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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!
Why do we need this? Maybe it is because I am an American, and I am still waiting for high speed rail in the first place, but I am not really seeing the advantage to this system.
Palm trees and 8
Yeah, I saw this on that movie, with the bus. Taking passengers out the door, at 55 MPH. I think it was called, "The bus that couldn't slow down".
I've seen some time ago another concept for the same, apparently in China. Here is the link to a video explaining how it would work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snFmLkOmkjE
those British guys need to learn to infringe on other people's intellectual property
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.
Some just needs to loop the camera feeds
If we could get trams not to stop because of traffic that would be very good already.
Okay, so the obvious first question is - how do you get on the trams? Do they stop? Unfortunately the article is a hand-waving fluff piece and doesn't explicitly answer that (or, really, any other) question; but it strongly implies "yes, they do stop". So what's the real advantage to the traveler here?
It seems to me the main thing this guy is proposing is actually a transit system with connections on every street, so you don't have to own a car at all. But that's nothing new and exciting, so he had to "jazz it up" to get attention - and that's where the "high-speed trains that never stop" idea comes in. But, really, that's not going to save a traveler any time. Plus, frankly, as soon as I started thinking about the potential details of this system... I quickly came to the conclusion it would seem logistically sub-optimal.
#DeleteChrome
Disney has been doing this for decades. The ride slows, the passenger steps onto a moving belt and from there onto the platform. It requires one or more attendants available to help and occasionally hit the emergency stop when the slow and/or unwary find themselves rushing toward the dark chasm at the end of the platform.
Now if they would just install parachutes and ejection seats in airliners ...
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.
When I ride the T or commuter rail, the bottleneck is at the doors to get in the cars. One small door on either end of the car, with people competing to get on and to get off. *My* brilliant idea is to have the entire side wall of the car roll up like a garage door so that people can board and detrain en masse. The problem is with the placement of the seats.
How does this compare to personal rail transport networks? Not favorable I think. This systems still has all the downsides of standard mass transit solutions, which means that you have to go to the stop, travel with other and get your travel interrupted by switching. The benefit is only faster switching, and the system is complex, requires large infrastructure and is far from commercialization.
PRT:s are expected to hook up in trains to for long-distance travel at high speed.
At a station, the train can be delayed if passengers are blocking the door. When you're travelling at speed and the slow/fast tracks are about to diverge, you have no choice but to separate the trains and dump those slow passengers between the tracks. At least it would be more efficient.
Subject says it all (again) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
I would think that the time savings would even be more dramatic on a plane. plus the planes would not have to go through as amny pressure cycles. thus the long-distance planes could be built lighter, while the short haul dock ing craft built heavier.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I suppose a model for this is how passengers or crew are moved to and from large ships during travel since they can't easily slow down or change direction. How's that done at the moment?
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.
If I understand this correctly, the 'slow' trains work like a sort of express bus system (or, to be more precise, a streetcar system). They do a slow milk run in the neighbourhood, picking people up. Then, after leaving the slow area, it speeds up to dock with the train, where you transfer over. It's kind of complicated, but I could see it working. So here would be your travel day. Wake up, catch the slow train at the corner, then after a short while, transfer over to the train. Then, when the slow train for your destination docks, transfer to that one. Get off at the stop for work, and walk the rest of the way. The idea here is to cut out the middleman. Instead of having to wait at another bus (train) station for the next high speed train to arrive, you simply transfer directly to the train.
There are, admittedly, a few problems. First off, this would only save time for people who have to regularly make the sort of 'bus-train-bus' connection. Secondly, this doesn't seem very error-proof. If people can't make the transfer fast enough, then you end up being stuck on the slow train until you can make another pass at the next one. Thirdly, you'd need quite a large section to make sure you have enough time to make the transfers.
That being said, this is definitely an interesting idea. I'd like to see someone work all the kinks out, though.
Cynical Idealist
The advantage of the current systems is its safety. If someone is stuck in the door, the doors will not close, and the train will not take off. If someone is stuck in the doorway in Priestman's idea, the poor sap will be hung out to dry when the tracks diverge. I suppose the tracks could be close enough to dock for a long enough time that if the doors aren't closed at the end of the boarding window, the trains could come to a complete stop. But that sounds like a lot of extra room, and hence, extra cost.
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.
