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Ski Lifts Can Could Help Get Cargo Traffic Off the Road
An anonymous reader writes with this except from a beautifully illustrated, thought-provoking article: "These days, we use them almost exclusively to transport skiers and snowboarders up snow slopes, but before the 1940s, aerial ropeways were a common means of cargo transport, not only in mountainous regions but also on flat terrain. An electrically powered aerial ropeway is one of the cheapest and most efficient means of transportation available. Some generate excess energy that can be used to power nearby factories or data centers. An innovative system called RopeCon (not to be confused with a role-playing convention held annually in Finland) can move up to 10,000 tonnes of freight per hour."
Ski lifts, however, are of no utility when conducting a simple once-over of one's grammar.
what advantage does this technology hold over trains?
There used to be an aerial tramway for moving mining ore in Zeehan in Tasmania. It was the neatest thing I have ever seen. Never did figure why they stopped using it. High maintenance costs maybe. Locally we have some big mining conveyors of 40km+ (Google Maps - Del park, Western Australia). The RopeCon system seems a great combo of these that has potentially less impact than building a road. V Interesting.
This does not only concern energy use: contrary to a road or a railroad track, a cargo ropeway can be built straight through nature without harming animal and plant life (or, potentially, straight through a city without harming human life).
Then scroll down to the big ugly modern cargo ropeways/conveyor belts in the bottom of the article and you can see they're ugly as fuck and can be seen for many miles around. Compared to that a road or railroad is almost invisible. They also generously ignore that we've gotten a lot better at building bridges and tunnels than before, not worse.
I suppose it makes sense if you have a huge, stable amount of materials moving point-to-point, but for the most part such a cargoway will only add another exchange point where goods must be unloaded and reloaded which costs time and money. Also there's very little flexibility, with trucks or trains you can run more or less and even sell parts of it if things are slow. With this you have almost only fixed costs and if you hit the capacity limit it's a very hard limit.
This reminds me a little of the people that try to revive the zeppelins, it's only going to work in some really niche cases and those places usually already have one.
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It was very useful in letting me know about the RopeCon convention in Finland, which everyone might have confused this device with with had it not clarified.
The principal problem of this, and most other similar suggestions, is that while such a system is good for a-b transport, reality is a network. Such a system helps you not at all, unless the goods to be delivered are already at the start-station, and are being transported to the end-station.
If not, you need to *first* load it on one mode of transport (typically some kind of car) -then- drive to the nearest "station" where the goods are repackaged, then near the destination, repeat.
It turns out the delays and costs of reloading cargo, frequently makes the economy such that it's better to simply go the entire distance by lorry. The advantage of the lorry is that it goes from where your goods are, to where you want them, with zero intermediary re-loads. (typically anyway, sure there's exceptions)
The lack of a robust network, also makes the system vulnerable. When (not if!) one ropeway breaks down, what do you do ? Reroute onto roads ? Wait ?
I think the best hopes are for dual-mode-transport, that is, vehicles that can drive both on normal roads -and- on special-purpose tracks of some sort. Doing this, gives you the best of two worlds. Have a look at http://www.ruf.dk/ for an example system.
Who wouldn't want to say that!?!
In your face nuclear powered data centers!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You could read the article, where your questions are answered. These systems don't seem to be aimed at competing with interstate - in one case a maximum length of 10km is mentioned.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Is that if you have a stable, point-to-point thing then, well, you want a train. Trains work great for moving cargo. They are extremely efficient, using 1% or less of the energy a truck would need to move it. America still moves many, many tons of cargo daily by train. If you've ever visited a city with a major railway going through it you see trains multiple times an hour, 24 hours a day. They also move pretty quick. While heavy cargo trains can't zip like light rail passenger trains, they can still do 70ish MPH without a problem.
The only reason they aren't used in place of trucks for cargo completely is their inflexibility. They are largely point-to-point transit. You can't have crisscrossing rails and lots of intersections for them to turn on and choose where they want to go.
So I fail to see what a rope cargo system would do that trains don't do better. It certainly wouldn't be as fast, I have trouble believing it'd be as efficient, and as you say it'd be ugly.
Seems like a solution looking for a problem. We don't have a problem moving goods in bulk, place to place for cheap. Heavy cargo rail does a superb job, and promises only to get better with hybrid trains (locomotives are ideal for hybrid technology, they are electric direct drive already and the need a lot of added weight to function correctly). What we do not have is as good a system for delivering goods to a final destination. Trucks are the best we've come up with for something that can move a reasonable amount of material for a reasonable price, yet can go to arbitrary locations as needed.
I grew up in Porsgrunn, Norway, a city which had two such cable transport systems:
Both of them were used to transport limestone, the largest one moved the output north from the Kjørholt mines to the Hydro fertilizer factory on Herøya. It passed over several ravines and steep cliff faces and ran for decades with very little maintenance, although the amount of limestone rock underneath it, as well as the occasional lost carrier wagon laying on the ground showed that it would probably not be safe to climb up and hitch a ride in one of the (empty) returning wagons.
(I do remember being very tempted though, despite the warning signs and barbed wire wrapped around the supporting pylons!)
On this sat image you can easily see the remains of the system, in the form of the totally straight road "Gravavegen" and the four concrete supports which held a pylon where the system crossed the small bay "Versvika".
The other cable system ran more or less in parallel with the first, starting from an open quarry about 5 km east of the fertilizer factory and going south to the Norcem cement factory which also needed limestone as a raw material.
This one is much harder to locate on sat images, the most obvious sign is this wide stripe in the forest:
Norcem
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Nature doesn't care how it looks, it cares what it's footprint is. Roads result in a segmented habitat, millions of tons of CO2, and roadkill galore. This would result in none of those.
No animal has ever been hurt by an ugly construction, this structure exists above the trees. So the animals can live beneath it,their habitat is not cut up by a road, no animals are killed on the road.
Clearly you are one of those people who think oil slicks are good for nature because they sparkle so nicely in the sun.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
(a) less expensive to build than roads or rail
(b) can be built where roads or rail are problematic (steep vertical ascents/descents)
(c) can be partially (or entirely) powered by gravity
(d) can be operated during heavy snows and floods
Trains probably have an advantage over a long distance, especially over flat terrain. I would think that trains would also have a speed advantage and be somewhat more flexible.
What if, instead of dangling things from ropes and letting them swing around in the wind and such, we put the cargo in boxes on some kind of wheeled support structure that rode on narrow elevated support beams?
The coefficient of rolling friction between steel wheels and a steel support beam is something very very small, 0.001 or such. This has the advantage of keeping the cargo from swinging around so much.
One other improvement would be that, instead of pulling the cargo with a rope, you could make one of these box-on-wheels things that has its own method of locomotion, where it produced the electricity AND the force used to move the cargo. A catchy name for this thing might be "Locomotive" or some other such marketing name.
If you attached all the box-on-wheels things together, let's call them "box cars" to be cute, including the one that produced the electricity and force (Locomotive), then the whole thing moves together as one long train of cars... you could just call the whole thing a "train" to be simple.
I'm glad I talked through this. Which way to the Patent office?