9 ms·

Railroads beware: Technology is gaining on you

27 points by kposehn 13y ago

ohjeez 13y ago
That's far more interesting than the title would imply.
betterunix 13y ago
I doubt that 3D printing will be a problem for railroads. You still need to transport for the raw materials, and most people will not have industrial-scale 3D printers in their homes (any more than they have industrial-scale paper printers in their homes). There are also limits to what can be 3D printed, and those limits will remain in effect for the foreseeable future -- liquids, timber, food, and so forth are not things that will be easy to print, but they remain important and they are often transported by rail. If anything American railroads should be rejoicing about 3D printing, as it will encourage more domestic manufacturing and create new opportunities in transporting both raw materials and finished products. (Edit: I know it sounds like I am making the same argument people made in the 1960s about computers in the home. However, a key difference with 3D printing is that the size of the printer determines what can be printed. It is one thing to print forks, knives, and gears; it is quite another to print a car body.)
- Spooky23 13y ago
  I don't think that you're making a "computer in the home" argument. It's more like tools. In 1960, a typical handy homeowner had a hand tools. Sure, I could build a deck in the backyard, but it would take a long time and require more hands. Today, a typical handy homeowner has power drills, saws, etc at very low price points.
- kposehn 13y ago
  I was a bit dubious at first, but I understand what they're on about now: The concern is that goods will be finished much closer to PoS, resulting in more transport of bulk commodities and less of finished goods. Intermodal transport (which includes those loooooooong double-stack trains you often see) is primarily finished goods going to market. If railroads want to stay competitive, I do agree that they need to "skate to where the puck is going" and make sure they have the capacity to handle shifts in traffic patterns. A good example is the Powder River Basin. That is the largest coal producing region in the US and for about 30 years has received massive capital investment. However, coal is on the decline and crude-by-rail is on a massive upswing. The railroads got caught flat-footed there and have been scrambling to increase capacity for crude-by-rail. As far as bulk crude, how else are you going to transport it outside of a pipeline? In this the railroads are safe, but in the future they may not be.
- a-priori 13y ago
  I'm also not sold on household 3D printers. Maintaining and operating a 3D printer would be a hassle. But retail-level printers? That's a no-brainer. I'm certain people would be willing to accept a reasonable mark-up to have things printed for them. I'm seeing hardware stores that prints all the screws and nails on-site (or at a regional distributor, shipped just-in-time) rather than keeping inventory, and "here's a random part that broke on this obsolete product, could you replace it?" services. I'm seeing furniture stores that create made-to-measure furniture of varying dimensions or colours from a standard template to fit your room. Like made-to-measure clothing, as opposed to bespoke (custom furniture) or off-the-rack (furniture store). I'm seeing motorcycle/bike/hockey helmets made to fit a person's head, car seats moulded to a person's backside (currently only an option on super cars like the McLaren F1), and custom orthotics that are cheap enough to become mainstream. I'm seeing mall photo booths that produce figurines instead of photos. But no, I can't see people having a 3D printer in their basement to do any of these things in their house.
  - tekalon 13y ago
    I can see it but only with the technology changing. My husband has a 3D printer and uses it all the time for little projects around the house. Once the technology advances, you can have printers that are the right size and the right interface for the common public, they can 'buy' or create a design and have it just automatically print. Think of having toys for kids or household products printed faster than driving to a store to get it. Right now 'makers' are already doing this. It's not very friendly for most people, but its been very helpful for household uses.
Anechoic 13y ago
Take note that Musk's Hyperloop prototype was created on a 3-D printer, What prototype? Did Musk actually show a model?
Spooky23 13y ago
Interesting long-term issue. I think the next decade or two of railroad history are all about moving commodities like oil and produce. Hyperloop is all about passengers (something the rail industry has never cared out) 3D printing requires raw materials to print stuff, which will drive more demand for rail transport. Nothing can move billions of plastic pellets faster and cheaper than a train.
- kposehn 13y ago
  Well, we may find a hyperloop is better for transporting the smaller pieces of a commodity. After all, if you can just send a crate instead of a container, you can send to the buyer exactly what they need and nothing more. The issue with bulk freight is once you've made the pellets, at some point they have to be divided up. I think something like a hyperloop will do very well for less-than-carload/container freight, but would probably never transport the massive volumes of bulk products (chemicals, wood, oil, coal, ore, steel coils, etc.)
  - pm90 13y ago
