m9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVesQ07GrRY&list=PLWwq_41dNV... edit: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cac411oBqSE&t=57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cac411oBqSE&t=57s
- dukoid 2y agoI wish we had some form of "TCP/IP" over rail, where the "packets" are containers or pallets...
- waiquoo 2y agodropping packets would be a much bigger deal...
- dukoid 2y agoYeah I was going to write UDP first but then thought it might be a worse analogy because of that. So what I was trying to say is: Why can't shipping containers be more "automatically" routed over rail? Perhaps fully automatic rail car couplers would be more helpful in general than yet another gadgetbahn?
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a railroad train full of memory sticks...
- dukoid 2y agoI suppose the bandwidth is not the bottleneck currently but mainly the "switching capacity" for this kind of application?
- DannyPage 2y agoEach image has "pictured using generative tools" in the caption. I'm glad they are upfront about it not being a true idea of the concept, but I don't understand why New Atlas would use misleading GenAI images to when the Japan News article^1 has an informative graphic. The exaggeration in the text also makes me doubt their interpretation of the source article. It makes a lot of claims about self-driving capabilities and population decline that barely seem supported. [1] https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/economy/20240623-193996/ https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/economy/20240623-19...
- fred_is_fred 2y agoElectric carts on a track. Oh so it's trains. They invented trains again.
- kkfx 2y agoOh yeah, what could go wrong in such mega-project....... In IT we learnt that mainframes was gem of tech but it's better to build many cheap desktops in cluster... In the aerospace mega-planes are mostly relic of the past because yes their single fly is cheaper but all the rest is much more expensive then using far less big planes. In the naval sector large oil tankers are essentially a relic of the past for similar + environmental reasons. Semi-abandoned office towers and some construction engineers state the same for big buildings https://www.israel21c.org/skyscrapers-are-huge-mistakes-warns-engineering-expert/ https://www.israel21c.org/skyscrapers-are-huge-mistakes-warn... curiously for certain big things, built by the private sector but paid by the public, the private involved disagree...
- numpad0 2y agoI found the official Ministry documents page in Japanese[0]. Looks like it's more like dedicated closed freeway system for fixed-programmed autonomous semi trucks, than actual 500km-long belt. Whether it's going to be rubber tired or metal wheeled is at least officially left TBD for now. Funny detail: Asahi Beer is asking in a slightly roundabout way to make it able to handle heavy objects and beverage-specific pallets, with a picture of a metal beer tank for illustration. They haven't decided if it's ever built or where depots will be - but it must carry beer IF they're going to do it! 0: https://www.mlit.go.jp/road/ir/ir-council/buturyu_douro/index.html https://www.mlit.go.jp/road/ir/ir-council/buturyu_douro/inde...
- molticrystal 2y agoReminds me of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"[0] where highways were replaced by 100 mph moving sidewalks. It will be a bad day if some segments of the conveyor belt has issues and they need to take time to find alternative transport, not to mention large portions of the 310 miles of cargo stuck on there depending on where things go wrong. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll