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By Road and Rail?
CygnusXII writes "Now this is a novel approach to Dual Mode Transportation. This is an interesting and refreshing approach, that could revolutionize the transportation industry. BladeRunner Dual Mode Transport, or see the main web page. The innovative vehicle will run on road as well as rail. It is as applicable to freight as to passenger transport. Branch-line infrastructure costs could be at least halved because signalling and points could be largely, if not totally, made redundant."
I can't exactly see the railroad companies being eager to let these on their rails. And who pays for the cleanup when one of these bails - the operator, the company that owns the rails or some insurance company that is supported by a federal government?
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
I know a little about the railroads and they'll never let this thing on their tracks. They are absolutlely paranoid about safety and the idea of semi's moving onto and off of their mainline tracks would be totally unacceptable.
Here's an example. Another parallel-running railroad has a damaged track and they need to run on another railroad's track for a distance. What does the other railroad require? That at least one of it's employees ride along as a "pilot". In addition, steep fees are assessed the other railroad to use it's tracks.
Cute models and a hopeful business plan are nice, but it's just not going to happen in the US.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The Norfolk Southern railroad has used a variation of this idea for years in their Triple Crown Service.
Jonathan B.
They've had vehicles equipped with this for decades on all the local train tracks. Typically it's a pickup truck used for railway maintenance. The only potential new thing is the use of this on non-maintenance vehicles as a means of long-distance consumer/commercial transportation.
A quick google search returned this page which looks about the same as what these dual-mode vehicles look like.
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I would love to see how this flies in Canada with the railroad system here. They don't like to share their railroads with anyone (ask the shortlines if you doubt this) and one little secret they rather not let be known is they hate transporting two things: Grain and People. Of course their PR department begs to differ.
But this would be an absolutely brilliant thing in Western Canada in places like Saskatchewan where horrible roads have made travelling by vehicles dangerous. Send these things by rail a large chunk of the distance to a location like Eastend for example, and they can get off and drive the rest of the distance to wherever they need be.
A track motor car is an automobile that has an additional set of wheels to allow it to drive on train tracks. This technology was commonly known in the rail industry in 1957, so there's nothing new about it.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
you have a dual purpose buss rolling along a rail route at, ummm, what, 80kmph? It weighs, what? 10 tons? 20 tons? Then right behind it is a kilometer long train full of, oh, I dunno - NAPTHA - that's roaring along at what?140kmph? ANd it weighs how many hundreds of tons? And takes how long to stop?
And then Brer Rabbit pulls the STOP AT NEXT CORNER pull tab in the dual purpose bus, and while he's getting his geriatric bones off the bus, everyone is sighing and wondering WHEN THE HELL HE'S GOING TO GET THE HELL OFF THE BUS. And as he ever so slowly mosies off the bus BLAMMO! Hit from behind by a train full of naptha.
The thing goes up like a tactical nuke.
This idea of a dual purpose bus is dumb dumb dee dumb, dumb dee dumb dee dumb dee dumb.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Not hard since Jessy and the boys/gals did this on Monster Garage a few week back. As stated the power comes from the tires runing on the railes while the Train wheels guide it.
Think they did is in Lethal Weapon 3.
If this thing was automated you might run into some problems, but then again it could be worse or just annoying.
I also seen several ideas on regular busses being fitted with guide systems so that could be driven without steering in between concrete guiderails. The advantage? It would require only track not a full road. The "hole" in the middle would make watering a lot lot easier while also leaving the area greener (and stop passenger cars from driving accross buslanes). At the same time the busdriver has less to concentrate on.
This idea seems more aimed at existing tracks. Plenty of places in the world where the old local railroad never been pulled up after the line was cancelled that could use the "faster" route for rural lines. I personally travelled by bus along a previous railroad route. Or rather the bus detoured a lot to zigzag accross highways while passing villages that if it had been following the railroad it could have served. I know because the railroad is used as a museum and the historical steam train journey is shorter then the bus journey.
So I do think the idea got some merrit, just not for freight. No big operator of a railroad is going to allow a vehicle like this. The biggest problem on the highspeed networks (where you need the signalling to be able to drive insanely fast in the worst of weather, old dutch commericial had a race driver boasting he could beat the speed limit in thick fog. He was sitting in a train :p ) is the number of vehicles that can be fitted. Better to run a few big trains then try to fit countless tiny busses on your major lines.
Since old rural lines tend to run from city center to village center a truck would have little point going there.
So a nice idea to breathe some life back into old rural lines without all the problems of busses (busses often don't really "fit" onto rural roads wich are often not designed for fast local traffic).
