The Dream of an Alpine Waterway • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dream of an Alpine Waterway

#41

Post by brnt » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 6:16 AM UTC

_visgean wrote: post #24

dmurray wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days, not because there's anything wrong with it but because road and rail have got so much better in the last 150 years. If canal technology had improved at the same rate and we had a magical economic way of building canals over huge mountains, like the one described in the article, of course we'd contemplate building more of them. Connect Denver to San Fra…

It is still somehow alive in Germany https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/WS/waterways-as-... > Up to 240 million tonnes of bulk goods are transported per year via the German Federal waterways, which amounts to around 65 billion tonne-kilometres. This equals almost 75 per cent of the goods transport by railway in this country or about 14 million lorry journeys.

In the Netherlands it's even more. Seems like the Dutch wikipage on the subject is far more comprehensive to the English one: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binnenvaart

Says over a quarter of freight goes by boot. Not surprising, seeing as how many small inland ports there are.

Re: The Dream of an Alpine Waterway

#42

Post by ajb » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 8:31 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #39

ajb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's for freight, though, and if I understand it correctly, the force of the upward movement is automatically converted to horizontal movement by the pulley/rail system. So there's potentially no need for anyone to be on the boat as it transits the tunnel. Not that that this looks practical - the tunnels would be huge, just for starters.

Not that huge. This thing seems to have been scaled for narrowboats, like the old British canal system. Those have some tunnels, just barely big enough for the boats. Here's the longest canal tunnel in the UK.[1] That was built in 1803. The project in the article was proposed in 1907, which was way late to be getting into narrowboat canals. Railroads, both ordinary and cogwheel, were working just fine in Swizerland b…

Wow yeah narrowboats were not the cutting edge of haulage in 1907.

Interesting about the Stand edge tunnel. I admit, I'm not that keen to go through it

Re: The Dream of an Alpine Waterway

#43

Post by NikkiA » Wed, Jul 03, 2024, 12:18 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #33

jcranmer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C&O Canal (built as a competitor to the Erie Canal) has a 184m (605 ft) lift to get to Cumberland, which is where they gave up trying to reach the Ohio River, haven been beaten by their competitor, the B&O Railroad. Per Wikipedia, their original planned route had another 2700 ft of total elevation change to make the Ohio River, about 4 times what they had already done. Pennsylvania's answer to the Erie Canal was…

Intermodal is one answer to "solving the hard bits". Stuff everything into a largish box, and move that between lorries, ships, rail, and whatever. There are limits to this: containers don't handle bulk cargoes (liquids, ores, grain, lumber), large assmemblies (automobiles, wind turbine components), or high-quantity gasses (e.g., LNG). There are some rail-based options for these (specialised cars), and in other cases…

> There are limits to this: containers don't handle bulk cargoes (liquids, ores, grain, lumber), large assmemblies (automobiles, wind turbine components), or high-quantity gasses (e.g., LNG). There are some rail-based options for these (specialised cars), and in other cases alternate transport modes are required.

But you CAN put liquid and pressure vessels in a intermodal framework.

Here are pictures of many:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=isotank&t=ffab&atb=v407-1&iax=imag...

Re: The Dream of an Alpine Waterway

#44

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jul 03, 2024, 3:47 AM UTC

NikkiA wrote: post #43

dredmorbius wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intermodal is one answer to "solving the hard bits". Stuff everything into a largish box, and move that between lorries, ships, rail, and whatever. There are limits to this: containers don't handle bulk cargoes (liquids, ores, grain, lumber), large assmemblies (automobiles, wind turbine components), or high-quantity gasses (e.g., LNG). There are some rail-based options for these (specialised cars), and in other cases…

> There are limits to this: containers don't handle bulk cargoes (liquids, ores, grain, lumber), large assmemblies (automobiles, wind turbine components), or high-quantity gasses (e.g., LNG). There are some rail-based options for these (specialised cars), and in other cases alternate transport modes are required. But you CAN put liquid and pressure vessels in a intermodal framework. Here are pictures of many: https:/…

You can do it, but ... it probably scales poorly.

The thing about bulk cargoes is that they are bulk. A total of one third of all commercial ships are bulk liquid petroleum carriers, and those ships devote all their storage capacity to one cargo: crude oil (or in some cases, refined hydrocarbons).

Similarly dry bulk carriers (ore, woodchips, fertilizer, grain), which are shipload cargoes.

Liquified natural gas is also typically shipped in dedicated vessels.

There are some instances where a smaller cargo allotment might be made, but those are almost always on very minor shipping routes.

A key concept in cargo is to use the largest and most standardised box size possible. Hence the standard 40 foot shipping container (the term TFU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is actually one half the size ultimately dominating the industry). In the case of bulk cargoes, a shipping container is still too small for most routes.

So: yes, what you describe exists, but it's a very minor element of total cargo movements.

Re: The Dream of an Alpine Waterway

#45

Post by K0balt » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

RajT88 wrote: post #27

K0balt wrote: post #23

There’s no violation of physics here, simply the energy transfer of potential energy from water moving downhill. Given a sufficient source of water above the highest tunnel, this seems like a remarkably efficient system, if almost certainly not economically viable to construct or maintain. If we simplify a bit and assume that all tunnels are of the same size, with the volume of water needed to fill one tunnel plus th…

> Given a sufficient source of water above the highest tunnel I keep looking at this and coming back to this point. Where on earth can you get that volume of water that high up reliably year round?

Im assuming that the mountain pass must be at a lower altitude than lakes fed by the alpine watershed.