I realize Peter's idea is to put rails on highways, but I hijacked that
idea to say let's put trucks on the existing railroads. For both of us,
I believe it would entail putting deployable steel railroad wheels on
the tractors and trailers. (I won't call them bogeys or trucks because
they would probably be single wheels with axles.)
To make my point clear, in case I was misunderstood, I like the idea of
trucks on rails. More efficient and easier to implement autonomous
driving.
However, putting rails on existing freeways is riddled with problems.
First, there are the various exits. Trucks would have to leave the rails
and cross other lanes to get to most exits. That means the whole convoy
has to stop for a truck to disengage from the tracks and pull off (or
there have to be mile-long merge strips, or something, to allow it to be
done at speed. And same for getting onto the rails. And, in some places
there are exits on the left side of the freeway. That would require some
amazing expenses to adopt.
And there are hills. I don't know if semi trucks could handle 6% grade
with steel wheels. If not, then the rail infrastructure becomes even
more expensive to handle both rail and tire.
And for highways, it's even more difficult. A convoy would be like a
train and need grade crossing gates. Highways would have to be widened
to have at least one lane for non rail transport. That might be next to
impossible in many tight spots.
On the other hand, using the existing rail network would be technically
simple. Convoys could be assembled and disassembled on side tracks and
then hit the mainline just like a train. Grade crossing are already
accommodated. Rails go between all major cities and could be used for
hauling freight in most cases. Pretty much all the infrastructure is in
place. I envision this operation to be driverless, with drivers only
handling the "last mile" - taking a truck wherever it needs to go within
a locality and vice versa. Even if a container needed to go expedited,
it could be a single unit train and still use the rails, with driver
(doing nothing while on the rails). So, this means semis could use the
existing rails for longer distances and the existing highways for
localities and shorter distances.
The problems with my solution (and to some degree, Peter's) is the
logistics. Many people's jobs go away. The semi tractors would need to
be company owned since there would be no driver for the long haul. And
there would be significant complications of having more trains on the
tracks - presumably there would be all the existing freight trains plus
all the new convoys. The railroads would want to have to adopt this
model. In short, a lot of how things are done would have to change.
A few people have talked about disappearance of rails. That is true in
urban areas but the intercity rails seem to be largely intact and
heavily used. What is disappearing is passenger service. But that's
another topic.
Someone also implied (or so I took it) that this would not be much
better than the intermodal system we have today. But disagree. There's a
lot of overhead of stacking containers on to rail cars and hooking them
together into a train. Takes hours. With individual semis that are rail
capable, the whole process could take a minute or two.
Peri
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------ Original Message ------
From: "EVDL Administrator via EV" <[email protected]>
To: "Electric Vehicle Discussion List" <[email protected]>
Cc: "EVDL Administrator" <[email protected]>
Sent: 06-Dec-20 2:50:02 PM
Subject: Re: [EVDL] 'All's not well with UK public charging' / Autonomy
On 6 Dec 2020 at 21:54, Peter VanDerWal via EV wrote:
Every year they pull up more tracks and covert the railway to something
else. I doubt they will ever be able to get them back.
I'm not a rail expert by any means, and maybe I don't pay attention in the
right places, but I don't see this happening anywhere but in the US.
With the possible exception of the UK and their Tory wrecking crew, Europe
and Asia are pretty well invested in, and committed to, rail service.
Europe's yearly rail passenger-km figure is about 24 times what ours is.
Ride the TGV in France or the Shinkansen in Japan and you'll see why US
railroads literally can't keep up. Both run most lines between 150 and
200mph. (Obligatory EV content: they're electric trains.)
China and other places also have high speed rail, but I haven't read much
about those systems.
It doesn't help that US politicians of a certain persuasion, and dozens of
influential US thnk tanks, keep beating on our railroads. Much of this is
funded and led by oil money. I'm looking at YOU, Charles Koch.
David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey
To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my
offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt
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