    >I think something like a hyperloop will do very well for less-than-carload/container freight, but would probably never transport the massive volumes of bulk products (chemicals, wood, oil, coal, ore, steel coils, etc.) Exactly. The hyperloop network would probably cost much more due to the extensive passenger safety features that need to be (hopefully) built into it
  - Spooky23 13y ago
    Railroads lost 99.9% of that business 70-100 years ago. You ship stuff that doesn't have time-definite requirements with UPS Ground or Parcel Post. Time definite, you use an express service. If you have time definate needs and larger quantities, you use FedEx Custom Critical, or some LTL truck service. Some folks today ship same-day parcel shipments via Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, or other passenger service. That's what hyperloop parcel delivery would compete with. It's onerous and expensive (ie. I need a guy to drive to the station with the thing I need to ship), and only makes sense if you have an office adjacent to the city pairs or airport. Lawyers used this service alot pre-internet.
rayiner 13y ago
Interesting thing about railroad stocks, and no doubt one of the reasons Buffet bought BNSF, is that they own one of the most valuable things in the world of transportation: rights of way. Is hyperloop the way of the future for freight? If so, the railroad companies can build that out faster than anyone else, because they've got the rights of way. Incidentally, this is one of the things I don't get about Hyperloop versus CHSR: there is nothing inherently cheaper about building an evacuated tube versus putting down a few steel rails. You still need a right of way and grade-separated crossings, and you still need to do all the engineering/environmental work for all that and that's where the expense piles up. You think laying some steel track down on a rock bed is the expensive part? Now, once you have the right of way in place, that's going to be valuable no matter what technology comes down the pike. Amtrak estimates the cost of upgrading the northeast corridor to 220 mph HSR at $160 billion. A lot of money, to be sure, but imagine what it would cost if there wasn't that existing right of way from DC to Boston, through downtown Baltimore, Philadephia, and New York, already in place! That'd be a trillion dollar project, whether you did it with a HSR or Hyperloop or whatever.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  I doubt Hyperloop is the future for freight, and freight is overwhelmingly where it's at for railroads (in terms of $$$). Hyperloop is built for passengers, where speed is the overriding concern. For freight rail, price of transportation is the primary concern. Accelerating a few tons of iron ore to nearly the speed of sound to get it somewhere is prrrobably not worth it. I don't even think I really buy the "3D printing will change everything" take either. Railroads will still be perfectly useful for shipping 3D-printer feedstock to distribution points for feeding the 3D-printing micro-factories. Unless the author says that passenger rail - in the US, that'd be Amtrak - should watch out for the future, in which case I'd say that's been patently obvious for longer than I've been alive . . .
- kposehn 13y ago
  The RoW is highly valuable for all sorts of stuff. Back in the day, iirc, Qwest was owned by Phil Anshutz, who also owned the Southern Pacific Railroad. He used the SP RoW to lay down huge tracts of Fiber, which the other railroads copied. They can and do run all sorts of stuff long the tracks - fiber, natural gas pipelines, and soon high transmission power lines.
Anechoic 13y ago
Could such a system, on a more grand scale, replace railroads as conveyors of passengers and freight? The vision is not new-fangled, and a modern day visionary insists it could be a better alternative to high speed passenger rail. The interesting thing is that the incumbent railroads are actually in a prime position to capitalize on this tech. The hard part about implementing the system isn't really the technology, it's all of the property, right-of-way, and NIMBY issues that come up. However the railroads already own property all over the country and (for the most part) they can do what they want with it. Everyone might be better off working together than trying to approach it separately. edit: beaten by rayiner
almost_usual 13y ago
There is about ~121,800 miles of track in North America owned by CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, BNSF, and Canadian National. That's about ~4.9x the circumference of the earth. Seems like it would be quite expensive to build this new infrastructure? Maybe if highway transportation was more fuel efficient / fast the amount of tubing could be minimized.
- Derbasti 13y ago
  In contrast, Germany, a country that is roughly 1/20 the size of the US, has about 60000 kilometers of track, or about 1.5x the circumference of the earth.
pm90 13y ago
Railroads are much more valuable than most Americans can possibly imagine. And technology will only make it more so, if sufficient people are willing to work on it. Here are some ideas off the top of my head: * automated trains for long distance travel, self-driving car-2-go's for short distance travel * integrate future transport modules with the railway network and build more tracks; travel long distance on electric self-driving cars. Of course, the main obstacle is the high initial capital investment. Here too, anyone really serious should start small: start by helping the current rail operators optimize freight (the real money maker); gain their confidence and then work on a joint project on a small scale; if it works out, then expand throughout the country. It's painful to see that a country as large as America has such an inadequate railroad system. But maybe it was for the best: countries like France or Japan with an entrenched railway system will have probably have a hard time making the switch to radical new technologies
