JUST PUT A FUCKING TRAIN ON IT WTF ARE WE DOING
FUCKING DOING OUR JOB AS TRANSPORT MODELLERS AND DOING A FUCKING COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS THAT SHOWS YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO GET FUCKING MODE SHIFT FROM RURAL USERS UNLESS YOU RUN A FUCKING METRO STYLE 10 MINUTELY SERVICE WHICH IS FUCKING UNFEASIBLE WITH THE FUCKING RESOURCES WE HAVE AVAILABLE.
IN THE FUCKING UK WE HAVE A LARGE NUMBER OF FUCKING ABANDONED RAILWAYS FROM THE PERIOD OF FUCKING COAL MINING THAT WOULDN’T HAVE ANYWHERE NEAR THE FUCKING DEMAND NECESSARY TO JUSTIFY SETTING UP AN EXPENSIVE AS FUCK SIGNALLING SYSTEM TO BRING THEM UP TO MODERN FUCKING SAFETY STANDARDS, ALONGSIDE REPLACING THE FUCKING RAILS, SLEEPERS AND BEDS.
IF INSTEAD YOU CAN HAVE A FUCKING PUBLICALLY OWNED FLEET OF FUCKING ELECTRIC ‘MINI TRAINS’ THAT PEOPLE COULD USE FOR INFREQUENT BUT NECESSARY TRIPS, THAT COULD REMOVE A FUCKING SIGNIFICANT BARRIER TO MODE SHIFT, WHICH WOULD BE PRETTY FUCKING RAD
Read the article, that’s literally the first thing they explain
Besides which, it’s very obviously a train if you just look at it. It’s a small monorail train specifically designed for this purpose using existing infrastructure.
People are never fucking happy.
A train is a collection of rolling railcars propelled by one or more locomotives. These are individual self-powered railcars.
So no, there’s no train here. Just monorail pods that will get congested as density increases.
The whole concept of a train is that all the cars move together and the only congestion is at the switching yards, where it can be optimized.
These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.
Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.
Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.
Isn’t it better to have a train that runs when you want rather than having to wait potentially hours for the scheduled commuter train. Isn’t this better?
Trains are expensive to run if you don’t have enough passengers (like in small villages).
Just fund trains.
Trains suck if you don’t have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.
Cars suck always.
If you out half the funding from car infrastructure instead into train and bus infrastructure this would not be a problem. Induced demand works both ways.
Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.
A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.
The population in rural areas is so low that no matter how you induce demand, it won’t work.
Look up “interurban railways”. Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!
This almost certainly wouldn’t work in the United States but it does in Europe because Europe has loads of these tiny abandoned rail lines (often single track) that were built in the 1800s and then abandoned. They don’t go anywhere particularly densely populated, you know because of the industrial Revolution causing everyone to move to the cities, so there isn’t the demand for a full rail service. Meaning they’re not going to spend the money upgrading the infrastructure to modern standards.
This means they can be used at relatively cheap cost. As long as the tracks are still physically present all they need to do is cut some weeds down and put these things on the line and they’re good to go. It’s a cheap project that a local municipal authority can handle without having to involve wider government.
Well, I think they look cute.
Great, now we can have traffic but on these old rails.
How about, and I know this is a radical idea, actually fixing up the old rail lines and putting trains on them instead of this gimmick?
This wouldnwork better on smaller scale, less traveled rural routes. Maintaining a whole ass train for a few dozen people is overkill. I kinda like this.
I know it’s kinda cheating to bring them up in this context, but the Swiss manage to run trains to very small towns just fine
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Depends on what you call a “whole ass train”. Many of these routes could be easily service by a 1 or 2 car DMU like the rural routes in Scotland and Wales.
Seems like a train that uses both sides of the track fulfills different requirements. A train can only be made to go one way at a time, but can hold more people (increased bandwidth), but these smaller half-cars can be moving people in both directions at the same time (lower latency). Seems quite clever if it works out.
There are stations on Anglesey where you have to stick your arm out to hail the train, and the only two routes they lie on are served by the kind of 1970s DMU like you mentioned on its way to Chester or a Pendelino on its way to London or something.
I’ve used those request stops! Those sort of rural lines are exactly what we’re missing here in the states, just bouncing back and forth on the line. You can see here Americans don’t even know what they are, but they’re the perfect solution for these lines going between little towns
I live next to a railway line in the south west that is similar. A single train runs up and down the line. If you’re on one of the stations, you wave to the train so it’ll stop for you. If you’re on the train and want to get off, you ask the driver to stop.