I see many problems with boarding a moving train from a moving platform, compared to boarding stationary train from stationary platform. Think of all the edge cases that could get people killed. People who fall down and can't get up for whatever reason. Or just someone causing trouble.
Safe and better might be having passengers board a compartment that then accelerates to join the larger heavier moving train. Passengers would transfer from the lightweight capsule to the train, and others would leave the train onto the capsule. The capsule would accelerate to a stop at the next station, while the train continued.
Will they just rip apart, when the train and the tram goes in different direction? I assume that neither will have the time to stop...
I agree. It could not work for anything practical. Just imagine someone getting caught between the doors while they were open when the trains HAD to separate due to lack of parallel track. I can think of how many times the DC metro tries to close the doors, but then fails and re-opens them. This happening at speed with an 'enforced time limit' can not work.
You always have some yahoo holding open the door for his slow walking friend. What's the train going to do when the moving platform comes to the end of the line? Cut his arm off?
-AlPhAbEt
To be fair, I suspect that both you and I live in North America. This system is intended for Europe, which, to my understanding, has the kind of space required for the transfer time at high speeds.
Cynical Idealist
Exactly what problem is this supposed to solve? It reminds me of the scene in Robots (2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AsgfVIOeQ) where they travel around the big city on a collection of various "rube goldberg" contraptions that seemingly never stop moving...
Ken
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.
This is not a good idea at all. This increases the complexity of an already complicated enough system, and the ways in which catastrophic failures will happen (and they will happen).
Anybody probably could come up with a hundred ways things could go wrong without ever even seeing a system like that in action. Also what the hell is the gain here?
You can't handle the truth.
In Rio de Janeiro, when I lived there, if you looked at all agile the bus would not completely stop to let you on. It would slow down to a walking pace so you could grab the handle next to the door and let the momentum of the train swing you aboard. Since you boarded at the rear door and exited at the front door you never go in the way of disembarking passengers; who also often exited while the bus was moving.
It was great sport and probably saved a lot of fuel. Not sure I'd like to do it at my age now (68) but I might just for old times' sake. LOL
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Not just speed of transfer, but synchronisation. If either train is early/late by more than a few minutes it'll either leave all the passengers stranded or require one of the trains to wait, which destroys the advantage of the system and potentially causes knock-on delays further down the line.
As well as the obvious "what if someone takes to long to switch and is between trains when they split" (which could be solved by some form of automatic emergency stop, though that could jam up the whole system for a short while as other trains and trams are backed up by the delay), there is the more simple problem of the long straigh track needed. Even if slowing to 30mph (given they mention the tram speeding up, I assume the connection won't be any slower than this) you need a mile for as two-minute change over plus the distance they'll travel while syncing speed and making the connection plus some safety margin at each end. That is at least 3 miles of uninterrupted perfectly parallel tracks. OK so 3 straight miles are very easy to find on a high-speed line outside urban areas, but that means the tram has to travel that far to get to the meeting ponit which will use more power and therefor fuel. I suspect the time savings to be minimal anyway, especially once you account for delaysd due to regular emergency stops, and I doubt there will be much by way of energy savings (OK so you are not stopping and starting the HST woudl will save a chunk, tbut the trams will probably end up eating what you save there by having to travel the distance to the meetup zone). The trams as a way to travel to and from the interchange are not a bad idea, and already implemented in some placdes, but I can't say the high-speed docking thing is anything other than lunacy.
What is wrong with these guys??? Why they don't give credit to the one that actually depicted such a system? Anyone? Isaac Asimov? You know him, ain't you?
I think the intention is that I could leave my house. Walk to the local 'tram' stop, be transferred onto a train from there and then back onto a tram when it reaches my destination city which then drops me off at the tram stop nearest my destination. Would be a great experience, although retrofitting it into current cities would be 'interesting'...
Advantage: All stations 1..6 get connected nonstop to cities 0 and 7, while passengers going from 0 to 7 only need to stop once. Of course, this requires each car to be motorized and automatically controlled. Also, it only works if you're going from station 0 to n or from station n to 7, not from n to m. Additionally, the idea is surely not original so feel free to google that for me.
Assume that you make the transfer at 120 km/hr, that means that if you want to have a 5 minute dwell time, you need 10 km of track to make the transfer. You'll need more track for a buffer to slow down in case there's mechanical difficulty or a passenger problem and you need to bring the trains to a halt.
