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Walmart Unveils Turbine-Powered WAVE Concept Truck
cartechboy writes "It's no secret that semi trucks use a lot of fuel. Moving that amount of mass along at highway speeds takes a lot of power. But Walmart might have just unveiled the semi truck of the future with its WAVE concept truck. This crazy looking semi features an aerodynamic cab and looks like no other truck on the road. The driver sits in the center of the cab and the steering wheel is flanked by LCD screens instead of conventional gauges. The WAVE concept is powered by a range-extended electric powertrain consisting of a Capstone micro-turbine and an electric motor. To reduce weight the entire truck including the trailer is made of carbon fiber. The 53-foot side panels on the trailer are said to be the first single pieces of carbon fiber that large ever produced. The result? A trailer that weighs around 4,000 pounds less than a conventional one. While Walmart says it has no plans to produce the WAVE concept, one has to wonder if this is a look at what semis of the future will be like."
I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have
so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls. Making trucks more efficient is a fine idea, but
it's only nibbling at the edges. Why not go back to trains for medium to long distances?
the carbon-fiber trailer is around 4,000 pounds lighter than a conventional one, allowing a truck to carry more freight
Being able to drop off trailers and pick up other ones is part of the point of the tractor-trailer concept. If the tractor is unable to pull a normal weight trailer, that's going to be an impediment to adaptation.
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Anything that light will have serious issues with cross-winds. If current trailers can blow over just imagine how bad it will be when you reduce the weight by 4000 lbs.
Some time ago, I recall reading on /. how Walmart was researching new energy efficient tires for use with trucks. Looks like they are being used here - a single large tire to replace the current standard dual-tire configuration. But this makes me wonder what the impact of a blow-out would be. Perhaps they have it figured out - or perhaps there are good reasons why this will never become a production machine.
Interestingly, they actually have a LAB in Silicon Valley -I saw a Billboard advertising for talent (how quaint) at Central Expressway and Lawrence the other day...
http://www.walmartlabs.com/
-I'm just sayin'
How will the trailer hold up to the average idiot with a forklift? Or to the average idiot that didn't strap the load in and it shifts?
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Railroads have to pay to maintain their tracks based on the wear their cargo trains do to them. Trucks, on the other hand, have the costs of maintaining the road spread onto passenger cars in a way that results in the trucks paying far less than their share of the costs. This results in billions of dollars per year effectively subsidizing truck transport.
Why does the name Luigi Colani spring to mind?
It is analogous to the last mile on fiberoptic networks. Once the West was centralized around railroads but it has since filled out and the railroad arteries have limited reach.
Trains are still used for long haul of bulk freight. The raw materials for manufacturing generally move from production to consumption over rail (when it's across land), as that's a fairly small network compared to distribution of manufactured goods. In terms of tons of freight moved, rail is still important.
What's curious is the low use of rail from manufacturing to distribution hubs. It is used some, and most of the FedEx/UPs/etc hubs that's I've been to are on rail spurs, but you'd think there'd be more rail used there, or for cross shipping between Amazon distribution centers, or in general "rail to distribution hub" use.
There's plenty of rail right-of-way into and around most big cities, even if the tracks aren't used much: the hard problem was getting the contiguous path to someplace interesting.
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Luigi Colani has been working on improving the efficiency of trucks since the 1970s. His designs are eccentric, but they are said to drastically reduce fuel consumption. What Walmart has done is incorporated the electric motor and switched to a carbon fiber trailer. While this would produce good results in theory, I have to imagine the practicality of getting batteries big enough to keep that truck running for hours uninterrupted would be a huge challenge and is why this truck is not going to be deployed any time soon.
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Trucks are point to point. If you need it from point a to point b in 24 hours you're going to need a truck
call the driver an independent contractor and get out any liability when things go wrong.
won't the self-driving trucks eliminate the need for ANY cab?
And then add the aero changes, which also reduces fuel consumption. Now..... you do realise a truck uses 50 litres of fuel per 100 kms, yes? And a truck usually can do 500,000 kms a year? Even 1% is 2500 litres. Across a fleet like Walmart? Seriously adds up per year. I suspect however the concept has a bigger number than 1% total fuel savings. Good aero on a truck can save up to 10% and that's 25,000 litres.
And if you think it'll cost 4 million in CF IF it comes about, you really have no concept of return of efficency in production.
Oh, and the service life of a truck and trailer are 10 - 15 years at least. The lifetime saving do indeed overcoem the initial cost.
Someone better tell Airbus that their 59ft panels on the A350XWB are somehow shorter than Wal-Marts 53ft panels...
But for pretty much every other owner/operator out there, this sort of setup makes pretty much no sense. There's too many different types of loads (and specifically designed trailers) for that.
So there'll be a fleet of a few hundred Walmart trucks like this. And the other 99% of the industry will stick with standard trucks.
There's also the durability issue. While modern trucks aren't cheap, they're designed to be readily repairable. As are trailers.
Not many repair shops (let alone road services) have carbon fiber facilities.
These designs are great...until they get damaged. Then they cost an arm, a leg and a testicle to repair, compared to standard trailers.
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Trains on their own can't solve the last-mile problems that trucks do solve. On the other hand, we've had more than a century of experience with overhead power, which can be made safe, efficient, and inexpensive with today's technology. This has been applied to buses numerous times. It absolutely can be applied to trucks and made very safe through switching systems. (Only supplying power to a segment of the line when a vehicle is on it, shutting down immediately when a short or mechanical failure is detected, and so forth.) Obviously there are design challenges: The truck has to be able to change lanes, and attach and detach from the overhead freely. Those challenges are anything but insurmountable and could enable trucks and buses that, once attached to the overhead, never need to stop to refuel. They only travel with their own energy supply (whether it's an ICE or a battery) when they're not on the highway where the lines are available, eliminating the need for depot facilities and maintaining the flexibility that trucks and buses provide.
That's still a half-way solution. Ultra-light rail using mass produced, modular infrastructure would be ideal and could probably use the same rights of way that highways occupy. The same category of vehicle described above could also be used, and put into its own isolated (and probably elevated) 'lane' where it drives on autopilot and entirely with overhead power until it reaches an exit and gets back on the road. (An extra set of wheels attached to existing axles, made to mount a rail, would be needed.) We already know that modern rail systems require far less maintenance than asphalt roads and we also know that trucks are a massive safety hazard on the highway. This road-to-rail approach would solve those problems along with electrifying the long highway stretches of truck shipping and passenger busing.
Good luck funding that, though.
I'm no friend of trucks, but I wanted to clarify that 80,000 is the typical maximum weight allowed for a semi-truck. That would more likely be a shorter-haul truck moving gravel or other materials instead of less dense cargo like Walmart products. For the long-haul, materials are transported by train.
While these road taxes are an interesting dimension, the main reasons Walmart's products are shipped via truck is because they don't want their own restocking schedules limited by train schedules. If efficiency were to dictate their logistics, the large Walmart regional warehouses would be located on a rail line and trucks would distribute the short haul from the regional warehouse to each store. Oh, well.