- newbie12 13y ago
  The main obstacle in the U.S. is that the interstate passenger rail system was nationalized by Congress. Congress forces unprofitable long-distance routes on Amtrak and keeps the monopoly company undercapitalized. Amtrak owns amazing assets like the Northeast corridor rail lines, but there's almost no innovation as the monopoly loses billions of dollars and can't really tap private capital markets. Meanwhile American freight rail-- totally privately owned and managed-- is the best in the world.
  - oijaf888 13y ago
    To be fair it was nationalized in the wake of the Penn Central bankruptcy and all of the other railroads wanting to drop passenger rail. Railroads were even able to opt out and I think a few did for a few years but it just didn't make sense to move passengers vs freight.
    - newbie12 13y ago
      The actual problem was the federal Interstate Commerce Commission regulated routes and ticket prices and wouldn't give passenger rail companies the flexibility needed to compete with cars and growing air travel. Central planning failed and completely destroyed U.S. passenger rail.
nemesisj 13y ago
I had a hard time reading this article without wondering if it was some kind of spoof. The USA has the most efficient freight rail network in the world (other countries optimise their networks for passenger), and this isn't due to a single factor. It is never going to be under threat from the Hyperloop, because most of the cargo carried are things like coal, raw materials, containers, etc. that aren't sensitive to being delivered "just a few hours faster" (or even days). Also, most of the US freight rail network is heavily heavily optimised and drops containers off for truck haulage after transporting the cargo to the most efficient spot on the network.
- trebor 13y ago
  I heard about how the modern diesel-electric trains are engineered and wondered what I could learn from their systems, and was just about shocked. My intent was a thought experiment on "could we build a better hybrid car?" And the answer is a resounding yes... just look at trains. All the research is already done, by train builders. They've done the math that says when to prioritize amperage over voltage for efficiency, and how to optimize various systems. And that's just one thing that I found massively impressive. (Now if only I could find the site I read, it was impressive.)
  - kposehn 13y ago
    Find it! I'd really like to know what you found. I've done a fair amount of research myself and have always felt the auto industry could learn a lot from locomotive builders, especially the use of 3-phase ac traction.
- kposehn 13y ago
  One caveat: there is a ton of highly time sensitive traffic, especially FedEx and UPS z-trains that run on very tight schedules - and the railroads charge accordingly.
  - devb 13y ago
    By volume and especially by weight, time sensitive mail deliveries are a tiny, tiny fraction of the bulk of coal, grain, scrap metal, etc. that make up most freight traffic.
nealabq 13y ago
Driverless trucks could also be a threat/opportunity. These trucks will trundle along at the most fuel-efficient speed 24 hours/day. Eventually they may be able hook together on the highway, further reducing drag. Of course trains can also become driverless and train-cars could automatically couple/decouple, which could lead to many more trains, some with much smaller loads. I can even imagine trucks someday with wheels for both highway and steel-rails.
- kposehn 13y ago
  I think that driverless trucks are a natural migration of the short-haul model, where you have a container that hops off a train at an intermodal facility and is driven to the customer. Automated trains are definitely coming; look at BHP Billiton's push toward remote train operation in the Pilbara region of West Australia.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
The hyperloop would actually be great for railroads to get involved in. They already have plenty of straight-line right-of-ways, they have deep pockets to finance the tech, and with the right corridor they could get into the same-day delivery business. Perhaps even be a direct competitor to Fed-Ex. I'm not sure the industry is ready to take those kinds of risks yet, though. The entire hyperloop concept is great, but it's just an idea, and ideas without any execution intelligence don't tend to do so well.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
"If you made it to age 50, you recall department stores where clerks placed a sales slip and cash in a cylindrical container that they then inserted into a steel tube at the point of sale, with the container then transported by compressed air and partial vacuum, through the maze of tubing, to cashiers elsewhere in the store." Many supermarkets in the UK have these at the till.
- justincormack 13y ago
  I have never seen one in the UK... where?
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    lots of the bigger ones - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554632/Thief-stole-90000-from-supermarket-tubes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554632/Thief-stole-9...
    - justincormack 13y ago
      Ah interesting, makes sense I suppose to get cash away from tills.