Now, a "tram" is typically a one or maybe two car light rail vehicle. Your HSR trains are typically 10 cars. Are you only loading onto 2 cars at a time? That's workable in rural areas but how do you handle the big cities? Or do you try to form the LRVs into a longer train to load up. Any LRVs that miss the schedule will really screw things up.
This sounds neat but it's not really practical.
Some of the rides at Disneyland have started taking advantage of this idea by moving the passengers along on a moving beltway (kind of like at the airport) next to the ride... So you board the ride without the ride having to slow down at all... e.g. the Buzz Lightyear ride does this and I recall that it worked pretty well.
Yeah, the system doesn't seem very robust. That being said, I'm sure a good civil engineer could find some way to make it work.
Cynical Idealist
I'm not sure where you got the idea that we have the space for such things. Most of our train stations are in cities. Most railways go through cities as well. You can't just knock over some buildings to add a bunch of rails. It took them years to buy up enough land to double the amount of tracks on a 50km trajectory over here. Not to mention that these trains really don't need that much distance to speed up to 140km/h (or faster). This money would be better invested in energy recuperation systems.
reley European cities are rather crowded - this is a cloud cookoo land fantasy
Hanging off a metal bar and being picked up in a net would be way cooler than a tram. You could probably charge extra for the 'Xtreme'-ness.
Well, it's not like the high speed train is incapable of stopping.
You just set your "must undock" point far enough back that if for some reason the undock can't happen, the high speed train has enough room to come to a stop with the streetcar still docked. Throws a bit of delay into the trip, but nobody dies.
It would be a lot simpler to just have all the passengers watch old Buster Keaton movies to teach them how to jump onto a moving train with no special equipment required.
Many posters have spotted that this post is a rehash, a troll or perhaps a straight faced sendup joke from a design firm.
The graphic art accompanying the original article might have been copied from a 1930's art deco transportation fantasy science fiction book cover.
But here is a really good question: What client paid this design firm to develop this specific presentation? How much do design firms charge per hour? $100 at least?
From the name of the design firm, I guess this is a two person design firm, and the real point of the article is for the designer to promote his design firm.
The modern way to speed up public transit is to publish a distributed database that client applications can combine with client data. See a non-exclusive blog post on this subject by me at:
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2011/04/ride-sharing-can-use-cell-phones-to.html
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.
One very simple solution to a LOT of the problems in Holland is to cut the train journeys up. Right now you got a service that runs from Heerlen to Den Helder and Nijmegen to Alkmaar. For those to whom this means nothing? It is the line you are on between Amsterdam and Utrecht, a VERY busy section of track WITH a HUGE bottle neck because it is 2 tracks only in Amsterdam, the capitol. So if a train gets stuck at Amstel (small station in Amsterdam) everything is stuck.
Heerlen is about as far south as you can go without having to learn Belgian and if you go any further north then Den Helder you better have flippers.
There aren't many people making the full journey. It takes more then 2 hours and that in Holland is a long journey.
BUT nonetheless, THAT is the route. Because when it was proposed to cut it up into sections so that a delay in one part of the country would not affect everywhere else, the train personel went on strike. They didn't want customer friendly, they wanted long journeys.
Right now, public transport service is rated as the WORSED service of ANYTHING in Holland. They don't care.
So good luck getting anything like this idea in place.
But the passengers aren't much better. Such a docking would be limitted in length. So what do you if a passenger is terminally slow? Any idea about speed has to consider that in the general public there are people who just aren't capable. Just plain capable. I am not talking about handicapped people, I am talking about people who just plain can't deal with life and freeze up. Train delays are most often caused by people being idiots. Somebody pulls the emergency chain because they suddenly realize they are in the wrong train.
Or elderly people stand up while the train is switching in front of a station and fall over.
The idea is not new. Moving sidewalks have done it and some entertainment rides have you step on a rotation platform to get into boats being pulled around the platform. And what they also got is a LOT of attendants to deal with the genetic waste who can't handle it.
Come up with any new idea to improve anything and you have to imagine in your mind a person you know with average IQ. Then remember that half the population is more stupid then that.
