61–70 of 80 posts
What the US needs is to fix its rail system. eminent domain the whole thing, pay off the robber barons and just run it like it matters to get shit from here to there.
“Just 1 simple fix” Hopefully they bulldoze your neighborhood first. Mine? I know my neighbors would wage war…
IANAAE (...not an aerospace engineer), but I smell a metric boatload of utterly delusional thinking here. > ...remarkably simple way to slash air cargo costs as much as 65% – by having planes tow autonomous, cargo-carrying gliders behind them, big enough to double, or potentially triple their payload capacity. A 65% cost reduction via tripling the payload would require that costs not increase, no? Are these huge carg…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to freight rail, the US is in the top handful of countries in the world by pretty much any metric. We’re not great at passenger rail, but we beat all of Europe when it comes to the amount of freight shipped via rail per capita, and all of Europe except Switzerland based on the percentage of total freight transported by rail.
This is true, and I've made the point myself previously on HN. But US freight tonnage is dominated by cheap bulk goods, most notoriously coal, though grain and bulk liquids (petroleum, industrial).[0] There's also a lot of intermodal / containerised freight, but this is almost exclusively long-haul "land bridge" traffic, with very little trade or viability for short-haul freight ( Cross-country carriage still takes 1…
Small autonomous train carriages fitting into the gaps of the bigger system and making use of abandoned/underused spurs.
I think this is them:
Interview with CEO on exactly what they offer at the moment:
https://www.railway-technology.com/interviews/i-dont-see-a-f...
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There’s such a huge time gap between our current rail and air that many things that are somewhat time sensitive end up flying which would use a reasonably quick rail network. NYC to LA is well under 2,800 miles so getting just about anywhere in the continental US on rail in under 48 hours is a completely reasonable standard. Yet, people moving from Texas to Florida don’t just park a U-Haul on a flatbed and fly, becau…
You think a completely reasonable standard is for a train to average 58 mph all the way across the united states without stopping? What about all the slowdowns due to extremely rough terrain? The fact people have to be swapped out? The fact that not all cars are going all the way across the country and also have to be swapped out? 58mph average is insane.
Poor track conditions, missing block signal systems, and Trains without an automatic cab signal, automatic train stop or automatic train control system "may not exceed 79 mph."
Freight trains really could travel a mostly Class 6 network at 120MPH in the US, we have regulations all the way to class 9. They don’t because that’s not rail is optimized for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to freight rail, the US is in the top handful of countries in the world by pretty much any metric. We’re not great at passenger rail, but we beat all of Europe when it comes to the amount of freight shipped via rail per capita, and all of Europe except Switzerland based on the percentage of total freight transported by rail.
This is a myth oft-repeated on HN. US freight rail does cheaply transport a lot of tonnage, but it is a shadow of its former self, after a half-century of digesting the investments of the past. It's squeezed out efficiency by running longer and slower trains (that exceed the length of the rail sidings!) transporting bulk goods on predictable schedules between fixed points (like grain and coal), while slashing routes…
“ It ships a lot of freight, but it does not do so effectively, quickly, nor safely, or flexibly.”
What does effectively even mean? If it weren’t effective people wouldn’t use it to ship.
What the US needs is to fix its rail system. eminent domain the whole thing, pay off the robber barons and just run it like it matters to get shit from here to there.
We're like a couple years away from having the tech to just give all autonomous electric vehicles the leftmost lane on the interstates from 10pm-6am, then raise the speed limit to 90 or 100 mph. Let trucking companies drive these vehicles a few feet apart from each other for aerodynamics. If you could book a sleeper taxi in New York and be in Chicago in the morning, or San Francisco to Seattle, for cheaper than a fli…
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Oh so the railway infrastructure isnt able to be differentiated from peoples homes around it?
You wouldn’t need eminent domain in that case