But as I said I seen this kinda thing before. About the closest I seen in practice is de "noord-zuid-as" bus "road" that operates in Amsterdam around the airport. Wich is a normal bus but a bit longer and drives on its own concrete road bypassing other traffic.
In Arnhem there is a trolley bus that can more easily leave the electric grid it is usually connected to by carrying its own generator. Allowing clean silent transport in the city but even more room to manouver then a normal trolley bus (they got tiny generators making off grid travel slow and noisy).
One thing I got a problem with however is their boasting about braking distances. Trains brake a lot slower and this is a good thing. People walk in a train, last thing you want is to stop so sudden all the people end up in the first carriage. Busses have a slight advantage that if they have an accident then it tends to be with passenger cars meaning they sorta just keep going. Fast braking with all your passengers loose is not a good thing. There been a few accidents with busses and lorries and the results are people dying at slow speeds. Unless this thing enforces the use of seatbelts they better make sure that emergency stop is not used.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm not sure how well devoloped the British rail system is
Currently it's approximately 21,000 miles of track, 1,000 signal boxes 9,000 level crossings, and 2,500 stations. There's about 10,000 mainline passenger train movements each day in and out of central London alone. In infrastructure terms britain has the best railway in the world, and that's after more than 2/3 of the original network was decomissioned in the sixties.
For a country about the same area as Oregon or Colarado that's a lot of rails. Of course in many ways the trains are not very good, but as long as America keeps her railroads running, we know we're not the worst! ^_^
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They would NEVER let anyone other than a locomotive engineer, making that sort of obscene salary, drive one of these things without implementing a union strike, and making it significantly unprofitable for railroads to use.
It's a nice idea, certainly, but thanks to the choke-hold that the BLE and UTU have on railroads, it'll never (profitably) happen.
Apparently, this author has never seen a "container". They've been around for what... 30 years? 40 years? The go on tractor trailers, ships, and rail. They're self-contained, cheap, and the infrastructure for quick switching of them from one mode of transport to another is already there. Freight is already past these little cartoons. Whether there's any need for passenger transport that's dual mode is another question entirely.
The cars could have smallish batteries that allow for short range driving under human control off of the tracks to/from your final destination (they would recharge from the grid and would run under fully automatic control while on the tracks). In urban settings, you might always be less than 1 mile from the nearest track on-ramp, so range wouldn't be a issue. For long drives in the boondocks, a small trailer or module with a gasoline or diesel engine could be attached to create a hybrid vehicle.
People would punch in their destination at the start of the trip, and the central control system would schedule the entire trip ahead of time, thus avoiding all traffic jams (barring software bugs). If the system lacks the capacity to instantly add the trip, it could make a reservation and tell the rider to chill out and get something done before starting; this would be much better than sitting in traffic.
What if you need to haul cargo? You might check out a virtual trailer at the lumber yard that's programmed to follow a few feet behind your vehicle. Unload it, guide it back to the on-ramp, and then it automatically returns to the store. Or, if you move a lot of stuff, you could buy your own trailer(s); you could make a whole train if you want.
The vast majority of standard truck and train cargo is comprised of packages small enough to fit in these smallish vehicles. Large numbers of them could automatically move most cargo around the country when traffic is otherwise low. This could save a lot of money on labor, but current truckers would not be pleased.
Of course, the Denver airport baggage handling system fiasco demonstrates just how hard something like this would be to implement. However, I think that it's still worth thinking about ways to improve over our current choices of wasteful overpowered, oversized automobiles and inconvenient slow public transportation (which is also wasteful because of its low average load factor).
What if you really just like to drive? I think that the freed-up Interstates could be reallocated as amusement parks. Remove all speed limits and rent out Ferraris and Porches for high-speed joy riding.
This will never work for several reasons. One who will drive the vehicle on the last leg? It would be too expensive to have a driver waiting to meet the train to drive that last leg and way too expensive to have alot of drivers riding along the way to make the last leg. There would be a great need to mix the passengers to get them to their destination vehicle and there is no way they can change while under way so at every stop they would have to allow passenger to get off and back on in other vehicles thus increasing the length of travel to unacceptable lengths. What is needed is for a way for people to quickly drive their own cars onto a train than reach the closest point of their destination and than quickly drive off it again thus eliminating that last driver and giving people their own transportation at their destination.
There are places that this would be a hit.
I'm in Georgia and there are a huge number of rail lines in use for moving agricultural products around. Most people don't notice or mention the trains at all anymore (except maybe at a murmur). But there are many lines still around that are in use and many that have only been out of use since the train companies started downsizing in the eighties due to better roads and cheaper truck shipping costs undercut their monopolies.