Simple example? You could speed up regular traffic if you switched the lights in a second flat. More then enough time for anyone with a brain to react and come to a stop. But you got to deal with the soccer moms who can't drive and drink coffee and do their make up and make a call at the same time. That is why lights take ages to change, for the slowest hanger on of the human race.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
are the ones that made progress (as in "Progressive") a dirty word. You know, there was a time when a rocket in orbit was a pointless futurist thought experiment. The reason you can post online is because of the satellites those rockets deployed...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
With the big citys being a full stop
Side by side is the insane part, if they did it high speed in front, slow behind then it can take as long as it needs to.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is a stupid idea because people are morons. I mean have you ever seen people try to get on the subway in Boston? The rush and try to get off or on even as the doors are closing. I'm surprised more people don't get stuck in the doors because of that. Anyway at least if you get stuck halfway in the door they can keep the train stopped until they get the idiot free. However if both trains are going down the tracks who knows how long they can stay connected while they try to get idiots out of the door.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Why not use a "cloverleaf" approach. As the train approaches the station, the rearmost car detaches and starts to decelerate. About the same time, a new car leaves the station and starts accelerating up to the train's speed, joining the train as the new lead car. Passengers for the next station need to move to the rear-most car(s).
Well they only got there for disembarkation.... It's called the slip coach, where the last coach of the train would be detached at full running speed and then momentum and braking used to guide the disconnected coach into the station. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_coach
Incorrect. Let's look at the example of Chicago. Because there's a giant freakin' lake as the eastern border, it has to spread north-south. So you will, in any train system, end up with something like the Red Line, which runs from the border with Evanston to the far south side. Populations may shift, but you're always going to need mass transit parallel to the lake. You'll also always have an arterial road going along the lake, but as someone who's been stuck on a bus on LSD due to an accident, let me assure you that bus transit is significantly less robust than train transit.
I think the way we "rethink" travel, is to consider why we're traveling at all. Here's an example: beginning last summer we have paid a lot of money so that a vendor rep can fly in periodically and help us configure a new software package. There is absolutely nothing that he has done that could not be done remotely. What a waste of time, energy, money, and other resources! Not to mention that the travel keeps him away from his family for extended periods.
Even on a regional level, a lot of travel is unnecessary. Millions of people could do their jobs via telecommuting. You can't even argue any longer that managers need people to come into the office so that they can keep their eye on them. Monitoring can be done remotely too.
In the future, I wonder if our descendents will look back on this time period and marvel that we found it necessary to actually, physically, move millions of people around every day by planes, trains, and automobiles?
Proverbs 21:19
The CNN video shows a handsome big city station offering shops and services of every sort. It is a landmark structure and transport hub that anchors development to the downtown core.
Heinlein's conveyor belts serviced what was essentially a suburban strip mall writ large.
The high-speed line should never be part of your daily commute. That implies that there is no desirable and affordable housing within 75 miles of where you work.
The synchronization of the trains has to be flawless. The loops become ridiculously large. That is what dooms most "people movers" to the status of a theme park ride.
How many of you have seen a subway train have its doors held open by some idiot trying to get on at the last moment? Some idiot will try the same crap even with this system. And because everything is moving, the potential for an accident is greatly increased. This system would not be failure tolerant to the degree it would need to work.
END COMMUNICATION
wake me up when we are about 10 years past the invention of transporters. By then most if not all of the kinks will have been worked out and going to work won't be such a drag. Oh and Scotty, make sure you beam me right to my desk this time. I don't want any more of that transwarp shit.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
One of my Minecraft levels used this. Each stop had a self-resetting rail loop, and there was a long rail with a constantly-moving cart. Trying to jump straight onto the moving cart often ended in bumping into and stopping the cart - and restarting the loop was problematic. So you would board a stationary cart, and wait for the main to come around. Once it did, they would match velocities, and you would easily hop over. Disembarking was the reverse - hop onto the secondary cart, then wait for it to reset and stop before exiting.
The starter loops had the side (actually, main) benefit of boosting the main cart's speed, due to a glitch that may or may not still be in the game. So it was essentially a perpetual motion device. Provided no animals or people got in the way, it would run forever.
Rail transport works well and is well developed, safe and saves lives and oil around the world except in the USA. That's not because it takes a few minutes for a train to slow down, allow passengers to go on or off and then restart, that's because of politics and private interests.