To reiterate, rail line maintenance expenses are not pushing Walmart cargo onto trucks. If those fees were so high, low-margin materials like gravel and sand would be in trucks and not hauled via train across multiple states.
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I think you might be underestimating how much freight travels by train, as well as not considering a logistical issue. I live in Kansas City, which is about dead center in the middle of the united states. As a consequence, a whole hell of a lot passes through here. We are a main artery for cargo carrying trains and I can't even begin to imagine how much passes through here everyday by train. You must also consider that due to the enormous amount of cargo a single train can carry, they are carrying goods and other cargo for many companies. The train cannot deliver specific goods to any given company directly, as a consequence, they must be unloaded in general areas and then loaded onto trucks for the last mile, which could easily be a hundred or more miles anyway.
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Then they should increase the highway taxes for heavy trucks by 96., 960 or 9600, not sure of the ratio but it should reflect the actual damages vs a regular car or truck.
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Do you know why I know this news is fake? You spoke of Canadian troop transport ships and amphibious vehicles in the plural form.
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Because in the end a truck still needs to get the freight to and from the train. There aren't enough rail terminals to be feasible for this to work. You have the problem of rail yard congestion as trucks line up and wait for hours to pick up their trailer or freight.
It sounds nice in theory but in the end its much simpler and economical to move smaller non bulk loads via truck.
I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have
so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls. Making trucks more efficient is a fine idea, but
it's only nibbling at the edges. Why not go back to trains for medium to long distances?
Rail trails. Most of the track miles in the USA has been consigned to rail trails or built over. I travel quite a lot and can spot old rail grades, despite lack of ties and rails, frequently across the landscape. It would astound some people to see just how much rail there once was in this country. Some was pulled up and removed for good reason, because the demand didn't exist to sustain it. Others were retired because so much dependence upon the flexibility of trucking. Intermodal freight still makes good economic sense, containers moved by flat cars enmasse, but sometimes it just doesn't make any sense at all to have thousands of trucks on the road when the contents could be moved much more cost effectively by rail, even light rail.
American commerce is addicted to trucking, even long-haul, such as L.A. to Denver, Denver to Columbus, Columbus to Orlando, etc. I once worked in the freight and logistics industry and the one thing trucks do have is flexibility. They can run short spokes more effectively than rail, but it's hard to beat rail for long haul. Customers are used to footing the expense of the inefficiency of moving one or two trailers hundreds of miles, where rail could have done for much less cost. Some day, when petroleum is no longer cheap we'll wish we still had rails everywhere.
On the truck side, I'd applaud these WAVE trucks as I hate getting stuck behind stinky diesels, which give me splitting headaches from their pungent exhaust.
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I know I have seen futuristic truck designs before. This was just the first one I saw on google. From 1964 I present the Ford Gas Turbine Truck
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From 1964 .. I present GM's Bison
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I know I am lending a lot to the ethics and morals of Walmart as a company when is say this, but if they are not going to be entering the truck building and selling business, they should patent-unencumber every last inch of their design, and publish every last schematic - Open Source it. It doesn't sound like they have anything to lose by doing so, and those few extra miles per gallon could add up to a sizable impact on air pollution if this and designs that followed from it became commonplace.
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Ridiculous considering that trucks have be redesigned to be 30% more fuel efficient for a much lower price... http://i416.photobucket.com/al...
This one is recent (and yes Fox news) Man Super streamlined Semi Truck
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I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls. Making trucks more efficient is a fine idea, but it's only nibbling at the edges. Why not go back to trains for medium to long distances?
Interstate Highways.... Convenience... Just in Time inventory management... Unions...
All played a role in the near death of RR, which is seeing a resurgence of inter-modal container shipping and driving trucks back to local delivery. Now with fuel starting to be a significant cost factor in shipping, RR are taking back market share.
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Because you shipped it Priority... Besides "Ain't nobody got time for that."
You don't have to look far for streamliningL Streamline trucks
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this is patently untrue. truck weight limits are per axle and spacing, for example a piledriver truck with a twin-steer tri-drive 5-Axle, can weight 49500 kg.
It depends on the load being hauled but you would be surprised how heavy freight can get, even Walmart freight. A load of breakfast cereal or mattresses might be light but books, liquids and other bulky items like potting soil are not. So ensuring their trucks can gross out as close to 80k as they can get gives them flexibility.
80,000 is the federal weight limit for interstate highways. Most jurisdictions stick to that number for their limit but there are many that allow more with, and sometimes without, permits. In certain parts you can apply for overweight permits to carry more than the 80k. For example in NY you can apply for an overweight permit for dump trucks with 7 axles (semi trailer type) to carry 117,000 pounds/53070kg. Tankers can also go upward of 100,000 or perhaps more using more axles but not in NYC. I know a retired truck driver who hauled intermodal containers to/from the NY and NJ ports and he frequently ran into containers that weighed more than the container was rated for. One container had him hitting the scales at 90,000 pounds, 10,000 over the legal limit.
And I can assure you that while 80,000 pounds sounds like a lot it really isn't compared to vocational and heavy haul. Back in the day there was a concrete company in NY called Certified Concrete. They had custom built Mack F900's who's giant tandem rear axles alone carried 80,000 pounds. then throw on the 23,000 pound front axle and you had 103,000 lbs gross vehicle weight on just THREE axles. If you lived in NYC around the 70's you would remember these polkadotted monsters. Heavy haul can go nuts but typically lowboy's rated 50+ tons are not uncommon for moving large machinery.
They abandoned those rights of way decades before they were re-purposed into trails.
IIRC they put a tax on rail miles in the early 20th century. Lost about half the track in the nation after that.
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I have a CDL and I don't think that's a good idea when we're used to the road from a left POV and nothing else for our entire lives. Soon as you start looking at the lines you're going to feel like you're about to run off the road. I'm always checking the bottom window on my passenger door to gauge where I'm at. "habit"
a lot of trucks travel most of their journey by rail and only the last leg by truck. lots of freight rail that transports the trailer part of the truck that is then married with it's driver at a rail head
While true, trucks also allow point delivery to a specific business, instead of to a railyard. Basically, the bigger trade routes (e.g. between New York and and Chicago) should be serviced by rail, with trucks picking up the products from the local railyard to deliver it to the final destination. Most of the engineering work to make this happen has already been done - truck-sized containers are loaded onto cargo ships for overseas transport.
The overhead of loading/unloading each container (not the contents) does cause some counter-intuitive results. e.g. Driving the container entirely by truck from Las Vegas to Los Angeles may be more cost-effective than loading everything on a train car, then unloading. But at longer distances, the lower cost of rail will override the extra cost of loading/unloading (as long as the trucks aren't being subsidized by automobile fuel taxes).
As for why we don't just switch to rail immediately, unfortunately the creation of the Interstate Highway System and its uneven fuel taxes led to the creation of a multi-hundred billion dollar trucking industry. You cannot simply correct the fuel taxes. Doing so would put millions of truckers out of work and render several trillion dollars of their infrastructure obsolete overnight. Any change needs to be done slowly and gradually, to give the truckers time to recoup their investment in equipment, and time to retrain for a different job.
won't have a cab.
