High speed trains--with no tracks!!

[francolettieri]

Yes thats correct if you havn't already heard. High speed trains that don't have any tracks.
http://www.tubularrail.com

I hope the future high speed rail network this country is planning uses that awesome technology.

Also, i'm so sick and tired of those giant 3 bladed wind turbines. I thought they used to be cool, before I saw this...
http://www.flodesign.org
Can't wait to see these start popping up instead!!

Technology Rules!!!!!

[BeFree]

1. Technology could save us

But we just can't afford it. Too bad, eh?

[francolettieri]

5. Its supposed to be 66% cheaper than a train with a track

and it can supposdly easily be built over difficult terrain (swamps etc..)

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Easier to build a normal track over a swamp, I'd say

because a normal track distributes the weight along the entire length, while this concentrates it at the towers - which thus will need more attention to their foundations. Building a track is quite similar to the wat you rescue someone from a swamp - lay out mats towards them that spread the load.

This is more useful in areas where ground space is limited, eg for metros.

What I'd wonder about is the control of it, especially in emergencies. The driver must have to use radio control to get the brakes applied in the towers. What happens if the radio link fails? Or is it driverless, and controlled by computers in the towers?

[farmout rightarm]

19. "Welcome aboard! This train has no driver, it's controlled by a computer. Nothing can

go wrong
go wrong
go wrong
go wrong
go wrong..."





;-)

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. Some slow-speed metros are already driverless

eg the London Docklands Light Railway:

1. Where are the drivers?

The entire Docklands Light Railway (DLR) network operates as a driverless system and is in fact the only driverless rail system in the UK. While the trains appear to stop and start of their own accord, the DLR is operated through a computerised system that is closely managed and monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at the DLR Control Centre. Control Centre staff have access to a visual overview of the entire DLR network displaying exactly where each train is along the railway at any given time.

http://pressroom.dlr.co.uk/faq/index.asp#1

It'll be used as one of the transport links for the 2012 Olympics, which may freak a few people out:

13. Will the DLR provide transport links to and from Olympic Park and other venues during 2012?

Yes. The DLR will act as a key transport provider during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In order to meet the additional passenger demand for 2012 and beyond, the DLR is making several enhancements to the network, including upgrading the rail car fleet from two-car to three-car trains, building an extension to the new Stratford International station serving the heart of the Olympic Park and building an extension to Woolwich Arsenal.

These upgrades will enable tens of thousands of passengers to travel swiftly and efficiently to and from Olympic Park and other competition venues such as the ExCel Exhibition Centre and the Royal Artillery Barracks. In order to meet the additional demand for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and achieve the three-car upgrade with minimal disruption to existing passengers, 55 new rail cars, boasting a sleek contemporary new design, will be added to the DLR fleet in 2008-09.

[Edweird]

25. The Metro-Mover in Miami is driverless.

[fire_in_the_middle]

2. I wonder

what would happen to maglev track if pole reverses or has a major shift? would we have no-track trains flying off the no-tracks at high speed? heh. that'll be a sight. :O

[francolettieri]

3. its not Maglev

That concept does not use Maglev. There are wheels on the evenly space collums that start turning presisly before the train arrives

[KittyWampus]

4. you just wrote a synopsis to a blockbuster movie! It's your million dollar idea...

:hi:

[salvorhardin]

9. Do you mean the Earth's magnetic poles reversing?

Quite frankly, it would have no effect. The magnets used in maglev technology are electromagnets. The magnets are created and destroyed every time they are turned on and off. Their magnetic fields relative to the short distance between the maglev tracks and the maglev trains are much stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. So the Earth's magnetic poles reversing would have no effect on maglev operation.

It should be noted though, that the Earth's magnetic poles are probably in the process of reversing right now. The thing is, the process will take at least another 1,500 years or so. Very short in terms of geologic time, but nothing we have to worry about any time soon. The British Geological Society has a great FAQ page on this topic. http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/reversals.html

[jmowreader]

6. Still has right-of-way issues

Big question: How, without the roundhouse thing they described, do you make turns?

[Grey]

11. They have an engine at each end.

Just like putting your car in reverse, you shift the gears and the magnets pull you in the other direction.
OK, it's not really an engine, but that is the concept.

[jmowreader]

26. Not quite what I was saying

It looks like this train has to run in a straight line all the time. You might be able to take a very wide sweeping turn in it, because the rollers can catch the nose of the train and guide it, but hitting roller after roller is going to give a very jarring ride.

[Liberal In Texas]

28. That's what I was wondering when I watched the video. They didn't demonstrate

curves or turns (aside from the roundhouse). How realistic is it to assume an absolutely straight shot between stations?

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. From the Q & A :

How does the Tubular Rail car turn?