That sounds more like a tram than a train
This is what one of the stations looks like:
They’re definitely trains. I live next to a similar one. It is physically a train, with exactly the same hardware as trains on busier lines (though typically only hauling 1-2 carriages instead of 4+). It’s just more fuel-efficient for a train to keep going through a station if nobody is getting on or off, so when passenger numbers are low, the practice is to let the driver know if you need on or off.
Would it though? It’s just vans on tracks instead of roads.
It’s not going to be more energy efficient with individually powered cabs. It’s not going to be more convenient unless your origin and destination are near a station. It’s not going to be more time efficient because of the extra distance getting to and from tracks and because you aren’t going to drive highway speeds in tiny self-balancing cars on old rails, especially when passing cars going the opposite direction. It’s not going to be more cost efficient because it’s more total moving parts requiring maintenance per person per trip.
It sounds like they are solving the problem of turning around only for terminal stations. This might make sense for trains that carry many people, but if you’re making cars on tracks there is no good solution. If you need to spend money on a system that turns the cabs around, then you either spend more money installing those systems at most stations or you spend money maintaining cabs that are driving around empty. Either way, cars on roads are cheaper.
They say it’s good for people who don’t want to wait for public transit, but they don’t say how this solves that problem. With public transit, you know when the train will be there. With this, unless they have a way for the cabs to wait at the station without blocking other cabs going the same direction, you have to wait for a cab to come and you can’t time your trip to the station around when the cab will be there. Maybe they have one? It would be a disaster if you wanted to get on from near the middle and needed to wait for either a cab that has already been vacated to come or for a cab to come all the way from the start of the track.
OK, it’s 2pm. With this system, you call a pod and ride it. With a rural train, you check the schedule and see that the next train is at 5pm. And you have to plan your trip back as well. Great, time to take your car.
And you might say “let’s have trains run at least once per hour then”. That means running empty trains all day, not sure it’s the best way to spend public money.
If your options are waiting at the station up to 2 hours for a pod or waiting anywhere else 3 hours for a train, are the pods better?
Obviously if the pods take 2h to arrive it’s not worth it
Why is it always “pods”?
How else are they going to win the rail pod challenge?
Looking forward to the Adam Something video about this.
I immediately thought about connecting multiple of these together to make a train haha
Connect them together for efficiency, and maybe use both rails for stability and to reduce design conplexity. (you dont even need any additional infrastructure!) Also, have them arrive regularly, so that users don’t need to bother with an app! Brilliant!
Seriously though, it’s really amazing how people keep inventing trains but worse. I guess this idea makes some sense if there aren’t enough riders for regular train service, but still…
That looks horrible. Cramped, the giant windows means it’s hot and the sun is always in your eyes… Any reason they need to only use one rail? We already have road & rail buses, trucks, etc…just use those.
They use one rail so they can pass each other on single line tracks. Which are quite common for rural lines.
If only there was some sort of article you could have read.
At least this one certainly can’t pass each other on one track.
They explained that one in the article as well.
This is a prototype so it has the mechanism so it doesn’t fall over if the prototype fails. The actual production version won’t have that. It’s also running at low speed for the same reason.
I would love a mini rail system like this in my community.
Actually, I’ll take most any public transportation at this point.
Fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n mit ein Gadgetbahn 🎶
The Brennan monorail rides again!
Some of this technology may sound a bit “over-ambitious,” but keep in mind the project was inspired by a fully functional self-balancing monorail that mechanical engineer Louis Brennan designed and demonstrated back in the early 1900s.
Why is it always fucking pods!? (Fucking-pods?)
I’m cautiously optimistic about this, it seems like an okay idea and the fact that they have vehicles working on a test track IRL means it’s at least not an obvious scam like hyperloop.
Also the fact that they have a specific use case in mind, don’t say it’s going to revolutionize all transportation, and are reusing existing infrastructure, all bode well.
The crane is the part I don’t get. Is it a stationary crane? Is that not more work than just putting a track switch in place instead?
It’s only for the alpha-test vehicles. The crane does not touch the rails, it’s a security issue for testing e.g. min power gyro
Mobile fuck shack.
However, what if it were possible to hail a small electric vehicle right when you needed it – via a taxi- or Uber-style app
Uber style app. Seriously, fuck no. Send trains or don’t, fuck Uber and their business model.
Project founder Thorsten Försterling tells us that the team is working on a track-installed machine that will be able to lift individual pods off of one rail and place them on the other (without passengers in them at the time), keeping them from all collecting at either end of the route.
What the heck, can’t you just have a Y at the end?
on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.
They’re reusing existing tracks.