Why would you need one without a driver?
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iirc, about 30 years ago, Grumman, an aerospace contractor based on Long Island, NY, decided that they were so hi tech and skilled, that they could make a better bus for use by mass transit systems like NYC's MBTA.
So they built said bus, and NYC , or one of it's QUANGOS bought some for testing..
a few issues, like the hi tech weight saving aluminum axles cracked on NYC potholes.
iirc, Grumman decided that cost plus aerospace contracts were a better way to go
This truck is a cool concept, but it's NOT going to be build for a number of reasons.
First, it is not going to work with existing equipment. The trailer won't hook up to a standard tractor and the tractor won't pull a standard trailer. Who wants something that isn't compatible with existing stuff? Not me. I may get great mileage, but I got to wait at both ends of a load for the cargo to get loaded and unloaded. Time is money, lots of money.
Second, it is inefficient to go from fuel though a turbine, to electricity, to horsepower. The diesel, clutch, transmission route is more efficient. Turbines do NOT work well at varying output powers, they are simply LIGHT for the maximum power you get. But if you don't use 90% power nearly 100% of the time, they are real fuel hogs. Driving does not consume steady power, you get 3-4 min of 80-90% power, followed by an hour or to of 30% on straight and level. Not ideal for turbines.
Third, Inter-modal has better fuel efficiency anyway. and doesn't require major changes to anything. It's also more convenient when shipping in quantity..
Besides, what's really going to happen is we will slowly migrate towards more streamlined shapes for Tractor's and Trailers. But the BIG change will be to Natural Gas as fuel. That will make a difference in costs and pollution.
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Competitive edge. If they can have their goods moved for a lower price than Target, Sears, Big Lots! etc., then Wal Mart can use that in a number of ways to beat the competition (even further); and all they'd have to do is only license out relevant patents and designs to those logistics companies willing to sign an exclusive agreement. Though commissioning truck builds and leasing those out would certainly also be an option.. just not one that would readily fit into Wal Mart's core business.
It's actually worse than that, and only begins to look at the problem.
Railroads own their own right of way, which means property, which means they pay property tax! They are also required by mandate to upgrade to any new safety standards the government dictates.
Neither apply to roads. The government owns the land the roads are built on, and exempts itself from tax. If a road safety standard is updated, existing roads are grandfathered in until they next time they are rebuilt.
Add in the fact that state and local government subsidize roads out of general tax revenue coffers, and use tax-free government bonds to finance them and railroads are at a significant financial disadvantage in the US. That's why they can only compete on large volume, bulk commodities. Want millions of tons of coal for a power plant? Well, even though they have to eat all those costs it's more efficient. Want to stock a Walmart? The cost of the spur to it would never be made back.
Normally I'm a staunch railroad fan, but this thing is cool. Hell, if I got a chance to drive this thing I'd happily fill out an employment application at WalMart. This futuristic truck is pretty bad ass!
Your bad at math aren't you?
Math kettle, meet the spelling pot. There is also a grammatical ladle missing somewhere....
I have a railroad track running across my land. I own the land on both sides of the track. The railroad doesn't own the property, and I pay the property tax on the land. And my situation is normal, not some weird glitch.
To play devils advocate here, how do you account for the bottleneck at ports where trucks line up and wait to pick up their freight?
There need to be more "smaller" rail engines for short runs. In the "old days" there'd be local, regional, and long-haul rain networks. You'd use rail to get from on side of town to the other, or to the central depot for outside. Then link into a train for a longer haul, next city over or so. And split the car back out for local delivery.
The trucking lobby is strong, and conveinced everyone that this is no longer possible. But it still is. If trucks were taxed in a manner that they paid their own way, rail would make a comeback. When rail is strong, passenger rail does better. And rail is more efficient.
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Maybe not exactly ... but for some reason it reminded me of the truck from Highwayman.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You're not great at language apparently, so it probably balances out.
Near death of the RR in the US? You are misinformed. We are no where near the death of RR. Just no RR to every city and one to every company warehouse that makes widgets.
If rail made sense to a companies bottom line, they would use it. Just as they now use one or more of a truck, rail, airplane, their own car or delivery van or a specific service like UPS, FedEX, US Mail. Because it makes the most economic sense to them for what they are doing. If I in NY buy a car engine from a company in LA, using rail is not the easiest way for me or for them to ship it. If that same place made 10K engines a month and was shipping them to KY and SC for an auto factory, it might make sense to use rail.
Is that concept really that hard for people to understand?
" the steering wheel is flanked by LCD screens instead of conventional gauge"
which won't work in the northern half of the US half the year. Even specialized GPS screens ghost and fail to turn on and are miscolored below 10F.
Unfortunately, MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. That means the bigger you make MPG, the smaller the effect it has on overall consumption. If a car/truck is driven 15,000 miles per year, and you come up with a technology which improves their economy by (say) 20%:
5 MPG tractor trailer = 3000 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 600 gallons saved
12 MPG luxury SUV = 1250 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 250 gallons saved
18 MPG SUV = 833 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 167 gallons saved
25 MPG sedan = 600 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 120 gallons saved
35 MPG econobox = 429 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 86 gallons saved
50 MPG hybrid = 300 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 60 gallons saved
100 MPG supercar = 150 gallons consumed, 20% improvement = 30 gallons saved
All those 100 MPG research vehicles are pretty worthless in terms of reducing the country's overall oil consumption. Likewise, the push for hybrid cars is tackling the problem at the wrong end. It's improving fuel economy where it matters least - cars that don't burn a lot of fuel in a year. If you want to reduce oil consumption, you need to be changing the vehicles which burn the most oil. That's the trucks and SUVs - that's where we should be concentrating our fuel economy improvement research dollars.
Buying a Prius may help assuage your personal guilt over the environment, but we would've been much better off if Toyota et al had spent those R&D dollars on improving truck and SUV fuel efficiency first. The bigger the MPG, the smaller the impact it has on fuel savings - switching from a 12.5 MPG vehicle to a 25 MPG vehicle saves as much fuel as switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to an infinite MPG vehicle. (GPM is the "correct" metric because people usually have a certain distance they wish to drive, meaning the miles should be in the denominator. If people filled up their tank once a week and drove as many miles as they could on the one tank every week, then MPG would be the "correct" metric.)
walmart will never invest in this because the truck of the future for them is the train. Long-haul tractor trailers are a dying breed perpetuated by cheap oil, and the future of regional and local trucking is in battery or hybrid power demonstrated by Staples and numerous other companies.
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Then they should make trucks rather than sitting on it.
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Trucker 1: "That thang looks like them French ticklers they sell in the john."
Trucker 2: "Where the hell'r you supposed to put a confederate flag on it?"
Trucker 3: "Betcha that truck has rear tire flaps with MALE silhouettes."
I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls. Making trucks more efficient is a fine idea, but it's only nibbling at the edges. Why not go back to trains for medium to long distances?
Same reason that cars win over public transit. You can be a heck of a lot more flexible with your routes with a truck than with a train.