Lateral change in direction---is made by a combination of two forces. They are rotation of the roller from the perpendicular to direction of travel axis. They may also be taken out of the horizontal plane thus producing a super elevation effect. In other words, if in straight travel the axis of movement is thought of as a line perpendicular to the axis of the rollers, a turn is initiated when the car encounters a set of rollers not perpendicular to the travel axis and the car will tend to move to that side on which the acute angle is found. The second influence is that of the side roller on the obtuse side of the next encountered side roller. The curved portion of the side rail contacts this roller and the car is forced to its realignment. The effect of this change on the passenger is mitigated by several design elements that can be varied; they are speed of the vehicle, spacing of the side rollers and the elliptical radius of the rails at the front and rear of the vehicle. Increasing the radius alters the time duration of load transfer to the roller.

http://www.tubularrail.com/questions_answers.htm

It's not very well explained, but I think this means the rollers would be cone-shaped (just as normal train wheels are), and so when the axis of the cone is set at an angle, that produces a lateral force. Then they're also talking about the existence of 'side rollers' and side rails. That, I imagine, is a roller with a vertical axis, and a rail that faces sideways, that would aain get a lateral force from the roller.

To my mind, the questions people have raised about vibration are important - it's possible to turn a train with these lateral forces, but you've gone from many wheels doing this, along the length of a train, to fewer. The last bit about "effect of this change on the passenger is mitigated by several design elements that can be varied; they are speed of the vehicle, spacing of the side rollers and the elliptical radius of the rails at the front and rear of the vehicle. Increasing the radius alters the time duration of load transfer to the roller" seems to be them saying the design tries to minimise the sudden forces involved; but they've filled the website with videos that show you very little, rather than any diagrams which show what the actual engineering and mechanics of the rails and rollers will be. Which makes me wonder if the marketing department drives the company rather than the engineering department.

[jmowreader]

35. Another problem I thought of--elevation changes

In reality I don't think this is going to work. It looks like a light rail solution--freight trains aren't profitable when they're short, passenger trains can be. Very few people are going to want to ride on a train that goes thump thump thump every time it hits a roller station. You'll also have to run this close enough to a power line that all the roller stations can be electrified. A computerized system can be used to switch the motors on, so the wheels aren't turning when no train is there, but it's going to take a lot of power to run this. A long-haul monorail would be far more practical--for a number of reasons, starting with "we can put huge batteries on the trains and recharge them with 'recharging stations' every few miles." You know, 500 feet of pipe with 440v power running on it, and a brush on the train to pick the power up.

[muriel_volestrangler]

38. They say they're OK on elevation changes

This is a comment from the company in response to an article about it:

I know that you picked up the "ridgid" description of the car from the Sun article while in fact the vehicle is better descibed as "semi-ridgid" which allows navigation of a 5000 foot horizontal radius and a 50,000 foot verticle radius. When combined these parameters allow tranversing the topography encountered on this route.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/608254

(although they can't spell 'rigid' or 'vertical' :D )

They also seem to claim they think solar cells on the towers would be enough to supply the power, though I'm not at all convinced by that (a succession of cloudy days in winter? You might need a lot of battery power to keep it going that long), but stringing cables between the towers wouldn't be a problem, so you don't need an existing power line.

If it's important to have a monorail, to keep the ground clear, I'd think a normal continuous electric pickup, as used by existing high speed trains, would work fine.

[jmowreader]

43. You'd get lots of loss with the always-energized wires

Plus you're running a powerline for a thousand miles--which means you're dealing with strong electromagnetic radiation all along the right-of-way. It's gotta be activated the whole distance to work, right?

My thought: Put the batteries in the trains, then set up the charging system so it only comes on when there's a train rubbing against it. Easy to do with any number of technologies ranging from the complex (RFID sensors that detect the presence of the trains) to the utterly simple (rat-trap-size microswitches for the trains to press on). If you can space the charging stations thirty or forty miles apart--here we rely on brute force and ignorance and just pack the sideskirts of the cars with batteries--you can put them near populated areas and exploit the electric service that's already there.

[muriel_volestrangler]

44. Hmm, I'm not convinced, largely because of all the current (sic) systems

I'm not aware of any system that leaves miles of track for which huge batteries would be needed. At 25kV, the standard voltage for long distance lines, I don't think transmission losses are that bad.

[Captain Hilts]

7. Amtrak's problem is track more than railstock. nt

[pinto]

8. Kick.

Interesting stuff.

[Edweird]

10. That's a disaster waiting to happen. 1 mis-alignment and it's all over - up in the air, no less.

It's great that people are thinking, but this won't go anywhere.

[eppur_se_muova]

23. Consider how bumpy the ride would be, as well.

Every car is going to flex a little when it hangs over the last wheel, then be pushed back up by the next wheel. Hard to supress that oscillation. And metal fatigue does accumulate -- eventually those cars will just break at the point of maximum stress.

What this really should be compared to is a roller-style conveyer belt ...