When I hear presidential candidates claim that they will cancel all subsidies to the rail system, it makes me cringe. Leadership is the ability to rally people behind decisions that are good for the country, and there is no doubt that a reliable rail system would be beneficial to the country in many regards. Of course, Amtrak does not set the standard very high, but that's not because of the technology lack of potential.
The op's idea is not worth being on Slashdot's front page.
When you live in a town or smaller city the bus or tram comes by every 10 to 15 minutes (30 minutes at night). At junctions they are normally synchronized so you can switch vehicles in a matter of minutes (1 or 2 minutes). For a average traveling time of say 20 minutes, the potential to save time are 10%. And you have to move yourself a little which is good for you. For shorter distances you can use a bike or walk. Using a car for a 20 min ride is in most cities not very clever, as you cannot find a parking slot at the destination and have to search for one, which, even at optimal route, will introduce extra travel time and walk back time. Distances greater than 20 minutes reduce the effect of tram switching.
The bast way to save time would be to not go at all and do it by phone/Internet/whatever. And secondly, every advancement in travel speed and throughput has only increased the distances between home and workplace, they never resulted in the saving of time.
If you live in a bigger city the underground goes every 5 minutes (10 min at night) and buses and trams have similar schedules. So you are already faster using public transport today than using a car. So why optimize its speed again. It would be more wise to increase the capacity of public transport. When all people switch from cars to public transport the capacity in European cities have to be doubled. For an underground with a 5 min schedule that would mean either increase the capacity of one train or increase the schedule. As the train are already at full length in that special time zone where the go every 5 minutes, so they can try to use two floors, but that would imply to rebuild the infrastructure, which is not such a good idea. Another option is the increase in the schedule from 5 to 2.5 min. That is however, not possible with present control technology. Maybe we have to switch to automated trains, like they have in Paris or Nuremberg (Germany). this also gives additional space inside the train as no driver is required anymore.
With no cars on the road you can also use automated buses. And when you use them, you can switch to trams as trams are more energy efficient and you can remove the street cover where the tram goes which allows the rain to drain away instead of using up the sewer system. Makes a better climate in the city.
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.
And what's the failure mode for this system? On current trains if someone takes too long to get on or off, the train can continue waiting at the station until the trouble is resolved. In this proposed system, what happens? The doors clamp shut and then rip them in half when the two trains pull apart?
As others have pointed out, this isn't a very good idea for high speed rail. It's not original, either. It was proposed in Taiwan a few years ago, and that design is more workable.
It's been used a few times for very low speed systems in amusement parks. The original, of course, was the moving sidewalk at the 190 Paris Exposition. That had two speeds of moving walkway side by side, to allow getting on and off. The mechanism was not a conveyor belt. It was an endless train of railroad flatcars with turntables between them. Also see the Never Stop Railway, in 1925, which is a cute mechanical solution to slowing down at stations.
Some railroads have used systems where cars were dropped off the rear of a train while the train was in motion. This never worked all that well, and there was no reverse operation to assemble the train on the fly. It's been suggested for transit systems where all cars have power, and it could be made to work.
The OPs Intermodal Trains idea doesn't make as much sense as Moving Sidewalks. In such a future, there wouldn't be any need for personal transportation in our cities or suburbs, only our exurbs and rural areas. Shared electric autos / trucks could be available for any urban transport needs not met by the Moving Sidewalks. The only trains needed would be for transport between cities, and if made fast enough would replace most airline travel, which is the single most abusive misuse of petroleum-based energy.
Just out of curiosity, how would such a system deal with a slow-moving passenger, or a passenger who drops their (whatever) and is struggling to pick it up? Sooner or later, under this marvelous system, the train and the tram-dock, would have to separate or else there's going to be a problem. Will the train be able to stop in time? What if mischievous people decide to utilize that problem to cause service delays or interruptions? A variation on the old crowd-sourced denial-of-service attack...
"In the UK back in the late 1800s/early 1900s I believe that trains often used to drop off carriages as they passed stations so the people going to that station would roll into it and stop while the rest of the train carried on. So it's not such a new idea."
I was just thinking this, inspired by the article. Train cars could be self-driving. People getting on at a station would enter a car that accelerated in front of the train and joined it at the head. They would then walk back to the car for the station they were going to. People leaving the train at the next station would be in the car at the tail which would drop off at the station.
