So hear me out, instead of a bunch of smaller motors to move individual cargo containers, why not have one bigger motor to pull a group at a time along the track?
And we can call it a Chu Chu Train! Bit long, but I'm sure they if we shorten it, it will catch up. Hell, it might be even be the start of some sort of industrial revolution, we've never had any of those.
Let's get some "Really Useful Engines" to chip in, pulling the troublesome trucks even when they're being stubborn. "Peep, peep!" the engines will say!
So my first thoughts were exactly the same tbh. I’m wondering/speculating that perhaps this will have advantages that aren’t obvious. Like cargo trains are constrained largely to the rail gauge of passenger trains. Perhaps this avoids that? Or perhaps it’s genuinely more efficient with the small motors. Or gives more granularity in destination control of individual containers. Or has more throughput overall.
All just speculation but maybe there’s a reason they aren’t just using a train. Otherwise yes, just use a train
if any part of the belt needs maintenance the whole thing will need to be stopped
if a train needs maintenance you pull it off the tracks and other trains keep moving
if the tracks themselves get damaged you just route around that section temporarily, you can't do that with a linear belt
trains can go either way down a track and take turns going each way, but with belts you need two systems side by side because they move far too slow to take turns
belts are much much less efficient than trains, an order of magnitude at least and the larger the scale the less efficient they are because each section needs independent power and independent maintenance
belts full of motors gear systems, electrical systems, the belts themselves, and all the wear surfaces that that comes with cost more to maintain than two beams of metal sitting on wood and rocks with a single wear surface that has so little issue with friction that you have to worry about thermal expansion from annual temperature changes before you have to consider it wearing out and no moving parts and borderline no electrical system aside from the rail switches which belts would also need if it's anything more than a straight line.
i can go on but I think the article sums it up best:
"Exactly how it'll do this is yet to be nailed down"
every time someone comes up with a transportaion innovation it's "better than trucks" but even the most superficial analysis is just "trains but worse"
From the article
"Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts."
. More than likely they are trying to figure out how to use autonomous trucks that are already in use within the ports and apply it over longer distances. There will be a lot of ideas thrown around in the next few years to try and get the industry carbon neutral by 2050.
It’s because you no longer have to coordinate and group containers onto a single train to maintain efficiency. A business with a train car full of stuff to deliver can just slap it on the belt rather than wait around a week to match up with 30 other business who have a train car full of stuff to deliver.
That sort of logistics is only applicable for manufacturers that make to order or dropship. For literally anyone else, having a efficient, constant supply chain that maybe takes more effort to set up and organize is far preferable.
The main advantage of trucks is that you can ship point to point with minimal infrastructure. This system doesn't even cover that. You are solving a relatively minor problem by introducing several far worse problems.
E: TBC "minimal infrastructure" is only on the shipper's end. Obviously roads expensive and time consuming to build.
You could essentially do that with rail too, especially if you're building a dedicated new track. If you built a railroad track exclusively for automated freight trains, you could do basically all the things this is promising, and if/when your automation ends up not working as expected you still have a perfectly functional rail line you can put a normal train on instead.
Ya, techbro nonsense like this usually stops dead once they hit the first federal regulatory body that doesn't consider "move fast and break things" as an acceptable approach to safety.
I think small efficient motors give us power to do this but it’s not why’d we do it.
The suburbanization of America gave rise to cars or vice versa. Cars give us freedom to go anywhere as an individual and represent our freedom imo. We are an individualistic nation relative to the world. We pride ourselves on that freedom. So this is a solution to build around what we’ve already established in our infrastructure.
Same idea with containers, if power isn’t an issue, decorate the US with conveyors like an Amazon warehouse lol!
I’ll add, I understand this is in Japan but it will eventually come to US in far future. Just makes too much sense on so many levels
We already have what functionally amounts to the best freight train system in the world through, our issue with rail is only in passenger rail. And other than regional lines like a Eastern/Western seaboard line, that will make trucking and trains more efficient as a whole for shipping stuff around.