27 points by kposehn 13y ago

That's far more interesting than the title would imply.

I doubt that 3D printing will be a problem for railroads. You still need to transport for the raw materials, and most people will not have industrial-scale 3D printers in their homes (any more than they have industrial-scale paper printers in their homes). There are also limits to what can be 3D printed, and those limits will remain in effect for the foreseeable future -- liquids, timber, food, and so forth are not things that will be easy to print, but they remain important and they are often transported by rail. If anything American railroads should be rejoicing about 3D printing, as it will encourage more domestic manufacturing and create new opportunities in transporting both raw materials and finished products. (Edit: I know it sounds like I am making the same argument people made in the 1960s about computers in the home. However, a key difference with 3D printing is that the size of the printer determines what can be printed. It is one thing to print forks, knives, and gears; it is quite another to print a car body.)

Spooky23 13y ago
I don't think that you're making a "computer in the home" argument. It's more like tools. In 1960, a typical handy homeowner had a hand tools. Sure, I could build a deck in the backyard, but it would take a long time and require more hands. Today, a typical handy homeowner has power drills, saws, etc at very low price points.
kposehn 13y ago
I was a bit dubious at first, but I understand what they're on about now: The concern is that goods will be finished much closer to PoS, resulting in more transport of bulk commodities and less of finished goods. Intermodal transport (which includes those loooooooong double-stack trains you often see) is primarily finished goods going to market. If railroads want to stay competitive, I do agree that they need to "skate to where the puck is going" and make sure they have the capacity to handle shifts in traffic patterns. A good example is the Powder River Basin. That is the largest coal producing region in the US and for about 30 years has received massive capital investment. However, coal is on the decline and crude-by-rail is on a massive upswing. The railroads got caught flat-footed there and have been scrambling to increase capacity for crude-by-rail. As far as bulk crude, how else are you going to transport it outside of a pipeline? In this the railroads are safe, but in the future they may not be.
a-priori 13y ago
I'm also not sold on household 3D printers. Maintaining and operating a 3D printer would be a hassle. But retail-level printers? That's a no-brainer. I'm certain people would be willing to accept a reasonable mark-up to have things printed for them. I'm seeing hardware stores that prints all the screws and nails on-site (or at a regional distributor, shipped just-in-time) rather than keeping inventory, and "here's a random part that broke on this obsolete product, could you replace it?" services. I'm seeing furniture stores that create made-to-measure furniture of varying dimensions or colours from a standard template to fit your room. Like made-to-measure clothing, as opposed to bespoke (custom furniture) or off-the-rack (furniture store). I'm seeing motorcycle/bike/hockey helmets made to fit a person's head, car seats moulded to a person's backside (currently only an option on super cars like the McLaren F1), and custom orthotics that are cheap enough to become mainstream. I'm seeing mall photo booths that produce figurines instead of photos. But no, I can't see people having a 3D printer in their basement to do any of these things in their house.
- tekalon 13y ago
  I can see it but only with the technology changing. My husband has a 3D printer and uses it all the time for little projects around the house. Once the technology advances, you can have printers that are the right size and the right interface for the common public, they can 'buy' or create a design and have it just automatically print. Think of having toys for kids or household products printed faster than driving to a store to get it. Right now 'makers' are already doing this. It's not very friendly for most people, but its been very helpful for household uses.

Anechoic 13y ago

Take note that Musk's Hyperloop prototype was created on a 3-D printer, What prototype? Did Musk actually show a model?

Spooky23 13y ago

Interesting long-term issue. I think the next decade or two of railroad history are all about moving commodities like oil and produce. Hyperloop is all about passengers (something the rail industry has never cared out) 3D printing requires raw materials to print stuff, which will drive more demand for rail transport. Nothing can move billions of plastic pellets faster and cheaper than a train.