So, you would not need separate circular tracks like in the article.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
With every carriage/set having its own drive power (as our V/Locity and I'm sure many others already do) and superseding driver cabins though use of remote (including onboard remote) sensing and control functions, or even fully automatic, you can have stopping services docking at the front and dropping off the back of an always moving train system.
This could even allow a return to the once very comfortable mode of separate cabins opening off the side of a long corridor rather than the current fashion of squeezing longitudinal access between open plan seats so that every passenger is disturbed by anyone walking past.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Bike messenger companies are rolling their eyes at this. This hub-and-spoke concept has been around for ages, it's just a larger scale application of what most transit systems already do.
- Park and ride
- bus and subway
- taxi and airport
- highway and offramp
Frankly, it sounds like if we could optimize bus routes, these feeder trains would not be needed. Here in Ottawa, the great majority of commuters ride the "Transitway", which is a dedicated high-speed road for buses and it's quite fast, but the feeder routes are such a mess that you might ride 40 minutes on a suburban route just to get to a Transitway hub. We need shorter, more diversified routes that cover more of the city. Have them circle around a neighbourhood, then jet down a main artery to the hub station - and don't stop every 50 feet along that artery, they should have their own feeder route. It's so laughable that our primary criteria for house-hunting is proximity to the Transitway, and it will be faster for me to bus the 10 km back to the downtown core via the Transitway, than it currently is to bus or walk 10 blocks because of shitty bus routes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Seems directly inspired from the ideas expressed in the 1901 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought...
They're called Paternosters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster
They're also a hoot and a half to ride. I also found it amusing that one was in the head office of an insurance company. I would have thought that it would have been an accident waiting to happen. But an employee told me that there were no accidents . . . because people always paid attention when getting on or off that critter.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
At present, high speed rail lines service multiple low throughput destinations by offering extras services that bypass all intermediate stops and or service that stop only at some intermediate stops.
There are for example four cities on the TGV Sud-Est line : Paris, Le Creusot, Mâcon-Loché, and Lyon. You'll have a train from Paris to Lyon every 30 min. but only some stop at Le Creusot or Mâcon-Loché, and those need not all stop at both, meaning a traveller from or between these may wait considerably longer than 30 min. There would be more trains for all travelers if we had platforms that matched speed with the trains.
In other words, the proposal is exactly designed around servicing locations where people travel infrequently enough that simply running more trains isn't cost effective, i.e. traveling less cannot help assuming you wish the same speed and convenience.
A priori, there isn't much near term future in this technology in France because frankly, if you were worth the SNCF getting you to your destination so quickly, then you'd already own a house in Paris and you probably don't travel much, hey France is star shaped both politically and travel wise, blame Napoleon. Germany's ICEs otoh have a more egalitarian grid-like network, rather than a star-like network, maybe they could build this.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I've found that living 10 min walking distance from work eliminates most advantages of telecommuting while granting all the advantages of the office. People should live in smallish but densely packed cities with few cars. And exorbitant gas prices should help keep the cars away.
There are of course people who must commute for personal reasons, mostly couples with serious jobs in different cities. European style high speed rail serves them infinitely better than automobile gridlock. Read on the train vs. stress out in the car.
Just fyi, there is a Bahn Card 100 for 3500 Euros per years which gives you unlimited train usage in Germany without buying any tickets. Ergo, if your commute costs like 130 Euros per week without any Bahn Card, then you might as well buy a Bahn Card 100 and enjoy the freedom of never even needing to buy a ticket! Amtrack won't sell you any ticket without requiring ID by comparison.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I believe the quote is "If people built houses they way they built software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilisation"
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Actually mass transit sucks. Trains are good for hauling coal and cattle.
What is needed is a transport system that meets individual travelling requirements ie carries one person efficiently and scales from there. Any model that relies on people giving up the ability to travel where and when they want is dumb simply because it requires compromise on where is when.
For actual fuel efficiency per mile look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation.
Motorcycles beat all forms of rail, changing them to diesel or more fuel efficient engines would allow them to beat "Efficient Hybrids" however you rarely see the nutters that promote rail considering more motorcycle. The majority of motorcycles can travel at over 200km/h which is significantly faster than most trains, what we need is for someone to make motorcycles or something like motorcycles safe.
Rail it being promoted by people who like trains, it is simply coincidence that they happen to be more efficient than cars.
