It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport.
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@david_chisnall
What's amazing to me is that we already did this in the early 1900s in the Western US and the trains were electric.
@ryanjyoder never knew that!
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@ryanjyoder never knew that!
@saja0486
It's a pretty amazing history.
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/red_electrics.html -
@saja0486
It's a pretty amazing history.
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/red_electrics.html@ryanjyoder I’m from Eugene, and I want to ask my stepdad about it now. He was born and raised in Oregon and was a kid during that time frame or at least not long afterwards. Would be interesting to hear what he knows about it or experienced.
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@saja0486
It's a pretty amazing history.
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/red_electrics.html@ryanjyoder thanks for the link.
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@saja0486
It's a pretty amazing history.
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/red_electrics.html@ryanjyoder looks a lot like the train cars in the former Eugene electric station restaurant. I believe the restaurant used to be the Eugene train station back in the day.
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@ryanjyoder looks a lot like the train cars in the former Eugene electric station restaurant. I believe the restaurant used to be the Eugene train station back in the day.
@saja0486
Oh that'd be really interesting to know. Do you have a link? I'd be curious which line the cars were from. -
@saja0486
Oh that'd be really interesting to know. Do you have a link? I'd be curious which line the cars were from. -
@david_chisnall
What's amazing to me is that we already did this in the early 1900s in the Western US and the trains were electric.@ryanjyoder @david_chisnall
Southern California had something similar until cars became more popular. -
It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall Very Disruption! Much Innovate! wow
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
What a concept! /s
They usually require multiple motors, depending upon load, however.
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall a remarkable evolution of the thinking may be had by the following insight: you can save on battery mass by delivering electricity along the predictable paths the vehicles take, thus even further lowering running costs, and even increasing the power available! in this essay i will
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall Uday Schultz has written extensively and persuasively about this, and why the perverse financial incentives of the operators ensure that we have worse intermodal freight service now than we did forty years ago.
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall uh your fatal mistake with that ides is not coming up with a s3xy name like Trillionaire Lead Man transforming transportation.
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@david_chisnall And with a fixed path, we could ditch the batteries completely, and just provide electrical power along the track, perhaps overhead! I think you are on to something here!
Think about that. No more expensive batteries that regularly need to be replaced. No more time wasted recharging these things. In fact, because they have a fixed track and route and don't need to stop for recharging, they can run day and night, you can make a roster and have drivers hop on and off along the route, which would make the whole thing even more economical.
It is a really great idea! Why did nobody think of it before?
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@david_chisnall As someone that worked for a railroad, there are lots of reasons this isn't the solution you think it is.
First, only a single train can be on a given segment of track, unlike trucks which can have dozens.
Second, trains are slower. They are more difficult to control because of the lower friction of steel wheels on steel rails. This also makes it a lot more difficult (read: impossible) for them to travel steep inclines directly. Descending sharp inclines is actually more difficult.
The infrastructure needed for monitoring and controlling trains is a lot more complicated than it is for automobiles / trucks.
The last mile problem: trains are great for moving bulk freight over long distances, but getting that freight to its final destination still requires another mode of transportation.
Trains actually use diesel fuel, they just do it more efficiently by using the fuel to power a generator to produce electricity. Converting them to batteries would have similar issues to electric trucks (IE, the weight required in batteries to power the train). Not to mention a balancing issue: you'd need some way to have the batteries distributed along the length of the train - if you centralize them into the engine or a single car, you create more problems for controlling the train.
There are so many more issues than you've thought of here. I know this was likely meant as a shitpost, but it's not a well considered one.
@unattributed @david_chisnall It was rather odd to read that "Trains actually use diesel fuel" when our local commuter railroad just switched to electric trains with overhead wires, reducing trip time noticeably due to better acceleration after each stop.
Of course, they should have done this decades ago.
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall Monocab is an attempt to disrupt transportation with this idea. Anything to get some VC money. Also, we could hydrate people if we burned hydrogen and oxygen in a specially lined vessel and collected the condensate. I call it Hydr@to. Please invest in my disruption of the beverage market.
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@jpetazzo @david_chisnall but why? Have you ever been to a parcel sorting center? Why, with our current level of software and robotics, is there no system where standardized boxes are automatically routed cross-country, leaving just the first and last mile to trucks?
Building roads is a lot cheaper than building railroad tracks.
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall Oh! Like a road train... on rails? A rail train. Intriguing idea.
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It sounds as if electric trucks are great for long-range land transport. But they require heavy batteries, so rather than putting them on the road (where they'll damage the road surface), why don't we build special metal tracks for them to go on? And, on long trips, join a bunch of them together so that you only need one motor and driver for a load of them travelling in a convoy? I bet you could make freight transport a lot more efficient if you did that.
@david_chisnall Infrastructure never gets enough love. It's not sexy. But it is critical to our civilization's continued survival.
Like most important but overlooked parts of our manufactured world, it has a public image problem. Like government, waste management, libraries, and social services. So most people don't want to invest in these things. And they are a prime target for corruption.
A healthy society would celebrate these things, and the people and organizations who make them possible. We should be invested in making them work efficiently and effectively. We should understand them. But they are banal and complicated. While our attention is drawn to what is novel and exciting (regardless of how trivial or silly or wasteful).
At least, we should be reminding ourselves of all the important things we rely on, and why they need to be cared for, and what bad things will happen if we don't.
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@unattributed @david_chisnall It was rather odd to read that "Trains actually use diesel fuel" when our local commuter railroad just switched to electric trains with overhead wires, reducing trip time noticeably due to better acceleration after each stop.
Of course, they should have done this decades ago.
@bzdev @david_chisnall There is a huge difference between short distance commuter trains and long haul freight trains. Here's a History of Diesel Engines from Union Pacific.