Rails stretch to the more remote parts of Georgia which are barely touched by commercial air. Though in replacement and downsizing theres still a large rail infrastructure that goes to Atlanta suburbs and so forth. The problem is that the roads have become the dominant and unasailable mode of transport here. There are many places that air, river, and rail will not get you even if they are less expensive and with less impact on the environment.
Imagine a shuttle service on these dual mode transports that can take people from Augusta to Marietta (probably for some religious or S&M convention). Rail could get you most of the way there (and at one fifth of the fuel cost of bus traffic) while the final legs would have to be taken on road.
Athens has a van shuttle service that goes to the Hartsfield airport in Atlanta on a regular basis. Many people take it because it will get them to Atlanta without a car and they can ride the MARTA train system around Atlanta. The dual mode vehicle, variable destinations of certain passengers, and fairly regular schedule would be a purpose for these vehicles.
Heck, even Atlanta's Metro transit system (MARTA) could strongly benefit from these vehicles. Right now they have a limited fleet of busses and an electric heavy rail system with a very limited set of destinations. While it would take major restructuring and expense, a hybrid rail/bus system would be very beneficial. Being able to offer. It might be a scheduling nightmare, but having recently gone to San Francisco and seen what a well run mass transit system can do I fully believe they need to start over on MARTA anyway.
Roads are the only growing, funded, maintained transportation system in Georgia. A hybrid vehicle that allowed use of the extensive rail infrastructure in this state could be a major boost for mass transit.
I want to see car trains along major long-distance highways. They'd ferry parked cars along heavily trafficked arteries. That would reduce the tremendous waste of commuter traffic on local streets.
For example, the shortest road across Brooklyn, from Manhattan to Long Island, is about 10 miles on Atlantic Avenue. It runs from a major confluence of 10 subway lines, a commuter rail, the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, a dozen bus lines and a water taxi, out to two major highways and JFK international airport. But it's a local street, with cross traffic, stoplights and turns - so it takes about 45 minutes for each of the literally hundreds of thousands of commuters to drive each way, each day. Under it, and a block over, run 4 subway lines and a pair of commuter rail lines.
I'd like to drive up a ramp, filling up a railcar, and parking, as the railcar drove away from the downtown terminal headed to the airport. And the same coming the other way. Railcars would leave continuously, as they filled, with a parking lot to accumulate extra arriving cars as railcars departures are occasionally delayed. Another lot at the end would accomodate extra cars accumulating when the exit highways are backed up. That start and end capacity would also allow railcars to be staggered on the existing rail lines, allowing existing rail traffic to share the lanes in the loop.
A cartrain trip would take 15 minutes. Drivers could stay in their parked cars, but would be required to reenter their cars for departure by at latest 5 minutes before arrival. A fare of 2 dollars each way might even get people to carpool more, especially if carpool lanes were available leaving the exits. The drive time would be predictable, allowing less time alloted to the entire trip. The stressful drive across Brooklyn would be removed, benefitting the drivers and the Brooklynites along the way. Local congestion would be relieved as much as the commuters would be accelerated. Accidents, pollution, road and car wear, and fuel consumption would plunge. And an underutilized transit resource would be used properly, rather than laying idle under a 10-mile traffic jam. All aboard!
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make install -not war
Actually, this *has* already been done for freight. I can't find links at the moment, but Swift has trailers that they tie together with rail "dollys" ... you can recognize these trailers because they've got smaller wheels mounted on them than the standard trailers and they have locking points on the rear deck.
Unfortunately, BNSF is the only rail line that'll run them right now because there's a significant risk of derailing. There's a lot of side-to-side flex put on any rail car, and most rail cars are stiff enough to take it -- but making a road/rail car stiff enough would end up making the trailer too heavy for the tractor to pull it. The road/rail cars that Swift uses have a tendency to twist while in motion, and things can break or snap and cause a derailment.
Neat idea, but knowing what I know about those swift trucks, I wouldn't ride in a rail/road passenger vehicle ... no way, no how.
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They say their system reduces rail wear, because of the way in which it corners. Rail maintainence should be reduced to once every 25 years - incredible!
Why wouldn't regular trains be able to use the same system to reduce rail wear.
AC
It seems like a lot of the rebuttals are based upon the logistic or bureaucratic blocks to running this on current railways. I think that this, and new passenger-only railways along the interstate highways, is just what the USA needs. It has a lot more potential than just adding another regular lane.
Sustainability and energy independence essay