The video is entirely comprised of ultra long freight trains shooting past the cameras. The trains are so long some of them had five locomotives in front, a couple more in the middle, and a couple more locos pushing. Even if you don't care at all about trains, it's kind of cool to watch these monsters when you're not stuck on the road waiting for them to pass through.
The subject of high-speed trains comes up with some regularity on Ithaka but high-speed freight hasn't been part of it. These freight trains probably move that freight as fast or faster than anywhere else since I've not seen any mention of the bullet trains being used for pulling freight.
The reason for all the interest is any economy will fail immediately if there is a problem with the trucks, trains, or ships. The general flow is products come in from overseas in standard-size containers. The containers are loaded onto train cars for the long-distance national traffic and the container is pulled by a big-rig truck to the local warehouse destination ... or some variation on that theme.
Manufacturing for import or export fails without all of those systems but we're not interested in the doom and gloom, we want to make it all run faster.
There's the wonder whether high-speed trains are even possible. Think five-hundred mph trains since this is the damn future, man, and we don't screw around. The whizkids of the future come up with all the aerodynamics to do it but what kind of power does it take. The basic measure of horsepower is how fast something can lift a weight and only the train master can imagine how much weight one of those ultra trains is pulling.
Maybe it gets so complicated and so expensive to run that a five-hundred mph train doesn't actually solve any problem and it becomes another F-35 (i.e. expensive and doesn't work).
Ed: the slowest part is the shipping across the water. What you want is faster ships.
Too right, mate. There was some expression about 'a slow boat to China' from back when the 'rents were young and they didn't get particularly faster.
Ed: the military vessels are much faster!
Yah and as soon as an aircraft carrier delivers Toyotas, that will be important.
The slowest part of the cycle is the shipping over water so we need faster boats. The typical approach at present is to make progressively larger container ships and these are vessels which contain nothing but the preloaded containers which will be transferred to trucks or trains at the destination port. You bet your bippy there has been some deep systems analysis of whether it's faster overall to ship hundreds or thousands of containers on an extra large vessel relative to shipping a smaller number of containers on a faster one but what if the smaller vessels got a whole lot faster.
Ed: hydrofoils?
Sure, it's the future, man. Lift those freighters up on hydrofoils and go for the high speed that way. The reduction in drag from the hull should result in tremendous cost savings as well.
At least that would be true until the hydrofoils break from the pressure and the hull breaks from the weight.
Ed: think in the future with high-tech materials which are light-weight and incredibly strong.
Sure, that's the ticket. New materials.
The subject of high-speed trains comes up with some regularity on Ithaka but high-speed freight hasn't been part of it. These freight trains probably move that freight as fast or faster than anywhere else since I've not seen any mention of the bullet trains being used for pulling freight.
The reason for all the interest is any economy will fail immediately if there is a problem with the trucks, trains, or ships. The general flow is products come in from overseas in standard-size containers. The containers are loaded onto train cars for the long-distance national traffic and the container is pulled by a big-rig truck to the local warehouse destination ... or some variation on that theme.
Manufacturing for import or export fails without all of those systems but we're not interested in the doom and gloom, we want to make it all run faster.
There's the wonder whether high-speed trains are even possible. Think five-hundred mph trains since this is the damn future, man, and we don't screw around. The whizkids of the future come up with all the aerodynamics to do it but what kind of power does it take. The basic measure of horsepower is how fast something can lift a weight and only the train master can imagine how much weight one of those ultra trains is pulling.
Maybe it gets so complicated and so expensive to run that a five-hundred mph train doesn't actually solve any problem and it becomes another F-35 (i.e. expensive and doesn't work).
Ed: the slowest part is the shipping across the water. What you want is faster ships.
Too right, mate. There was some expression about 'a slow boat to China' from back when the 'rents were young and they didn't get particularly faster.
Ed: the military vessels are much faster!
Yah and as soon as an aircraft carrier delivers Toyotas, that will be important.
The slowest part of the cycle is the shipping over water so we need faster boats. The typical approach at present is to make progressively larger container ships and these are vessels which contain nothing but the preloaded containers which will be transferred to trucks or trains at the destination port. You bet your bippy there has been some deep systems analysis of whether it's faster overall to ship hundreds or thousands of containers on an extra large vessel relative to shipping a smaller number of containers on a faster one but what if the smaller vessels got a whole lot faster.
Ed: hydrofoils?
Sure, it's the future, man. Lift those freighters up on hydrofoils and go for the high speed that way. The reduction in drag from the hull should result in tremendous cost savings as well.
At least that would be true until the hydrofoils break from the pressure and the hull breaks from the weight.
Ed: think in the future with high-tech materials which are light-weight and incredibly strong.
Sure, that's the ticket. New materials.
2 comments:
Solve the truck link. As traffic jams cause a loss of productivity of at last estimate 250K man-years.
We can't hire enough truck drivers but we waste the ones we have.
This doesn't address the amount of fuel wasted or pollution created.
Bring on drone delivery. Seems crazy to send a truck to my house sometimes 4 or 5 times a day with deliveries that a drone could handle easily
The drone covers the 'last mile' in getting a delivery to you after a truck gets it to the distribution point. I've seen ground drones delivering pizza already but unknown how that goes as a production system. Amazon plays around with different kinds of airborne drones but that doesn't have much news for how well it proceeds.
A drawback is using one drone per package means one enormous number of drones in the air and they would have to cycle back to the base to get their next package so it seems that would be some crowded airspace.
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