In short for better individual transport.
where at any time
when at any time
faster than current systems
fuel efficient
The nose would open up and the incoming passenger module would slide out to be replaced by another outgoing module.
And you load up the passenger compartments with giant parachutes and floats, so when the plane's engines get blown off or the venturi tubes get iced up and the plane is headed straight down into the ocean at 10,000 fpm, you sacrifice the plane but save the passenger compartment.
At this point, airline accountants start crunching wrongful death outlay numbers and comparing it to the cost of a semi-controlled landing and the odds of saving the plane...
Heck, I'd probably accept a DHS red-button to force a scuttle, if I thought it would get the idea finally implemented.
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I would like to have an office on a train such that I have a workspace and internet connection and a window. I don't care if the train takes a long time to get to the destination, or if there is a destination. I envision trains for devs that are full of compartments for this purpose. Maybe an entire development team on a private railroad car.
As an example consider the proposals for high speed trains, say, between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The most recent Amtrak passenger service on the route was criticized because, due to noncooperation by the freight railroads, the trip would take eight hours. But that was before the internet. Internet access, if available, changes the nature of train trips for people who can telecommute. An eight-hour train trip, or even a ten-hour trip, with a comfortable workspace and internet access is uptime, as opposed to a five-hour drive.
I dimly remember that a Sci-Fi author had already had this idea 15+ years ago. Was it Asimov? I'm not sure. He wrote about a subway system where instead of a platform you have several successively faster conveyor belts, and you'd move from one to the next until you board the train, resp. vice versa.
Anyone remember the story?
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this would only save time for people who have to regularly make the sort of 'bus-train-bus' connection.
You're missing the whole "no stopping" concept. I live in the Chicago suburbs. There are about a dozen stations between mine and Chicago's Union Station. At rush hour, there is an express train that skips most/all stops between mine and Chicago, and takes about 25 minutes to get to the city. The train that makes all of the stops can take over an hour*. This proposed system would make all trains effectively express trains, yet they would also make every "stop" along the way. There are usually only two express trains at each end of the day, so this would make a huge difference for all those who cannot make those express trains, or those with stations that are always passed up by the express trains. Yes, there are immense time savings at stake here, in addition to simplifying scheduling and making the trains stay on time better.
*Note the express train will be at maximum speed for most of the trip, while the all-stops train rarely reaches maximum speed and averages far less than that due to all that time spent accelerating/decelerating.
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The "last chance to disconnect" point would have to be tens of kilometres from the end of the parallel track.
You absolutely have to allow for exceptional scenarios, such as when "a passenger train running from London Charing Cross to Hastings failed to stop at Stonegate station in East Sussex. The train ran for a further 2.45 miles (3.94 km) with the emergency brake applied, passing the level crossing at Crowhurst Bridge before coming to a stop 3.22 miles (5.18 km) after first applying the brakes.". That train was only going at 100km/h and took over 5km to stop. It was due to high winds causing exceptional autumn leaf fall, making the rails exceptionally greasy, and a maintenance oversight meaning there wasn't enough sand to give extra adhesion. (investigation report)
I notice the guy with the idea is a designer, not an engineer. (I'm not an engineer either, FWIW.)
The problem is not so much the person who gets left behind, but the person who gets caught in a closing door. In a subway, automatic interlocks are supposed to keep the train from moving if the door doesn't close. In this scheme, there's no margin for error. A person caught in the door gets torn in half and pulverized. There's no fix for this.
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The docking at speed idea has crossed my mind, and I think it's great, but of course safety is an incredible hurdle.
One thing I really really want is the ability to carry our passenger cars on trains. I used to make a five hour drive, with the return five hour drive, at least twice a month. I always wondered how much fuel could be saved by putting both me and my vehicle on a train. Not to mention the ability to catch some Z's while in transit would be nice. People wanting their cars with them when they arrive is a major consideration when it comes to travel.