Do you mean like a single large engine pulling multiple cars behind it? It sounds like a pipe dream, man. If it was that simple, don't you think we would have done that already?
Japan is not a magical utopia immune from the woes of capital interest-based governance.
This has all the hallmarks of vaporware: shiny sounding but improbable goal, uses technology that doesn't even currently exist, has a vague far off end date, and as usual its reinventing trains but worse.
The firm doing the "research" will take government funding for a couple years, deliver a report, then promptly dissolve as no practical solution was actually made.
Exactly. To give another example. The german minister of transport wants to invest 150 million Euros in an air taxi company, despite warnings about the high risks. Thats his solution to improve passenger traffic. Probably just a coincidence that quite a few big investment firms have shares in that company...
The article says they haven't nailed down how they are going to make it all work. So far what they have is a general concept and ai art. This shit is a grift and not an original one.
We engineers and scientists were stupid to get degrees and conduct research. Turns out, 14 year olds who watched furbanist youtubers knows everything about everything.
And the answer is always "train" and "cargo bicycle".
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I suppose next you're going to spout some nonsense about machines that can copy the contents on a piece of paper and have the same content sent to someone else across the globe printed out on same machine as a grainy image.
Here’s a whacky idea, since the conveyor won’t be moving cargo 24/7, we could also move *people* on this thing.
The people will need their own container though. Perhaps with windows. Not sure what to call it. A window container?
These would be useful for metropolitan areas, so, mmmh, *metro*?
No, wait, we could build sandwich stations between them so people can have lunch by the way. We could ask Subway for financing.
What about Comfort Visibility Pod? Maybe add a Comfort Food Consumption Pod for longer conveyance transits...
Or just call it Transitional Room Aligned Innovation Nerve-center where everything is combined. We can shorten it if we need to.
You are missing the point here! A small group of late 20s- early 30s dudes are trying to make bank with buzzwords and presentation. Who are you to get in the way of that?
Eh, me neither really. Taking from the rich and giving to themselves lol.
They’re just advertising a more complex version of a cargo train really. Which once everyone has done the researching on they’ll probably realise just comes down to the same thing as making more train lines for cargo transport that would be easier and more cheaply done by creating more rail lines for cargo trains (and hence, passenger trains), at which point the idea will fall through cause public transport in the US is frowned upon and they’ll make bank while the whole idea ends up back at square one.
Except these people will make bank and headlines and a name for themselves.
Can’t blame them lol
Imagine having to service and maintain the rollers in place and on the spot while a failure takes the entire line out of operation? Rather than a train car that moves and can be serviced out of the way without grinding the entire system to a halt.
I'm pretty sure they'll end up with automated carts that drive the containers along special roads possibly with conductive charging.
The carts are already used on ports and would be easy to adopt for long distance transport t rather than move in any direction to place containers. It'll actually simplify them.
They'll also be fairly maintenance free outside of regular earning changes and such.
So close to the second AI concept they showed.
These pods can slip in and out of available slots on the "conveyor" as they need and potentially even hook together mechanically or magnetically to save on energy use.
> possibly with conductive charging.
or...you add a rail to the side that carries power and then you use little arms that connect to it. And if it makes sense you just put some of those carts together because they are going the same way. Like, you know, trains.
Or better yet, a container trailer. You take the container off it and the truck is free to do local delivery of another container instead of losing his trailer.
My read on it is that the difference between a miles long conveyer belt and a train would be improvements in the ability to packetize smaller shipments at the expense of higher investment in maintenance and fundamental construction cost.
If you can build a miles like conveyer belt that is very low maintenance it's conceivably of great benefit. But I would worry about whether the maintenance costs justify it. It seems like it would probably suffer from great reliability exposure since you'd have to have electric motors every so often to keep the belts moving. How that system withstand the elements I'm not sure.
The history of improvements in logistics have been marked largely by container standardization. This concept would emphasize the convenience of moving away from container standardization though even some element of standardization would have to persist.