In the case of many retailers the goods to the stores leave from a distribution center which serve a subsection of the country. The loads and routes are calculated to be as efficient as possible and they spider web out from each distribution center. The goods are delivered by the manufacturers to the dc by whatever means necessary be it train, plane or van. This truck would not be used so much for cross country hauls as for hauls from DC to stores then potentially to intersecting DC or freight pickup for returns.
There are many different weight restrictions, but in general the weight limit on the vast majority of trucks in the United States is 80,000 pounds. 12,000 on the steering axle, 34,000 on the drive axles, and 34,000 on the trailer axles.
Construction equipment I'm sure falls into the special permit category where they all have unique rules. Trucks that have split axles on the trailer (the axles are not right next to each other but a few feet apart) usually can run 20,000 pounds per axle. This gives them some leeway when it comes to trying to balance loads.
I think you'd be surprised how often trucks hit 80,000 pounds. The tractor and empty trailer alone usually run 35,000 pounds. When I drove, I'd say I was past 75,000 pound at least 1/3rd of the time. Walmart products would be on the lighter side, but they do include heavy things such as beverages which can add a ton of weight.
A high efficiency power source, mediated via battery and electric motor is really interesting technology. The locomotives made the switch to diesel electric from steam in 1940s very very swiftly. In just one decade the steam engines were gone. The electric motors are ideal things to turn the wheel. Their torque peaks at zero rpm, exactly when it is needed. IC engines via clutch + transmission + gear box is a hack. But trucks have been using synchromesh transmission and gear box for all these years. Even without a battery in the middle, constant rpm diesel engine producing electricity would have been simpler than the complexity of the gearbox. That is exactly how locomotives work.
It is high time diesel-electric or micro-gas turbine + electric trucks are designed at least experimental platforms.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The reason *old, never used*, and often unconnected rails criss cross a lot of the U.S. is this: the government used to straight up give the rail companies the right of way. Up to seven miles, IIRC. This was before rail was taxed by the mile.
The rail barrons then sold off the surface interests, often to ranchers, but retained the mineral rights, which they continue to make massive bank on, to this day.
In the vast majority of cases (in fact I would suggest > 90% of all rail miles) the railroad owns a 50 foot wide strip of land. This is due to the history of how railroads procured land when the routes were selected. You would own the property on both sides, and the railroad pays property tax on that 50 foot wide strip in the middle.
There are some cases where the railroad does not own the land, but has an easement for the use of the land. Railroads hated that arrangement for a number of reasons, but could in fact be the arrangement where you own property. In that case it's like any other easement (for a pipeline, electric line, or even a driveway to a landlocked property) they have a right of use for the purpose of running a railroad, but do not own any property and would not pay property tax as a result.
We could do exactly that if Warren Buffett and other railroad men would invest what it takes to run freight athigh speed. If we could achieve that it would not only take freight off the highway and claw back more business from containerships, but new markets for passenger runs that share lines with freight might suggest themselves.
Railroads have to pay to maintain their tracks based on the wear their cargo trains do to them. Trucks, on the other hand, have the costs of maintaining the road spread onto passenger cars
Nevertheless, shipping something long distance via rail is way cheaper than by truck. In spite of the subsidy advantages truckers get, they still don't compete on price.
The truckers compete on convenience, and time, and door to door service. By the time you handle all the inter-modal swaps, and delays trucks get it done faster. Rail means you go 1)From the shipping dock onto a truck, 2)across town, 3) off the truck, 4)onto the train, 5)wait for a train to be built, 6)wait for train to run, 7)off the train onto the trucks, 8) finally to the delivery dock.
Mr Fuckup can visit in any one of those places, and your 6 box cars of cabbage rots on some siding in Omaha.
And train building can literally take DAYS before your container moves. And it might take days at several points in the journey for unusual destinations.
Still, we are beating the hell out of all our roads with mile long trains of trucks. After every city there is the 20 mile truck sort where each driver wanting to go 1/4 of a mile per hour faster than the next, will consume all available lanes passing.
You will get modded to hell suggesting we get trucks off the road and onto the railroad, because you are attacking someone's life style.
But its a sad truth that we rely more on long haul trucks than any other place on earth.
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Be careful around those. I saw one try to kill Will Smith .....
Then they should increase the highway taxes for heavy trucks by 96., 960 or 9600, not sure of the ratio but it should reflect the actual damages vs a regular car or truck.
If they did that, you wouldn't be able to afford to buy goods anymore. Or we would go to hauling things in pickup trucks and just making 100 trips instead of one semi load, increasing carbon emissions and cost and decreasing efficiency.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
While that is true, rail companies just aren't interested in operating spur lines and connecting to a lot of smaller places. They only care about the mainlines where they can haul very long trains long distances. Around here the rail companies don't even want to talk to you about providing bulk goods cars unless you can fill 100 cars at a time. Only larger terminals have that much track on their land.
The end result is that trucks are required to get products to and from the railway, and at that point it's often cheaper to run the trucks all the way through.
Railways got a sweet deal; the land and tracks were originally paid for by the public. They have the land now in perpetuity. But they are interested in short-term quarterly profits (and having as large a profit as possible), so they aren't interested in expanding. Since everyone is only interested in their bottom like we have the situation that we find ourselves in now. It's not sustainable, obviously. But unless people are willing to dump serious public money into public works to promote rail, and have the guts to regulate it for the benefit of all the public, nothing is going to change.
Today, over-the-road heavy trucks pay approximately $14,000 per year in combined fuel and other highway taxes. This amount does not come close to paying for the damage to roads and bridges caused by trucks...one 80,000-pound truck does the same road damage as 9,600 automobiles...
That's true which is why I never have to seal coat my driveway or concern myself with freeze/thaw damage. No wait! Despite the lack of semis on the driveway, I do have to concern myself with these things including periodic replacement after 20 or 30 years.
Anywho, were the whole axle-weight-to-the-4th-power taken seriously, we would very quickly see more axles and more trucks rated for lower weights. I.e., you would soon be back a lot closer to where you started.
And another thing you lying moron, trucks aren't nearly as responsibe for traffic jams and having school/work/home each located 30 miles from each other. Were you to have a truck pay that multiple (9600x or even 9.6x - which they easily do), they could justly kick all the cars off the interstates while they only need 1 or 2 lanes instead of 3 or 4. Oddly, I don't recall the car-only lanes being maintenance free.
Sure make the trucks pay, then you get your sorry ass off their roads.
J.I.T.
Larger modern business are very price selective on how they ship. But shipping costs alone are only one part of that cost algebra. It is generally far cheaper per pound to ship via rail, but for many products it is cheaper over all to use a just in time inventory system to reduce warehousing space. Quick turn around trucking fits in with JIT systems very well.
The limit varies a bit per state but the most common value is not a total weight measure. The size, shape and distribution of the wheels can vary the load that can be carried.
A typical weight restriction is a pounds per square inch weight which is typically administered by the states as a weight of 3200 lbs per axle with the assumption that each axle carries dual tires on each side. This weight is usually figured by weighing the total truck weight, and using mathematical equations (and the trailer geometry) to calculate the per axle weight.
