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Rethinking Rail Travel: Boarding a Moving Train
PolygamousRanchKid tips this article about an idea for revolutionizing the rail system in the long-term:
"The idea is to have a city-wide network of trams that travel in a loop and connect with a high-speed rail service. But instead of passengers having to get off the tram at a rail station and wait for the next HSR service to arrive, the moving tram would 'dock' with a moving train, allowing passengers to cross between tram and train without either vehicle ever stopping. 'The trams speed up and the high-speed train slows down and they join, so they dock at high speed,' explains Priestman. 'They stay docked for the same amount of time that it would stop at a station,' he adds. While Priestman admits that it will be some time before his vision could be implemented, he says the time has come to rethink how we travel. 'This idea is a far-future thought but wouldn't it be brilliant to just re-evaluate and just re-think the whole process?' he says."
and perhaps to encase cities in caves of steel
rewriting history since 2109
Maybe the time has come to rethink _how much_ we travel...
Subject says it all, really.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
So, when we have our city with flying cars, domestic robots and all of the other commensurate sci-fi amenities which will never happen, we will also have a train we board at speed.
I'm sure in some abstract, never-going-to-happen way this is a really cool idea.
But it's so far detached from anything which will ever happen as to basically be a meaningless suggestion. These fantastic cities of the future will never actually happen unless we suddenly have unlimited cheap energy or resources ... the cost of rebuilding any major city would be absolutely ridiculous.
Harumph ... I must be getting old. Time was I'd think this was something cool. Now it's just another pointless futurist thought experiment.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I can imagine a scenario where one of the trains is packed, users try to squeeze in from one train into another. One person (or more..) does not fit in, there is no more track for the trains to be coupled, they HAVE to split even if the doors are held open by the passengers, and people up on the track between the wheels of both trains.
This is nothing new. Disney has been doing this for decades. In fact, the rest of the world could take a lesson or two from Disney's playbook. Notice that Disney designs its rides such that the line (queue) is constantly in motion. By contrast, Six Flags and other theme parks, you have to wait while the people on the ride are off. We should take this a step further and design aircraft with a removable passenger compartment akin to the 747 air freighter. The nose would open up and the incoming passenger module would slide out to be replaced by another outgoing module. This has the advantage of eliminating the one door bottleneck.
Have you ever been at the station when there was a really slow moving old lady at the front of the line, trying to get into the train, but moving at a snail's pace, holding up the whole line, and then still being in the doorway when it starts trying to close? Remember the loud buzzer that sounds to signal people to get out of the doors, that she's too deaf to hear, and ignores as she slowly continues toddling her way into the car, holding up the train, and still nobody else has managed to even get in?
I've been behind her several times. It's weird, almost every time I go to Toronto (the nearest place I've had to ride the subway), she's there in line in front of me. She's a really nice lady, but oh so very slow moving, and she won't accept help.
This proposed system would ensure that I would only ever be behind her once, because when the high-speed train and moving tram were not able to un-dock because she was still toddling along in the gap between them, they would either end up crashing and killing everyone, or they would separate anyways and either tear her in half, or drop her between the tracks and grind her into paste on the ground.
It is the last point that gets me. one would need a couple of miles of track next to each to be moving fast enough to make it worth while, however that eats up space, and the slow train would have to circle back around for the next train in sequence.
Also how do you do multi train platforms?
to me it seems like someone didn't think the idea through all the way.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
lets figure a way to bring the office, the work back home.
Home is home. Workplace is workplace.
The problem we have with all the smart phones and tablets and wifi and the internets is that we CANNOT shut ourselves of from our daily grind.
No thanks. I'm much happier knowing that when I leave my offices I'm done. There is no expectation that I am available to do work.
This is just moving back to 'cubes' where instead of being in a cube in an office space, your 'cube' is your room at home. That on so many levels is horrendous.
Why not instead of bring the work back home, all move in and live at work like.. oh I don't know.. those folks at Foxconn.
Yeah sounds great.
That may be true of urban mass transit systems and commuter rail, but intercity rail in the United States is slow because it is still largely pulled by diesel engines and low-speed electric engines. We do not have a high speed rail infrastructure, and even the stretches of rail that can support high speed operations are bogged down by grade-level crossings, regulations, other rail traffic, and the condition of some of the rails and overhead wires.
Palm trees and 8
That is poor rail network flaw, not szome absolute barrier. If you've ever used european mass transit, you know th system can be designed well. You get on a bus for the ride to yojr local station, which connects to larger stations... there are multiple paths, fast trains that only top at major cities, and slower trains that split off and stop at each, or every other town. The efficiency is awesome, and you can beat a car easily.
You'd need a significant length of straight track to accomplish the transfer. In corners, the different corner radii mean that you'd need to increase the distance between the train cars on the outside of the bend to make sure the cars stay lined up.
It'd be much simpler to link up the trains front-to-back. The Dutch ICM shows a practical design to do this. The ICM is only linked at standstill, but a few tweaks to the coupling (and possibly the doors) would allow it to be linked while moving. The mechanical link also makes it easy to ensure the trains keep matching speeds (just drive the rear train at a slightly higher power level than the front).
The drawback of this design is that there's only one connection point so the transfer is much slower.
The inconvenient truth is that mass transit must be sized for peak loads, and therefore runs no where near capacity most of the time. A train, tram, or bus fully loaded is very energy efficient. A train, tram, or bus lightly loaded uses way more energy per passenger-mile than a car. No transit authority remakes trains between rush hour and mid-day, nor do they have two fleets of buses so that they can switch from long articulateds at rush hour to mini-vans during mid day. Mass transit wastes huge amounts of energy, and we can't afford it any more.
The answer is self-driving cars. We already have door-to-door infrastructure for cars. With self-driving cars road capacity increases because the cars can run closer together and at higher or at least more consistent speeds. A self-driving car is a self-valet-parking vehicle, so parking lots and structures can be moved further from office buildings.
People working on any kind of mass transit solution that involves large vehicles like trains are exactly the fools that are wasting our fossil fuels the fastest. Show me solutions that scale up/down with the daily load fluctuation, and you have my interest.