One idea I keep coming back to is a roller coaster approach. Instead of a train why not individual un-powered cars? We could have solar and windmills all along the tracks (transmitting power back to the grid hopefully) running electric motors that turn chains and fling modular cars along the tracks. You can even setup a fling - coast system. Get about three times as many flingers as you need and having a few broken ones doesn't even really matter. Using something akin to RFID you can set your destination when you get on the system and at a preset exit your car is diverted off the track to a load/unload zone. I figure the "cars" could be akin to shipping containers. They could carry cargo without passengers, they could carry designated passenger cars, they could carry passengers in/with their vehicles. Variable scale on the same system. If you work it right the electricity that propels the system could be used to charge hybrids/electric vehicles and to keep the batteries on classic vehicles charged so the passengers can continue to listen to the radio, use laptops etc.. If you really do it right a tube can be brought in the window with air conditioning, heat, and maybe even a power outlet or two. The possibilities of the modular train, be it roller coaster or not, are endless.
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Road accidents hold up traffic for up to a couple of hours. Train accidents hold up traffic for a day or more, depending upon whether the track is damaged.
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I thought of something along very similar lines about a decade ago, and rejected the concept because of overriding safety concerns. Besides which, how do you transfer yourself and all your luggage in the short period of time allowed before the vehicles undock? Instead, I propose a system of modular cars that can travel on regular roads for local travel, and high-speed MagLev rail for longer travel. The vehicles are stationary when transferred from one mode to another, avoiding most all the safety problems. The same rail network can also be used for freight. Please, please, check out http://www.levicar.com/ for more details.
Interesting idea. Until you realise that the first time a child pram stops/gets stuck in the transition phase you will see that this can't possible work.
How can you possible ensure that all passengers transition properly.
Well you might think OK every passenger is in a pod where the pod transitions between vehicles. Again what if that now has trouble.
I like the thinking outside the box. However the human life/health risk component is too high.
A person caught in the door gets torn in half and pulverized. There's no fix for this.
Door detects obstruction, fails to close; tram and train *remain docked* and both stop. You *must* allow enough parallel track so that can happen safely if the 'last safe undocking point' is passed without undocking having occurred.
You also have CCTV at the docking point, and massive fines etc. for anyone who obstructs it without a damn good reason, and lots of flashing warning sounds/lights etc if the docking area is obstructed just before undocking.
Not to say it's cost effective or practical, but it could be done safely.
There are several issues that I can think of with this transfer.
First of all timing: you have to make sure the trains arrive at the exact same moment. Very exact, as otherwise you're wasting parallel track time in aligning the trains.
Secondly the transfer: you must make sure that no-one gets stuck halfway the trains, otherwise something nasty will happen when the trains separate again. The solution would be to have the doors closed by a certain point, and if not stop the combination (how to break synchronised is another issue). This takes a lot of track length.
Anyway you don't want to stop, want to keep a reasonable speed for the high-speed train, so then you're easily talking about 80 km/hr (normal street-car speed of 30-50 km/hr; normal high-speed train speed would be >200 km/hr). Otherwise, why not just stop alltogether.
Transfer times will have to be at least a minute. One minute at 80 km/h is just over 1,300 m.
Stopping a train at 80 km/hr takes a long way, that can easily be 400m. So for the emergency stop you need already 400m of parallel track. That makes for a total parallel track length of about 2 km. That's a very, very long distance. The high-speed train may be passing through that city; the tram will definitely have to loop around and go back to its normal routes.
It makes me think of a recent program about solutions to road traffic, where a similar idea was floated: put the cars on a continuous running train, well basically a huge conveyor belt. The driver doing the first and last mile themselves, and the long distance go automated. The animation showing how this would work also showed the transfer, where a car would be on a feeder conveyor and from there be transferred to the main conveyor. The parallel track was just long enough to make the transfer - no word on what happens if the mechanism doesn't work (then the car will be returned to the road the normal way), how the car gets on the feeder, or what happens if the transfer is not completed. It looked scary and all but fail safe to me. There was really no room for error.
Normally when you make a train/train transfer you step out of one train, walk to the other platform, get on the next. Fail safe. You fail to get off your train? Try again next station. Fail to clear the doors? They will open; train won't move until all doors are closed. Failed to get on the connecting train? Wait for the next.
On the Green Line at least, the number of cars per train will vary according to predicted need. Probably lots of places do this; it's a damn obvious solution.
not that they can send half a car of course
So, instead of having a train slow down and stop, we are going to have a bunch of moving platforms that does the starting and stopping instead. hmm, wonder how much that will cost? Not to mention you just a bunch of points of failure, instead of just the train.
Also, how long does these "platforms" travel. Your talking probably a few miles at least the platforms have to move, even more the faster trains go.
So, really, wtf?
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