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Swedish Firm Proposes City Buildings On Rails
Lanxon writes "A Swedish architecture firm that came up with a plan to roll buildings through a city on rails has won third prize in a competition to develop the Norwegian city of Åndalsnes. The company, Jagnafalt Milton, suggested that existing and new railroads could be built to provide the base for buildings that could be positioned differently depending on the seasons and on the weather. It proposed designs for rail-mounted single- and double-berth cabins, along with a two-story suite, reports Wired."
This also means that cities could just move south when the winter comes. It's not like some roadblock is going to do much when a whole city rolls in.
Aw crap, now the extension cord won't reach!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I can't remember if it was Felix the cat or Betty Boop, but it sounds a lot like this. The buildings were all on rails and moved around as needed, and people got on a stationary "train" car while the buildings came to them in a strange inversion of normal travel methods
I mean, those guys can do absolutely anything on rails, and I'll bet it only took a few lines of code.
I am officially gone from
They could be even more flexible if everyone lived in trailers. You wouldn't have to wait for all your neighbors to move when it was time to pull up stakes, nor would you be forced to move when your neighbors get wanderlust.
It proposed designs for rail-mounted single- and double-berth cabins,
Make mine a double-wide.
What is old is new again.
More music, fewer hits
One proposed method of colonizing Mercury is to build a city on rails that circles the slowly-spinning planet, always staying in the shady site where temperatures are cool enough for human habitats.
With this story, such an idea doesn't seem nearly so far-fetched.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Film at 11.
Quoth TFA:
The idea, says the agency, was to use the city's railway infrastructure -- left behind from the days when it was an maritime construction town, building oil rigs -- as a basis for its future. Konrad Milton, one of the partners in the company, told Wired.co.uk: "As we see it there are two major benefits. First, it's easier to put buildings on existing train tracks than to demolish the tracks and build regular building foundations. Secondly the city of Åndalsnes has different needs depending on season." ...
Why rail and not roads? Milton says: "In this case the railtracks are in such abundance that it's the obvious choice, but the idea with rolling buildings could work very well in situations where roads and other hard surfaces are in abundance -- like old military airfields, harbors or over sized highways."
Interesting recycling of old infrastructure. Reminds me of how Manchester England recycled a lot of its old inner city industrial warehouses and converted them to loft apartments. The population of the city centre boomed and and the already legendary nightlife of the city was given another boost as the place was gentrified. (Pity about the Hacienda nightclub though, it ended up becoming loft apartments too.) A lot of their old railways were recycled as tram lines. Trams running on the old railway tracks run at 50MPH which may not sound like much, but for travel in a built-up urban area it beats the hell out of anything you could do by road. The tram system (called Metrolink) combines that speed in the suburbs with the convenience of dropping you off literally at the doorstep of the shops and offices in the city centre. It's so popular that overcorwding was its biggest problem last time I was there.
I'm not sure if Åndalsnes could re-use their old railway lines in that way but this mobile building thing is pretty innovative and exciting. Kudos!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
As somebody who keeps up with this kind of stuff (albeit often with a rather quizzical expression), you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on. Don't think about how monstrously impractical this would be. Don't consider the long-term maintenance issues involved with the moving parts, the problems involved with things like plumbing and electrical service, or the insulation requirements of a floor raised up off the ground in a northern climate. Don't try to think about how much simpler it would be to achieve the same goals in a passive design. Don't think about any of these things, because if you do your brain will break from the glaring obviousness of the problems. Just take a moment to appreciate the zoomy science-fiction cool factor, and get on with your day.
When they're going down the track, they can say "We built this city on rock and roll!"
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
This seems like a gimmick, but I have a fantasy that might actually be feasible - not for me, but for truly rich people. The idea would be to convert old railroad cars into luxury traveling apartments. There is plenty of room in one of those things for very comfortable living if the interior is designed ergonomically. The way I picture it, cities could "beautify" some of their defunct freight stations into rail car parks - parking lots for luxury rail apartments.
Occupants could then negotiate transport of their apartment by attaching it to various freight trains at competitive prices. Moving freight by rail is pretty cheap, so this sort of "migration" might actually be pretty affordable once you've bought/rented one of these rolling apartments. I picture this working especially well on a continent like Europe, where there is lots of rail and lots to see. Next year, the rail tunnel under the Bosphorus will mean that you can take a rail car from Scotland to the Middle East on standard gauge rail. If China comes through on its plan to build a railroad across Asia into Turkey, that would extend the mobility of these apartments even farther.
Of course, you could argue that shipping container apartments might be more practical and less constrained geographically, but that's just much less romantic.
It's the Crimson Assurance!!
I'm sorry but I can't imagine this working.. As we all know buildings require a firm foundation. In order to have a rail system that could potentially hold the weight of the building at any given point the entire rail system would have to be build upon a foundation strong enough to hold the heaviest of buildings.. The costs would be astronomical; and for what? Miles of empty track?
The all-contingency plan B: move the entire city 5 miles down the road!
Problems :
Using rail does not remove the problems you would have with the obvious alternate way : trailers. You basically have all of the disadvantages of using mobile trailers stacked with ADDITIONAL problems from width limits on a rail line. I'm not even going to go into the problems associated with mobile homes/trailers, other than to say that every single one I have ever been in sucked.
And another additional problem : you can tow mobile homes and trailers over gravel and dirt roads that are dirt cheap to build and maintain (pun intended)
Rail is VERY expensive : about $1 million/mile. Totally economically unfeasible to build the additional rail segments this plan would need to work, as well as to bring the old abandoned track up to code that this architect has in mind to use.