I spent a summer weighing trucks and I can tell you that maximum 3200lbs per axle can vary anywhere from 62000lbs gross weight to over 84000lbs depending on the trailer and tractor combination used. Though the most common configuration for a 50-67' trailer is right around 80,000lbs its not the legal limit in any state I know of. Triple trailer combo's can carry almost 125,000 lbs split between 3 trailers. In fact there are specialty truck trailer combinations with about 16 axles that can carry almost half a million pounds without exceeding the legal limit. See the link below for images of a few examples.
http://www.guymturner.com/heav...
Add to that, the average semi drives 125,000 miles per year, 10 times the average car driver.
Wrong. At least if they did things fairly. The cost of goods would go up, but we would be paying less (Fuel/State/City) tax that was subsidizing (up until the hypothetical change) the truckers.
The point is it would just move the burden around. It is a zero sum problem. If they charge truckers more, they charge all of us less and the difference to our taxation will make up the difference to the product differences.
Ouch
Basic physics says that a mass in motion tends to stay in motion. It doesn't take fuel to move that mass once it's moving, it takes fuel to combat the massive amount of drag caused by the brain-dead shapes of these trucks.
You probably don't own the land that the track is on, but you own the land on either side. You might want to recheck your documents and property in order to avoid paying tax on land that you can't use because it has an active rail line running through it.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I know the answer!
Lets just have drive on truck trains.
You drive the truck and trailer up onto the train, and then when you get to the end, you drive off.
Of course, there might be a few tunnels that aren't quite tall enough on the way... but hey, free sunroof!
Aerodynamic changes may make sense. Carbon fiber, no.
According to your estimate, the carbon fiber might save 2,500 liters per year. At $1 per liter, that's $2,500. You think it makes sense to spend MILLIONS in order to save thousands. Typical liberal math.
Do you have any idea how many starving children could be fed with four million dollars? Fuck why don't you left wing freaks ever engage your brains.
The other day someone posted a link to a Wikipedia listing of nationalization and denationalization of various industries in the US. Most of it had to do with railroads. I don't know about other states, but here in Texas the railroad commissioner is considered the third most powerful government office. It's a stepping stone to the governor's office.
I'd be hesitant to run a railroad, or have a large enterprise rely on the railroad, knowing that the government might decide to take it over tomorrow, or completely rewrite all of the rules because it'll help his gubernatorial campaign.
Nuts. I just had points early. I would have modded you down.
The real reason is that the Railroads in America are ran POORLY. Simple as that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, we need to increase both gas and diesel taxes. The problem is, that the federal taxes have not increased since the 80's, and the states can not do it (esp. diesel) because the neighboring state will have cheaper fuel and the truckers will simply bypass buying ANY fuel in that expensive state.
.25/ gal / year. for the next 4 years. Likewise, the gas tax should go to the state coffers in which it came from, while the diesel goes to the federals. If any state cuts their fuel taxes to be cheaper than a neighbor, then the gas money is cut to them, and the federal diesel spending in their state is cut as well as well by that amount. IOW, prevent wars between the states.
What is needed is for your gutless CONgress to pass HONEST gas/diesel tax increase. Ideally, it should increase by
Finally, all of that needs to go into INFRASTRUCTURE. No more of this diverting to general funds garbage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The amount of fuel taxes could easily double and it will make nary an impact on the price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The rails lines are broken up all over the nation. As such, if you want to go coast to coast, you will pay multiple companies to access the rail. It becomes EXPENSIVE. Then through in the fact that the train companies are ran poorly. Very poorly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The railroads are operating at capacity. We're not building new rail lines.
Also in this country cargo rail has priority over passenger. There's a reason amtrack is so damn slow, having to pull off to the side to let cargo go by. Forget high speed, just going normal speed without stopping so often would help.
Picture of one of the Certified Concrete trucks
http://www.truck-photos.net/picture/number22164.asp
No the reason is that trucks don't pay fairly for the road wear while train's have to pay for rail wear. Do you think any politicians would dare try to enforce a tax based on vehicle weight. Nor do they pay for the new roads which are built for passenger cars...
I own a few trucks, and I drive one of them. I deliver often to Wal Marts. The thought of Wal Mart being serviced by trains is hilarious. The entire system would break down in one day. Wallyworld runs on a 30 minute schedule. Everything is offloaded, scanned, counted, and put away, then on to the next truck. It is impossible for trains to provide efficient service. Wal Mart and other big retailers would never allow themselves to be put at the mercy of the railroad unions, anyway. A strike could put them under water....The truck of the future things never pans out... The gains of aerodynamics are minimal at this point. The trucks are already aerodynamic. Much more fuel can be saved in other ways. Three forms of natural gas engines are being produced. Which one will win out is anyone's guess. Elinminating biodiesel fuel would save far more fuel than any other change. I lose 10% on my MPG when using biodiesel. ....Two more thoughts. The truck market is global. The American share is not over 10%. More are sold in China. Foreigners don't go in for these kinds of crackpot designs that so many geeks find "cool". "Cool" doesn't mean squat in business. They are looking at total cost of operation, inculding maintenance, repair, and resale value. Most of our used trucks here are sold overseas. You never thought of that, but businessmen do.... Finally, I laugh at people who pontificate on how much trucks pay in taxes, and leave out the tolls we pay, the 20% surcharge added to each new truck sold, the amount the cops squeeze out of us for paperwork "violations" (this is substantial), and various other costs, that all goes to the government. Bogus figures. From Chicago to New York can cost well over $500 in tolls. If the schedule is tight, you have to run the toll roads. That 500 dollars hurts. I mean, it hurts you too. It raises the price you pay at the store for the stuff we carry. Yes, it gets passed on to you. Socialist truck haters ought to think about that.
1)From the shipping dock onto a truck.
2)across town.
3)off the truck.
4)onto the train.
In a train oriented system this would be all 1 step for heavy cargo companies (postal service, postorder companies, supermarkets etc): From the dock onto the train.
5)wait for a train to be built.
good joke.
6)wait for train to run.
How long this is depends on the usage. Here in the Netherlands passenger trains run once an hour like clockwork. Scheduling trains like that is possible, for cargo as well as passengers. Simple hint: never wait for cargo. If the cargo isn't at the dock or in the cart in time it'll have to wait for the next train. If trains are the standard this may only be an hour.
With modern control systems it may be possible to load the cargo onto a train cart, get the cart up to speed as the train passes and hook it on the end fully automated. This would mean the dock gets more expensive (linear motors in the tracks to get the carts (with magnets on the bottom) to speed) but this is only a small section and since the train doesn't even have to stop delays are minimized and power requirements are minimized.
7)off the train onto the trucks.
8)finally to the delivery dock.
If the destination is a company this could, in many cases be only a little bit because the shop or somesuch would be in the same area as the dock (or it may have a dock all for itself).
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I'm no friend of trucks, but I wanted to clarify that 80,000 is the typical maximum weight allowed for a semi-truck. That would more likely be a shorter-haul truck moving gravel or other materials instead of less dense cargo like Walmart products. For the long-haul, materials are transported by train.