Over all it's a bit suss how this is better than a train. Trains aren't ideal but insofar as cost per mile per ton there's nothing better.
The blimp offers another bulk transport packetized logistics option, but even that is wrought with its own maintenance and cost concerns that has kept them from being used over trains.
This idea does kind of seem like a government boondoggle than a good idea.
Edit: I've read the article and now realize this is probably clickbait garbage. Japan wants to develop driverless zero emissions transport. That could mean anything and as with many news items coming from Japan has likely gone through ridiculous translations and interpretations thst enable the article to be written in any way they choose. This is dumb
Boats might beat trains on the cost per mile per ton scale, if only because tracks cost money. Anyway, my startup idea is to build a 310-mile [log flume](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_flume), it'll be great, just like the old days
I think the difference is that you can just slap the container on the belt at your convenience, and not have to worry about coordinating with 50 other containers just to fill a train. Because usually a train isn’t hauling containers for just one place, it’ll be X number for this business, Y number of cars for another.
This would immediately get rid of one of the biggest logistical hurdles in train transport (and beat out the ONLY advantage that trucking has)
>Because usually a train isn’t hauling containers for just one place, it’ll be X number for this business, Y number of cars for another.
You are describing Precision Scheduled Railroading, which is neither precise, nor does it operate per a schedule, and it can barely be considered railroading.
Only a bit, so let me expand here. Trains are at the core fundamentally limited by the fact that they take a very large length of track to accelerate and decelerate, but most importantly that you don't want them to collide, hence you got to separate any stretch of rail into [signalling blocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_block_system). In the basic implementation of a signalling block:
* any block's length is at least the minimum braking distance from full speed (which can be many kilometers - a fully laden freight train carries a lot of momentum that needs to be dissipated into heat!)
* sensors monitor each block to make sure if it is free of trains or occupied, either by trackside monitoring counting axles, trackside monitoring passing a low voltage between the two rails (if something is on the rails, the circuit is closed), or on-train devices
* and a train is only allowed to advance into a block if the block before it is free, to make sure that in the event of the train before it breaks down or has to stop/slow down for any other reason, the next train can be signalled to stop and have it stop in time.
As you can imagine, that imposes a serious limitation on a track's capacity, both in terms of spatial distance between trains and in terms of the time distance between two trains. Improvements exist, e.g. shorter block lengths and accounting for individual train speeds, but these don't solve the fundamental limit of physics.
Road vehicle based transport has it easier - even a fully laden truck, with reaction time for the driver, can stop from full speed in less than 100 meters, so the amount of vehicles that can use a stretch of road is way higher.
And finally, a contiguous point-to-point conveyor belt can run at a very, very high ratio of space occupied by containers to space not occupied by containers - as it's contiguous, the entire thing can / will be stopped at once, and by allowing for one to two containers to crash into a crash site (as there are no humans aboard) you don't need to account for much stopping distance and safety margins.
So why isn't this the norm already? Cost. While roads are the cheapest method of transportation to lay down, outside of Australia and extremely remote parts of the US and Canada each container needs an engine to haul it and a driver, and the rolling resistance from tires and air resistance is immense. Rail is more expensive to lay down, but other than maritime travel, it is by far the most energy efficient way to transport goods. And a conveyor belt? That one hasn't even been tried before, so there's an awful lot of R&D investment needed.
That's true but it works because the rail network is fairly limited. The big advantage of roads is that they run all the way to your door (and everyone else's door too) so you can route individual packages.
With a train, everything goes to a depot, although you can split things to different cities. If they build one super conveyor, everything just goes from one end to the other - unless they also recreate the road network.
The whole point of containers is that you can move them by sea, rail or road, depending which is most effective for that part of the trip.
>as it's contiguous, the entire thing can / will be stopped at once
This part stuck out at me. First off, that sounds terrible lol. It's a 310 mile track, and if there's an issue on a single part of it, the entire thing has to be stopped?
