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Underground Freight Networks
morphovar writes "The German Ruhr University of Bochum is conducting experiments with a large-scale model for an automated subterranean transport system. It would use unmanned electric vehicles on rails that travel in a network through pipelines with a diameter of 1.6 meters, up to distances of 150 kilometers. Sending cargo goods through underground pipelines is anything but new — see this scan of a 1929 magazine article about Chicago's underground freight tunnel network (more details). Translating this concept to the 21st century would be something like introducing email for things: you could order something on the Internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning."
you insensitive clod!
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Did someone get ahold of an old Popular Mechanics or something?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Meh. By the time they get something like this up and running, home fabbing will probably be very viable anyway.
Je me fous du passé
Many large cities in the US had a Pneumatic Telegraph at one time. Basically one of those pneumatic tube package delivery systems, but spanning the whole city. This was back in the 1800's. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
I hear that Harriet Tubman has experience with this sort of thing.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I'm sorry, but that's just a dumb analogy. Email isn't overnight or even fast, it's nigh instantaneous. How about "overnight shipping for free" or something else that doesn't involve breaking it down into bits?
How about the security implications? Hack the system, free stuff. Or, mail a bomb to your ex.
The postal system is more secure because people are constantly in the loop.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
From the article: "Note that pneumatic systems could deliver physical objects, which is hard to do with email..."
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Just hope that a shipment of spam doesn't clog your tubes :)
this would be great target for terrorists, especially if it's your society's major delivery network. a few well-placed ticking bombs would bring you down. it ain't 1929 no more.
Nice fantasy - we can't even get fiber to the home let alone deliver things to your cellar.
This would be such an amazing improvement over the current state of affairs, where I can order something on the Internet and pick it up through a front door in my living room the next morning.
I read Usenet for the articles.
I believe you mean Aperture Science Vital Apparatus Vent.
Even if this were practical for large businesses like the old pneumatic tube system in NYC, there is no way it would be practical for someone to dig it out to every home in the area for a handful of deliveries per month at the most. Digging tunnels is expensive and time consuming.
The best you could hope for is to have it dug to the basement of a large apartment complex.
I read the internet for the articles.
Denver International Airport tried something along that line.
Things went so badly that when they sent camera equipped luggage to trouble shoot the system, they lost their camera equipped baggage. Forever.
United finally abandoned the system a few years ago, though they're still paying for it.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Because its the only thing that makes sense?
You going to put a large tube above ground in the way of everything? This is the well established technique - subways, sewers, utility tunnels, even catacombs. If this were to be implemented it could even follow the existing networks. The tubes could follow the subways to neighborhood distribution centers or the sewers to individual buildings.
If you put it above ground, you get increased traffic congestion (given that it will reduce available space), lesser security (items could "fall off the truck" any place the system was accessible) and a lesser adaptability. If a river is in the way of a surface road, you have to build a bridge. If a river is in the way of a tunnel, you build more tunnel.
Yep, it would cost a fortune to develop the new technology to make waterproof pipes. :-)
Apparently a contractor was doing work driving pilings into the river bed near one of the bridges, and in the process they damaged the roof of one of the tunnels where it went under the river. Chicago's system had been largely abandoned, but it still connected into subbasements of buildings all over downtown. It shut down downtown for days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Flood
I thought the first rule of Freight Club is that you aren't supposed to talk about it?
Recycled from trash, etc.
Actually, I think that fabbing is going to run into the same "intellectual property" felgercarb that music and video is running into. As far as I know, the only physical objects with copyright hinderances on them are buildings (not sure about china patterns, and silverware).
Right now, there are patents. Are there fair use clauses for patents? If I download a fabbing pattern from a foreign source, am I breaking patent law, or breaking import law? If I scan an object and distribute a fabbing pattern, have I broken patent law? What if I fab something I saw in a TV show, is that a copyright violation, a trademark infringement, or a patent violation? If a beautiful young female made off with one of my silverware fabbing patterns can I say that the dish ran away with the spoon?
I think we may look back on the halcyon days of yore when we only had the RIAA to deal with.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The first thing that one must ask, after ohh-ing and ahh-ing over the fantastic concept, is 'Why did this fail in the past?' Because really great ideas in city planning are never new, and have always been tried before. If it is still around, then it worked. If not, then it was abandoned because it didn't work. Why?
This mini-tunnel concept was done in Paris about 100 years ago. Small packages were delivered around the city using compressed air in a long series of tubes. It was abandoned by the late 1960s.