kposehn 13y ago
Well, we may find a hyperloop is better for transporting the smaller pieces of a commodity. After all, if you can just send a crate instead of a container, you can send to the buyer exactly what they need and nothing more. The issue with bulk freight is once you've made the pellets, at some point they have to be divided up. I think something like a hyperloop will do very well for less-than-carload/container freight, but would probably never transport the massive volumes of bulk products (chemicals, wood, oil, coal, ore, steel coils, etc.)
- pm90 13y ago
  >I think something like a hyperloop will do very well for less-than-carload/container freight, but would probably never transport the massive volumes of bulk products (chemicals, wood, oil, coal, ore, steel coils, etc.) Exactly. The hyperloop network would probably cost much more due to the extensive passenger safety features that need to be (hopefully) built into it
- Spooky23 13y ago
  Railroads lost 99.9% of that business 70-100 years ago. You ship stuff that doesn't have time-definite requirements with UPS Ground or Parcel Post. Time definite, you use an express service. If you have time definate needs and larger quantities, you use FedEx Custom Critical, or some LTL truck service. Some folks today ship same-day parcel shipments via Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, or other passenger service. That's what hyperloop parcel delivery would compete with. It's onerous and expensive (ie. I need a guy to drive to the station with the thing I need to ship), and only makes sense if you have an office adjacent to the city pairs or airport. Lawyers used this service alot pre-internet.

rayiner 13y ago

Interesting thing about railroad stocks, and no doubt one of the reasons Buffet bought BNSF, is that they own one of the most valuable things in the world of transportation: rights of way. Is hyperloop the way of the future for freight? If so, the railroad companies can build that out faster than anyone else, because they've got the rights of way. Incidentally, this is one of the things I don't get about Hyperloop versus CHSR: there is nothing inherently cheaper about building an evacuated tube versus putting down a few steel rails. You still need a right of way and grade-separated crossings, and you still need to do all the engineering/environmental work for all that and that's where the expense piles up. You think laying some steel track down on a rock bed is the expensive part? Now, once you have the right of way in place, that's going to be valuable no matter what technology comes down the pike. Amtrak estimates the cost of upgrading the northeast corridor to 220 mph HSR at $160 billion. A lot of money, to be sure, but imagine what it would cost if there wasn't that existing right of way from DC to Boston, through downtown Baltimore, Philadephia, and New York, already in place! That'd be a trillion dollar project, whether you did it with a HSR or Hyperloop or whatever.

fennecfoxen 13y ago
I doubt Hyperloop is the future for freight, and freight is overwhelmingly where it's at for railroads (in terms of $$$). Hyperloop is built for passengers, where speed is the overriding concern. For freight rail, price of transportation is the primary concern. Accelerating a few tons of iron ore to nearly the speed of sound to get it somewhere is prrrobably not worth it. I don't even think I really buy the "3D printing will change everything" take either. Railroads will still be perfectly useful for shipping 3D-printer feedstock to distribution points for feeding the 3D-printing micro-factories. Unless the author says that passenger rail - in the US, that'd be Amtrak - should watch out for the future, in which case I'd say that's been patently obvious for longer than I've been alive . . .
kposehn 13y ago
The RoW is highly valuable for all sorts of stuff. Back in the day, iirc, Qwest was owned by Phil Anshutz, who also owned the Southern Pacific Railroad. He used the SP RoW to lay down huge tracts of Fiber, which the other railroads copied. They can and do run all sorts of stuff long the tracks - fiber, natural gas pipelines, and soon high transmission power lines.

Anechoic 13y ago

Could such a system, on a more grand scale, replace railroads as conveyors of passengers and freight? The vision is not new-fangled, and a modern day visionary insists it could be a better alternative to high speed passenger rail. The interesting thing is that the incumbent railroads are actually in a prime position to capitalize on this tech. The hard part about implementing the system isn't really the technology, it's all of the property, right-of-way, and NIMBY issues that come up. However the railroads already own property all over the country and (for the most part) they can do what they want with it. Everyone might be better off working together than trying to approach it separately. edit: beaten by rayiner

almost_usual 13y ago

There is about ~121,800 miles of track in North America owned by CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, BNSF, and Canadian National. That's about ~4.9x the circumference of the earth. Seems like it would be quite expensive to build this new infrastructure? Maybe if highway transportation was more fuel efficient / fast the amount of tubing could be minimized.

