181–190 of 490 posts
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A train car carries about a kiloton of cargo. How many zeppelins would that take? Edit: Actually, I can't count. Only a few hundred thousand pounds. That's still probably a bunch of zeppelinworths though.
Hinderburg-like at 100 ton itself can carry about 120 ton payload, ie. payload of 2 train cars.
There is a world where we dig tunnels under federal highways, and stick freight trucks down there. They'd run on a monorail, at 120+ mph. Surface vehicles would be dramatically limited in terms of height, width, and length. Maybe people buses could go down there? In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
I feel like trains are similar in a lot of ways, and many orders of magnitude cheaper. That’s definitely cool to think about though!
There is a world where we dig tunnels under federal highways, and stick freight trucks down there. They'd run on a monorail, at 120+ mph. Surface vehicles would be dramatically limited in terms of height, width, and length. Maybe people buses could go down there? In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
Or you know, build like a normal as train along side the highway.
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If the US rail network wasn't in such a state of disrepair and freight trains weren't miles long to cut labor costs, you wouldn't even need to dig tunnels for them. That also saves the cost of digging those tunnels and actually making them safe (i.e. having service tunnels, ventilation, fire escapes, fire suppression systems, etc etc). And of course with tunnels you'd want rail anyway because you don't want to be stu…
The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.
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Yes, and that tunnel has massive ventilation systems, not just for emergencies like fires too. Fun trivia: the tunnel is so deep that without ventilation the temperature in it would be 40 centigrade.
It does, but the ventilation is still not designed for diesels. I guess we are just discussing boring, in that case, electric something is required, maybe battery would work out better than overhead or below lines. Or maybe the only way to do this right without any ventilation is via supercooled magnets or air pressure.
As any emergency worker will tell you, the problem with batteries compared to ICE engines is that if the battery is on fire it doesn't just stop once you extinguish it. You need to keep at it until it has cooled down sufficiently to prevent spontaneous reignition and that takes a while. Plus the entire time it burns it generates large amounts of toxic fumes.
Compare that to an electric line that just needs to transmit electricity and just stops if you shut it off. Yeah, ozone accumulation is a problem but so is heat so you'll need some venting anyway (plus you probably want the air in the tunnels to be breathable because we're humans after all).
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That sounds like railroads but worse. What's the advantage? Tunneling is incredibly expensive to do, yet you're proposing it in a situation where it'd need enough coverage so as to ban large freight transport over roads.
The one advantage I can think of is no weather to deal with like snow/ice.
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Amtrak in the northeast corridor is Amtrak owned track
Which is basically the only one in the entire country. Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.
What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
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The constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.
That makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.
Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?
The Channel Tunnel was attempted in the 1800s and failed. A hundred years later they tried again and succeeded. So...
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I'm going to guess that he didn't expect it to work. He never invested significantly, and there must be a reason. The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.
I always wondered just how bad an idea must have been. If Musk didn't go after it. Specially considering that he is the one who published it...