Tunnels have problems. Especially in the middle of cities. The buildings are high and the foundations are deep. The tunnels have to be deeper. And their sides re-enforced.
How are you going to keep the water out of them?
What do you do when they become obstructed by cave-in or automated-container collisions?
Who's going to pay for all this?
Who's going to pay to fix it in twenty to fifty years when it becomes known that massive amounts of money were stolen during the initial construction phase? (like the 'big dig' in Boston).
One of the great things about being a student of German history is to watch them meticiously design, craft, and build an elaborate 'solution' and then blow it all up in a fit of Wagnerian madness. Then pick up the pieces, go back into 'DeutscheKraftwerk' (not a real word but a real concept) mentality, and begin the whole process all over again with a new generation purified by fire and the triumph of the will. While the rest of the world just watches and feels sorry for their neighbors.
I have already formed HamsterGram LLC, a company that sends messages by tying them to the back of hamsters and then letting them loose in the giant network of empty fiber-optic conduits that cross the United States.
Routing is easy, as different hamsters have been trained to prefer different types of food - Chicago hamsters prefer pizza, New York hamsters prefer vended hotdogs, Wisconsin hamsters prefer sharp cheddar, etc.
To solve the last mile problem I have issued them all armored hamster balls, so if you see one rolling down the street for the sake of your car I'd recommend avoidance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MailRail, in London, came closest to the proposed system. Little automated electric trains carried mail since 1928. It was shut down in 2003. (It's still intact, though; it might be restarted some day.)
MailRail gives a sense of the constraints of a realistic system. The tunnels are 9 feet in diameter and double-tracked, so it's possible to get repair crews and equipment into the tunnels without much trouble. For small-tube systems, breakdowns are tough to deal with. MailRail was a railroad in miniature, with stations, sidings, switches, repair shops, and work trains. Even rails wear out and have to be reground or replaced, so MailRail had the gear to do "maintenance of way" work. All those things are needed, and many of them are labor intensive.
The operating cost on MailRail was quite high, even though all the capital costs had long since been paid for. Cost was 3x to 5x the cost of using trucks. But the real problem was that it didn't go to the right places; over the decades, post offices had been moved to locations off the MailRail line, and only three of the nine stations were still in use.
The Chicago tunnel system had a different problem. It was designed when long-haul freight was by rail and local delivery was horse-powered. Bear in mind that trains were routinely hauling heavy loads by 1850, but trucks didn't appear until the 1920s and didn't work well until the 1930s. (1920s trucks had power comparable to that of a small car today.) So for a seventy-year period, local delivery was badly matched to long-haul transport. Early attempts to deal with this problem involved breeding very large horses. This was the period of pneumatic tubes, underground freight rail systems, and similar attempts to fix the local delivery problem. Once truck engines and drivetrains become powerful enough to do the job, those local delivery systems were no longer needed.
"In the apartment buildings on Roosevelt Island, residents drop their trash down chutes, and it gets sucked at nearly 60 miles per hour through 20-inch underground pipes that run more than a half-mile up the island. After arriving at the ground floor of a gray three-story building at the north end of the island, the trash is compacted to about one-twentieth of its original size, sealed in a container and trucked to landfills outside the state." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/nyregion/19trash.html
The thing to remember is that no one owns the underground. In the heavily urbanized areas where these are planned, you'd have to condemn a lot of private property and route around existing roads. railroads, etc. That can be a lot more expensive than digging holes.
My understanding is that I *do* own whatever is under my property. If there's oil/gas/other valuable stuff under the property that I own, then those resources are my property.
Or not. In many areas, the government sold off the mineral rights (the rights to the underground resources you're talking about) to a mining company decades ago.
A friend of mine (pardon the pun), worked for 30 years in a limestone mine. Most people in the mid-sized city above the mine didn't even know it was there, and didn't know that a huge amount of stuff had been (and continues to be) mined out from under their land.
As an aside, he was full of fun stories about how when they reopened part of the mine that had been closed off for thirty years they found a bunch of 1950s cars buried down there, and how when they needed to get water for the machines they drilled upwards - and the water came out hot.
Remember the Simpson's episode featuring the "Burns Slant-Drilling Company" that sucked out all of the oil from under the school? It's not so far from reality.
Conversely, if there's nasty stuff in the ground under my property (old chemical tanks, etc.), then I'm responsible to remove said stuff or pay the price for environmental damage that they might cause.
Ah, that's where they get you, because you're most likely correct about that.
Putting moderation advice in your
Google has a few chapters of Richard's book about military tunnel-digging posted.
-FL