I'm a friend of trucks -- pretty much everything you have ever bought made its first and last trips by truck. There's no way modern logistics are feasible -- i.e. you don't get to buy stuff -- without trucks.
The weight being carried is a function of the number of axles on the truck. Each axle is good for about 8 tons, so your 80,000 pound load (40 (short) tons) is a 22 wheel tractor-trailer. You do need to balance the weight properly given the location of the axles, but this isn't rocket science.
There is a good reason for having a generally applied and precise limit on weight per axle: the wear and tear on the road is empirically proportional to the weight per axle to the fourth power. Those overloaded trucks or improperly loaded trucks do a lot of damage to the road, much more than you could ever do with a passenger car.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
Mercedes EXT 92.
Yes, in the year 1992 Mercedes showed concept truck. It had siding doors, driver in the center, aerodynamic connection between truck and the trailer, convex trailer front, minimalistic dashboard with touchscreen, xenon headlamps, led turn signals and rear lamps, radar, cameras front and back. The list is very long. They went so far that the trailer was pulled towards the cab at higher speeds to reduce drag.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think trucks with similar features designed by Luigi Colani are even older.
Powertrain you say? Leyland showed truck with gas turbine in in 1968. But this is even older. Ford made "Big Red" gas turbine truck in 1964.
Why are we still looking at the concepts when most of the technology existed at least 20 years ago?
They are not experienced in building trucks. Most likely they are going to approach an experienced company and pay them to build these trucks. It seems they have a working prototype so they probably already did that.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Walmart says it has no plans to produce the WAVE concept,
Then why make this prototype? I suppose it might have been more expensive to make than they thought or something, but it seems a shame to waste all that work.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
See http://concettomotors.blogspot.de/2012/07/os-caminhoes-do-futuro-de-luigi-colani.html
The amount of fuel taxes could easily double and it will make nary an impact on the price.
A 10% increase in fuel prices would have a notable impact on OTR trucking, even if it didn't substantially change my transportation habits.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why go for a fixed amount per gallon? With a fixed amount, inflation eats away at the revenue. The federal gas tax has been 18 cents per gallon since 1993. It should have been a percentage all along. Why we let the oil companies get away with that one, I don't know. No doubt Big Oil lobbied hard for it, but still. Sales tax is a percentage. So is income tax. But the gas tax was allowed to be a fixed amount.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Everything else is pretty much lip gloss to make it look shiny.
http://www.myheimat.de/neustadt-am-ruebenberge/event-truck-d64042.html
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
But as public transport still exists, and is even wonderfully successful in many places, doesn't that mean that maybe there is a gap between trucks and trains which could be occupied by some sort of hybrid technology? Perhaps more rail-like than truck-like.
OK, who else saw that and thought of this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
I would buy this if diesel were taxed at the same rate as gasoline. That's not true, as it's usually about 10% more. Considering the sheer volume of fuel these large trucks go through, claiming that they aren't paying their fair share seems a bit of a stretch.
Also consider that while a large truck does carry a significant amount of weight, they also distribute it over a significantly larger contact patch. While I will grant you that load on the asphalt is still higher than most cars, it's not nearly as straight forward as one might think. If someone with more time could google a comparison, that would be very enlightening.
Yeah, I saw this at EPCOT like 15 years ago, except it was made by Volvo. I'm not sure what the advantage is of the driver being in the middle.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Funny I hear that same excuse for not raising the minimum wage and requiring employers to provide insurance.
It's like it's the favorite propaganda for the status-quo.
5)wait for a train to be built.
good joke.
Not a joke. Trains are "assembled" (built) at a rail yard by a yard engine moving freight cars around on the various sidings until you hook up the long-haul engine. Depending on the number of sidings and number of connections between freight cars that need to be made, this can take 30 minutes or a few hours.
I used to take a train from central Pennsylvania up to NYC every few weeks. We had a 20-30 minute layover in Philadelphia on each trip while they switched engines from diesel to electric. That was always a 10-15 minute process.
That being said, putting containers on/off a freight train only takes a few minutes per container. Maybe less depending on travel distance. But if you have 30-50 freight containers to load per loader, that time adds up to a few hours. Plus the time your driver spends waiting in line to get their container. So it really only makes sense for trips of 500-600 miles or longer. For distances less then that, you can have a driver on each end meet in the middle to swap loads, without having to pay them overnight rates or have either driver work more then 9 hours.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Keep in mind that the OTR industry has already absorbed a fuel cost increase from $1.509/gal (2003) to $3.992/gal (2013) [source: EIA].
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Actually you pay the originating railroad the agreed upon freight quote. The rail lines have a cooperative agreement amongst themselves that handles the division of freight among the rail owners.
It's really not as expensive as you make it out to be.
Trains are still used a lot. You aren't near a major rail line to notice. A lot of containerized freight arrive by a port and use trains to send them to a regional intermodal transportation hub where it is picked up by a truck for its last miles of delivery.
With the exception of B2B regional deliveries, a lot of the trucks on the road are carrying freight that spent some time on a rail road.
3200 lbs per axle?
A typical 18-wheeler has four axles with dual tires on each side, plus one axle with single tires on each side. So, 14400 lbs max load?
Somehow, I think not.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What a quaint idea! Lowering taxes on some just because you raised taxes on others? Really? You enlarge my view of the possible...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I know a guy who used to drive the F900's for them. He is retired now but every ones of those monsters were either scrapped or sold to an exporter where they went to South America. It is unknown if any of those trucks survived. Most of the CCC mixers they owned went to Quadrozzi who still operate in Brooklyn and Far Rockaway.
I am an antique truck nut, I even own a 1961 Mack B61T mostly all stock including the turbocharged 673 diesel, 9 speed duplex, jake brake, and Kaiser roof air conditioner. If I could find one of the F900's I can die a happy man lol.
That's a solved problem. You offload containers to trailers and use yard trucks (hostlers) to move them to short-term storage areas. When road trucks come to pickup, which now doesn't have to be at a set time so they don't all come at once, the thing is just sitting there, already on a trailer. They hookup and go.
That's most definitely a Texas thing, and it's due to oil/gas regulations being lumped under TRC than anything to do with railroads.. in fact TRC is no longer concerned with railroads.
The female narrator for the video is the pronunciation spatula for calling the micro-turbine a micro-"turban".
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Your right, it would be a waste of $3.75 million PER TRUCK, so in total it would waste billions of dollars.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Ports mainly deal in bulk in the form of 20 and 40 foot intermodal containers and ro-ro (roll on/roll off). Ports are bottlenecks as they are points of entry or departure for freight to and from this country. You don't send a container on a ship from NY to florida, you do that via rail or truck. The problem people have with trucking is the interstate moving of goods where it might be more efficient to move items via rail from point to point within the borders. But in the end its more simple and efficient time and cost wise to ship via truck.
This is the mentality of truck drivers. They think they own the roads and drive like it.
You never actually shipped anything by train have you?
