Yeah, 'cuz they need a locomotive to move 'em around - a simple problem to solve with self-powered railcars.
They also don't have tracks that can handle railcars individually. It'd be a simple matter of programming 10 railcars from each of 10 locations to converge on a certain place to pick up a large volume of product. Presto - 100 railcars show up from all over a 600 mile radius in 4 hrs or less.
Nope - railcars can be shared. There probably aren't more than about 10% of all trucks moving at any one moment - they load-unload, get fuel, wait for the trucker to finish breakfast-lunch-dinner-pee break, get weighed, etc. etc. 1 railcar for every 3 trucks would probably cover things quite well.
Washington Metro does pretty good. Clean, fairly quick except for the usual train bugaboos of having to transfer lines and having to wait each time.
People pay for it whether its govt. or private industry. Both those enbreasties only have 1 source of money - the people.
Yet people still work on self-navigating cars and think that this is going to work, which I doubt. Now there is an environment that is really unpredictable. Rails, OTOH, are fairly predictable, and hazards can be detected and dealt with by using the proper sensors and programming.
You restore power and the system starts back up.
No training for someone sitting in a moving railcar, any more than sitting in an airplane and riding it requires training.
Yet high speed rail, the conventional kind of train, has run for millions of miles, with 1 accident caused by people incorrectly modifying the wheels of a German train. I think people will like those odds.
No, I think I'll ask our friends who run trains like TGV and the Japanese bullet train. These guys don't have accidents.
In France and Japan. And Germany up until a few years ago with that one incident from the modified wheels.
They don't - in a well run system.
rude drivers nope. rude TRUCKERS... 1968Nothing's free, but I'd rather be paying for American uranium-produced electricity than middle-eastern produced oil. As for the governenment getting involved in transportation, it already is - this would be government competing with...
We're gonna build this with redundancy, and without communications because that always fails - just on-board sensors detecting things that need it, or if there is communications, it'll be fail-safed so the absence of a signal indicates trouble. That way, if a sensor fails to provide a signal, that will be taken as the worst case condition that sensor is trying to detect - bad rail, something on the track, etc. Then we use redundant sensors anyway to ensure there is not comm break.
Dave Head