... one in which the rollers are spaced far apart. I see some really fundamental problems with this approach -- the number of wheels, or rollers, depends on the length of the track. The number of wheels on a conventional train depends only of the length of the train, which is much smaller. Wheels are more complicated to build than rails, so the cheapest design uses lots of rails and minimum no. of wheels.

It's good people are trying to be creative, but I doubt this is going anywhere. Maybe a few niche applications.

[Warren DeMontague]

39. That was my thinking, too.

One good cross-wind, and ***bam!***

[muriel_volestrangler]

41. No, crosswinds wouldn't be a problem, I think

The carriage is always held by at least 3 rings, so there's not much ability for the nose to be seriously off centre; and the nose is pointed, so that if it's off centre by, say, one third of the width of the carriage, it'd still start off inside the ring. The correction might feel rather violent, but it'd stay within the ring system in that case.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

12. Interesting things they fool around with....

http://www.flodesign.org/technologies.html

ACOUSTIC WEAPONS
Acoustic weapons use sound waves to cause spatial disorientation or even severe ear pain with rupture of the ear drum. High-intensity low-frequency sound may cause other organs to resonate, causing a number of physiological results, possibly including death.

LESS THAN LETHAL WEAPONS
Less-lethal, Less Than Lethal, non-lethal or, more recently, compliance weapons are weapons intended to be unlikely to kill or to cause great bodily injury to a living target. In the past, police (or soldiers) called to a riot were primarily limited to use of bayonet or sabre charges, or firing live ammunition at crowds. Less-lethal riot control weapons were developed to reduce the loss of life in such situations

[On the Road]

14. That is Tubular, Dude!

Let's use the stimulus money for a monorail trackless train system!



No, seriously -- I hope it works and fulfills the promise in the website. We certainly need something to solve the problems it addresses.

[gmoney]

33. "I dunno... seems like more of a Shelbyville idea."

The tubular train thing in the OP scares the willies out of me, to misquote Slaartibartfast...

But why not an enclosed tube and give the cars wheels on all sides... sort of like a luge run. Oh, well, maybe not a luge run.

Catapults! Yeah, that's it...

[patrice]

15. K~ + R~ !~

[farmout rightarm]

16. Klaatu barada nikto

:D

[Toucano]

17. Blight the landscape with stanchions.

No thanks.

[farmout rightarm]

18. No more than an 8 lane freeway...but this outfit is still in the concept/money gathering stage.

I predict it will turn out to be vaporware.

[Toucano]

20. We could always live and work in the same community and need fewer

8 land highways.

Why are people always moving around like little ants in the first place?

What's with the constant need to get somewhere other than where we are?

[Confusious]

40. Why try to force people to sit?

Or ignore the fact that they do move around?

Accept the reality that people are going to move around and find the best solution for it. ( Which isn't this or 8 lane highways )

[Toucano]

42. Nobody is forcing anything

Public policy decisions created the incessant mobility. There is nothing innate about it. Indeed, civilization thrived for thousands of years with comparatively little mass mobility.

Allowing the mobility to dictate public policy now is akin to the lady who swallowed a spider to catch the fly. Why did she swallow the fly? I don't know why. Perhaps, she'll die.

It's not the mobility that's the problem, but the public policies that cause the mobility (and a host of other ill side-effects).

[mopinko]

22. +1

really ugly.

[eppur_se_muova]

24. So, what's this turbine like? No pix or discussion at the link. nt

[rhett o rick]

27. Is Flodesign an American Company? nt

[AngryAmish]

30. I always wondered why they had to build bridges for trains anyway

The trains is on rails, right? So precisely line up the rails on each side of the river gorge, highway, etc and build ramps. Hit them with enough speed and it is an easy jump.

[slackmaster]

31. The chairman of FloDesign's board is named Stanley Kowalski

[gmoney]

34. The third!

"Now let's see the papers...Now listen. Did you ever hear of the Napoleonic code, Stella?...Now just let me enlighten you on a point or two...Now we got here in the state of Louisiana what's known as the Napoleonic code. You see, now according to that, what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband also, and vice versa...It looks to me like you've been swindled, baby. And when you get swindled under Napoleonic code, I get swindled too and I don't like to get swindled...Where's the money if the place was sold?"

[MadHound]

32. If you think that those turbines are cool,

Check out windbelts. <http://www.humdingerwind.com/>

This is wind generated without a turbine, in wind speeds as low as four mph. Perfect for home use, which is what we need to start moving towards, decentralized power generation, each house, each building becoming an energy generator. With this sort of technology, combined with thin film photovotaics that can be rolled out as a roof, we can achieve this.

[Hannah Bell]

36. guess: the "pulliam" involved is a relative of dan quayle.

[dysfunctional press]

37. what if there's an earthquake that knocks a stanchion(s) out of alignment?

i doubt that we'll be seeing much of this type of system anytime soon.
i wonder if they've suckered any big investors yet?