I used to when I was in logistics and it's not as bad as you make it out to be. The most frequent problem (and it wan't that often) I had was when a railcar I was leasing found its way back to the owner's rail line and they took the opportunity to perform maintenance which delayed my shipment by 3 or 4 days (on rare occasion 2 weeks).
Toyota is mainly a passenger car company. So it makes sense this is the place they would start with hybrid R&D, since that is where they could also make money. Also what makes you think that what Toyota learned with the Prius did not bleed down to trucks and SUVs? They currently offer one hybrid SUV and one EV-SUV, and the truck with the best fuel economy rating.
This is the train of the past. Remember tollroads, then the government supplied land and materials to make railroads, then capped their expansion with "freeways" to enable larger towns, railroads didn't expand,they became lazy, and let others do the last mile. Hense, truckers. to the small towns and to move the produce from point a to a collection point. Then some companies, trucking, took the idea one step further, good roads, bigger truck, and the fight was on, you notice the good roads now, too heavy a load, same prooblems that rails have, heavy loads, lack of rails, infrastructure. So.
Also consider that while a large truck does carry a significant amount of weight, they also distribute it over a significantly larger contact patch. While I will grant you that load on the asphalt is still higher than most cars, it's not nearly as straight forward as one might think. If someone with more time could google a comparison, that would be very enlightening.
Damage done to the road rises exponentially with the load. The rule of thumb is damage to the road is proportional to (gross weight / # axles)^4. A single fully loaded tractor trailer can do as much damage to a road as 1000 passenger cars. So I don't know if the higher fuel tax trucks pay completely offsets the additional wear they put on the roads.
See http://www.pavementinteractive...
A 10% increase in taxes? The amount of damage increase exponentially with vehicle weight (to the 4th power - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...). The fuel costs increase linearly with load size. So even with higher fuel usage and slightly higher taxes, it doesn't make a significant difference.
Short sighted Railroads, who decided they were in the "railtoad" business, and not in transportation business. They spurned trucks in the early days of petrol based transportation, seeing them as competition, rather than an alternative means of moving cargo and people. This allowed the buildout of roads to that replaced rails.
Now, it is too late, as the right of ways required to extend rail further is much much harder to come by and very expensive up front.
Then there is the speed aspect of moving cargo / passengers vs Rail. Currently it takes 14 hours to get from where I live to Los Angeles via Rail, and it is once per day. I can drive in 10 (with stops) or I can drive/fly in 6. I can only imagine how long it takes for cargo, which has to be loaded, unloaded at each end, and staged before and after loading before it has to move to the final destination.
Realistically, if your cargo is time dependent delivery, you don't put it on rail. This is fully the problem of the Rail companies, not understanding what business they were in. Now, the understand but it is too late.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No the reason is that trucks don't pay fairly for the road wear while train's have to pay for rail wear. Do you think any politicians would dare try to enforce a tax based on vehicle weight. Nor do they pay for the new roads which are built for passenger cars...
Given that road damage is apparently proportional to the 4th power of axle weight (too lazy to put in link to wikipedia), it seems unlikely anyone would be brave enough to push that legislation... but it'd make railways more attractive.
$3.992 a gallon.... here in the UK it costs nearly that much for a litre.
Practically, I don't see why the shapes of the truck and the trailer couldn't go this direction, along with putting the driver in the middle. There are significant cost savings to the manufacturers to eliminate the need for left and right sided cabs. A passenger seat could be arranged in the back, if necessary. We're a LONG way away from carbon fiber panels on the trailers, though. That's kind of silly, though the weight difference is a small positive. I've always wondered why some vehicles are shaped as they are. Buses, tractor trailers, and other large vehicles could really use a simple redesign to gain some serious aerodynamics.
They haven't replaced the long haul, in fact the rail roads are handling record amounts of freight, but the drawbacks to rail are time issues and the fact that eventually all freight must be put on a truck. Trucks are best for a few hundred air mile routes and for anything that is at all time sensitive. Also, you can always get a cheaper trucker to deliver freight, they are entirely decentralized. With the rails there is little room for negotiation.
Trucks are used for a number of reasons;
Trucks are faster then rail
Is Walmart going to build a rail line to each store?
Trucks are more efficient for smaller locations, and if you wait for more freight cars to be loaded see the first point.
no
Side note on Buffett, I thought it was interesting that he wholeheartedly supported Obama, and then Obama wholeheartedly tried to squash the Keystone Pipeline. Until the dots were connected and I realized that with no pipeline every gallon of oil and therm of gas had to be transported by Buffett's rail cars.
Lowering taxes on some proportionally to their use just because you raised taxes on others according to the actual damage done to the road?
FTFY. Doesn't sound so crazy now does it? It almost sounds like the perfectly logical thing to do! Simple fact is that rails are more efficient (cost of fuel, wear and tear, etc) at moving items that weigh considerable amounts. Making cars/taxes pay for the trucks just artificially makes the cost of trucking look lower which means that the rails don't get used as much and their efficiency drops. This basically breaks the free market in this domain. The rail cars look much more expensive than they really are vs trucks as a whole.
Trucks of course are much more flexible on schedule, but one would argue that if we hadn't been subsidizing the trucks for all of these years we would have a more efficient rail system setup by now. Plus these days with analytics and just-in-time ordering delivery times should all be automatically hashed out with your ordering schedules and delivery speed shouldn't be a concern as long as it is consistent.
Self driving vehicles will put truck drivers out of a job within a generation anyway.
The reason is... have you ever tried to ship via train? When you ship via train, you have a "delivery window" think of it like the cable guy who will be at your house some time between 8 am and 5 pm. With trains that window is usually 7 days long, depending on when the crews get to the car your stuff is in. Trucks are so popular because, generally speaking, one knows how long it is going to take to get from hub A in Boston to hub B in Las Vegas.
42 69 6C 6C 20 47 61 74 65 73 20 69 73 20 61 20 77 68 6F 72 65 21
Lucky for you the UK is much smaller.
Actually when you compare it to more accessible things like a pickup truck it is not that huge. Now a semi hauling a new 250,000 lb bridge beam is a slow and scary thing.
When I was a service foreman for a landscape company, I took my pickup truck close to 30,000 lbs once, hauling a large load of rock. To the truck's credit it did have leaf springs all the way up to the sky to begin with.
Funny thing is cops are angry if you pull a pickup into a weigh station. I guess they do not imagine one can go past 24K lbs. "Get the fuck out of here you retarded asshole!".. "OK officer, I was just obeying the sign"
And yes, that place was frighteningly dangerous and illegal but when you are paying your way through college..
As for Walmart's design. No fucking way. That design will create a pile of dead truckers. The driver is low and has a lot of weight behind them + a nice little ramp of a nose, on the truck. 1 SUV driver yapping on the phone swerves in close in front and slams on their brakes and the trucker is dead after eating an SUV.
Several rail companies were offering intermodal cargo transportation (truck to rail to truck) since the 1960's.
Even FedEx and UPS use rail to transport their trailers and containers.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
When the truck is FULL, I don't think the carbon fiber will really save on weight, or fuel costs, as it will weigh 3 tons less than otherwise.