Derbasti 13y ago
In contrast, Germany, a country that is roughly 1/20 the size of the US, has about 60000 kilometers of track, or about 1.5x the circumference of the earth.

pm90 13y ago

Railroads are much more valuable than most Americans can possibly imagine. And technology will only make it more so, if sufficient people are willing to work on it. Here are some ideas off the top of my head: * automated trains for long distance travel, self-driving car-2-go's for short distance travel * integrate future transport modules with the railway network and build more tracks; travel long distance on electric self-driving cars. Of course, the main obstacle is the high initial capital investment. Here too, anyone really serious should start small: start by helping the current rail operators optimize freight (the real money maker); gain their confidence and then work on a joint project on a small scale; if it works out, then expand throughout the country. It's painful to see that a country as large as America has such an inadequate railroad system. But maybe it was for the best: countries like France or Japan with an entrenched railway system will have probably have a hard time making the switch to radical new technologies

newbie12 13y ago
The main obstacle in the U.S. is that the interstate passenger rail system was nationalized by Congress. Congress forces unprofitable long-distance routes on Amtrak and keeps the monopoly company undercapitalized. Amtrak owns amazing assets like the Northeast corridor rail lines, but there's almost no innovation as the monopoly loses billions of dollars and can't really tap private capital markets. Meanwhile American freight rail-- totally privately owned and managed-- is the best in the world.
- oijaf888 13y ago
  To be fair it was nationalized in the wake of the Penn Central bankruptcy and all of the other railroads wanting to drop passenger rail. Railroads were even able to opt out and I think a few did for a few years but it just didn't make sense to move passengers vs freight.
  - newbie12 13y ago
    The actual problem was the federal Interstate Commerce Commission regulated routes and ticket prices and wouldn't give passenger rail companies the flexibility needed to compete with cars and growing air travel. Central planning failed and completely destroyed U.S. passenger rail.

nemesisj 13y ago

I had a hard time reading this article without wondering if it was some kind of spoof. The USA has the most efficient freight rail network in the world (other countries optimise their networks for passenger), and this isn't due to a single factor. It is never going to be under threat from the Hyperloop, because most of the cargo carried are things like coal, raw materials, containers, etc. that aren't sensitive to being delivered "just a few hours faster" (or even days). Also, most of the US freight rail network is heavily heavily optimised and drops containers off for truck haulage after transporting the cargo to the most efficient spot on the network.

trebor 13y ago
I heard about how the modern diesel-electric trains are engineered and wondered what I could learn from their systems, and was just about shocked. My intent was a thought experiment on "could we build a better hybrid car?" And the answer is a resounding yes... just look at trains. All the research is already done, by train builders. They've done the math that says when to prioritize amperage over voltage for efficiency, and how to optimize various systems. And that's just one thing that I found massively impressive. (Now if only I could find the site I read, it was impressive.)
- kposehn 13y ago
  Find it! I'd really like to know what you found. I've done a fair amount of research myself and have always felt the auto industry could learn a lot from locomotive builders, especially the use of 3-phase ac traction.
kposehn 13y ago
One caveat: there is a ton of highly time sensitive traffic, especially FedEx and UPS z-trains that run on very tight schedules - and the railroads charge accordingly.
- devb 13y ago
  By volume and especially by weight, time sensitive mail deliveries are a tiny, tiny fraction of the bulk of coal, grain, scrap metal, etc. that make up most freight traffic.

nealabq 13y ago

Driverless trucks could also be a threat/opportunity. These trucks will trundle along at the most fuel-efficient speed 24 hours/day. Eventually they may be able hook together on the highway, further reducing drag. Of course trains can also become driverless and train-cars could automatically couple/decouple, which could lead to many more trains, some with much smaller loads. I can even imagine trucks someday with wheels for both highway and steel-rails.

kposehn 13y ago
I think that driverless trucks are a natural migration of the short-haul model, where you have a container that hops off a train at an intermodal facility and is driven to the customer. Automated trains are definitely coming; look at BHP Billiton's push toward remote train operation in the Pilbara region of West Australia.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

The hyperloop would actually be great for railroads to get involved in. They already have plenty of straight-line right-of-ways, they have deep pockets to finance the tech, and with the right corridor they could get into the same-day delivery business. Perhaps even be a direct competitor to Fed-Ex. I'm not sure the industry is ready to take those kinds of risks yet, though. The entire hyperloop concept is great, but it's just an idea, and ideas without any execution intelligence don't tend to do so well.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

"If you made it to age 50, you recall department stores where clerks placed a sales slip and cash in a cylindrical container that they then inserted into a steel tube at the point of sale, with the container then transported by compressed air and partial vacuum, through the maze of tubing, to cashiers elsewhere in the store." Many supermarkets in the UK have these at the till.

justincormack 13y ago
I have never seen one in the UK... where?
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  lots of the bigger ones - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554632/Thief-stole-90000-from-supermarket-tubes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554632/Thief-stole-9...
  - justincormack 13y ago
    Ah interesting, makes sense I suppose to get cash away from tills.