If efficiency were to dictate their logistics, the large Walmart regional warehouses would be located on a rail line and trucks would distribute the short haul from the regional warehouse to each store. Oh, well.
Walmart's logistics is probably the most efficient for any retail chain on the planet. What isn't time critical is already shipped via rail. Anything imported via a container ship will get put on a rail cars designed for containers and off to the DCs they will go. They still need a lot of trucks to ship things from the DCs to the stores.
BTW, the US already ships lots of stuff via rail: http://www.economist.com/node/16636101?zid=302&ah=601e2c69a87aadc0cc0ca4f3fbc1d354
> if you're running into legal weight limits
If legal weight limits were the problem, yes. Most of the time, they aren't. More often, a typical truck is carrying about half it's legal cargo weight.
Let's look at the case of running into the weight limit, though. That may be true 10% of the time. Suppose one truck is carrying bottled water or something else heavy. It'll have about 50,000 pounds of cargo. The other nine trucks aren't at their limit.
Spending $ million X 10 = $40 million more on those trucks could conceivably increase their cargo by 4,000 pounds. That's a ten thousand dollars a pound. Noone is dumb enough to spend $10,000 per pound, except maybe the US federal government.
How long this is depends on the usage. Here in the Netherlands passenger trains run once an hour like clockwork. Scheduling trains like that is possible, for cargo as well as passengers. Simple hint: never wait for cargo. If the cargo isn't at the dock or in the cart in time it'll have to wait for the next train. If trains are the standard this may only be an hour.
With modern control systems it may be possible to load the cargo onto a train cart, get the cart up to speed as the train passes and hook it on the end fully automated. This would mean the dock gets more expensive (linear motors in the tracks to get the carts (with magnets on the bottom) to speed) but this is only a small section and since the train doesn't even have to stop delays are minimized and power requirements are minimized.
But guess what? The freight train system in the US is the most efficient and cost effective on the planet. Europe may do passenger trains well, but apparently not freight. A train once an hour? Look at how many of these freight lines are running 100-200 trains a day.
http://www.economist.com/node/16636101?zid=302&ah=601e2c69a87aadc0cc0ca4f3fbc1d354
Yeah, so poorly they're the most efficient freight rail lines on the planet.
http://www.economist.com/node/16636101?zid=302&ah=601e2c69a87aadc0cc0ca4f3fbc1d354
Train companies tend to be about as efficient as cable companies, for the same reasons. Still, as the sibling posts have pointed out, it's quite cheap per mile-ton compared to anything but waterborne shipping.
I think perhaps some companies just don't think in terms of rail. I wonder if the Tesla plant is using much rail yet - when it was the NUMMI plant there were a couple of freight trains a day, but then volume was far higher.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Rail existed all over the US at a time when _the_ only way to get freight shipped across land was a train or a wagon. Rail is more efficient for large trains, but for the small loads once in a while to a city it loses an advantage. The rail companies didn't want to maintain tracks on routes that they were losing money on, so the tracks were removed. The US still has the most efficient freight rail system on the planet and where businesses can effectively use rail, they do. Trucks fill in where rail isn't feasible. They work together. It's not a one or the other situation.
No, freight trains are running fast enough to do they job they need to do. You could double the speed of the trains and that wouldn't offset the amount of time needed to build the train. Passenger runs are a nuisance for the freight guys. The last thing they want is a passenger train on their tracks if they're pushing 100-200 freight trains a day down those rails.
Exactly, however the build time, often takes days, for any given especially where non-perishable goods are being shipped.
You might have feeder lines coming in from regional hubs, ports, mining, manufacturing centers to a train yard, for assembly into a trans continental train, and each of these loads has different destinations. So the train is built for ease of disassemble, so that entire segments can be dropped along the way. Putting the closest destinations last on the line of rail cars, so they can just be disconnected when you reach your first stop, and maybe others tacked on.
But that is not the only consideration. You have to consider weight distribution along the train, You can't necessarily put a long slug of very light empty flat cars between longer much heaver materials cars. The light cars can be pulled off the track in certain cornering situations.
Train building is all done according to computer generated assembly lists. And if yard engineers are very lucky every segment is found on a specified track, in the proper order, but they often need to move other cars just to get to the segment they want. In large yards like The Bailey Yard that segment could be many miles away by rail, but only 500 yards away as the crow flys. Each trim up and down the yard can take half an hour. Google maps view: you will have to zoom both In and Out to comprehend the scale of this yard. These yards are everywhere.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And what's wrong with subsidizing something we all use and benefit from? Those who can pay more do in the form of higher property taxes (the rich actually pay a smaller percentage to the feds income/capital gains tax, but that's a different story). But in return the can hire people at lower wages and patronize businesses with cheaper prices because those businesses can hire people at lower wages. Without the subsidy, we'd either have crime, a revolution or higher wages.
I don't understand how trucks, which require much more fuel, and more driver time per load, have
so thoroughly replaced railroads for long hauls.
Rail roads don't go everywhere. Regular roads do.
A load of tomatoes or lettuce from Salinas Ca. to Hunts Point Ny. is 44,000 lbs no matter who is hauling it. I guess it is trucked because it is refrigerated and shelf life. Team drivers make it in a few days.
Yes, fuel taxes doubling or shrinking, or fuel prices shifting 10-20% WILL have a major impact on the trucking industry.
What it will NOT do, is impact the regular cargo that they haul. The reason is that shipping around America is a relatively small % of the price of goods.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Googling for 'usa total vehicle miles driven by vehicle class' turns up this link,, the July 2013 Transportation Energy Data Book compiled by Oak Ridge National Laboratories for the Department of Energy. In the "Quick Facts" section, it notes that cars and light trucks (the category that includes SUVs, IIRC) account for 63% of US transportation petroleum use, while medium trucks account for 4% and heavy trucks account for 17%.
So no, the environmentalists have it exactly right, unless fuel economy improvements for medium and heavy trucks are really easy to get.
It results in inefficient use of resources. Ultimately, decisions on whether to send something by truck or train ought to be based on which gets it to its destination using the fewest resources. If you subsidize truck transport, the cutoff point gets moved so that some amount of cargo that would have been better off going by train ends up getting sent by truck instead because trucks are made to look artificially cheap. The extra resources spent trucking that cargo that should have been trained represents a dead weight loss that reduces the total amount of wealth in society as a whole.
And they have for a long time.
Busses found here
http://editorial.autos.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=435202
And Large SUVs found here.
caranddriver.com/reviews/2008-chevrolet-tahoe-hybrid-4x4-first-drive-review
Here is a company that has done exactly as u suggest and gone after "most"gallons saved. Well...We all know how that worked out for them.
I misunderstood 5. However, it should be technically feasible to do this automated and with all carts at the same time, assuming magnets under the carts and motor coils between the tracks. Freight train can be modernized but isn't because nobody invests in them.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I paid 24k in road taxes last year ...who do you think has more right to the highway? ...snow does more damage to roads then all trucks combined ..stop your bitching 4 wheeler you don't like trucks on the road then don't buy anything that a truck brings you oooooo wait that's everything!