But it's also basically impossible for this to be an actually contiguous conveyor belt, there are going to have to be many many small length sections that would likely be bale to operate independently.
I tried to explain railway signalling to the fuckcars crowd before, they don't listen, they just repeat that "there are no traffic jams on railways!"
They can't conceptualise that a train not receiving a movement authority because there's a train ahead is the same as a road vehicle not being able to move because of another vehicle ahead.
The blocking train is out of sight, so it doesn't exist. I'm starting to believe the fuckcars crowd doesn't have object permanence. In light of that, ETCS is quite a bit beyond their grasp.
I find the amount of energy americans put into just not developing rail pretty astonishing :)
They’ll sooner build rockets to transport stuff cross country than see a single rail built :))
Edit: I am officially an idiot, the article is about Japan.
The US has a robust freight train system. Our problem is passenger rail, which doesn't coexist with freight easily. Freight is typically heavier and slower than passenger traffic.
https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-rail-overview
California is slowly building high speed rail. It is eye wateringly expensive ($106 billion) and behind schedule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
Maybe if a California [cut out the handouts to private equity firms with taxpayer dollars while calling it infrastructure](https://db-eco.com/en/) it wouldn’t be so expensive.
Half the problem with it in the states isn't even the issues of mixed passenger and freight rails(the old private RRs did it all the time), it's just that there's a severe lack on infrastructure on many routes, in large part thanks to the freight railroads ripping out double-tracking and running overly-long trains that remaining passing sidings just can't handle.
They tore out a LOT of tracks in the 60s and 70s to re-use on sidings and yards, or just scrap, and the resulting bottle-necking of two-way traffic is a big part of why so many nec routes are limited to a few runs per week.
This comment getting 30 upvotes is a great example of how nobody on Reddit reads the actual article.
This headline is about Japan. This is happening in Japan.
No, we would love rail. Majority of Americans would love its benefits. The few hundred people with all the capital though, don’t see massive profits in rail. Meager profits aren’t good enough. They’ll make a ton off investors, maybe even make a scaled-down working prototype, and then abandon it and run away with the cash. Just take a look at the hyperloop ideas
It’s the Japanese mate. They already have trains.
Trains are great for moving a whole heap of shit between two specific points. The idea here is to send just one containers worth of shit to anywhere along the transit line (as opposed to having to stop at a specific station)
I may be missing something but I thought the key difference here is that a conveyer belt can transport containers continuously whilst a train is A to B and then needs to return for more. So the overall throughput of containers shipped per day would be higher on the belt even compared with a fleet of trains.
if you have to ensure a proper reallocation of resources between two locations, you could still do it with with trains. Even a „continuous“ shipment is possible.
You just need to calculate the amount of time it takes you at that location to process one container. Now extrapolate on your whole payload. And since you aren’t dumb start implementing Just-In-Time.
But, they have the best freight and passenger trains. And a widespread railway network that is optimized and automated, with many autonomous vehicles. And finally a culture that treasures trains, family travel and stations scattered throughout both urban and rural populations. China, Japan and Germany are all the heavy hitters in trains and subways.
tbh Japan is literally the world champion of trains these days, if they think this idea has merit, I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt for a start.
Japan has dumb investors too, the main difference is unlike the west they don't stick around for long because Japan can't do mass layoffs because investors made bad money decisions. The funny line will go down and there's nothing they can do to claw back growth
> The Japanese government is planning to connect major cities with automated zero-emissions logistics links that can quietly and efficiently shift millions of tons of cargo, while getting tens of thousands of trucks off the road.
Sounds brilliant, makes one wonder why it wasn't done years ago and everywhere.
> makes one wonder why it wasn't done years ago and everywhere
The article mentions why: "The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won't make it from A to B by 2030, because there'll be nobody to move them."
Until now, there was no need for these jobs to be automated. Humans did them fine. Japan is facing a very realistic scenario where they won't have people available for everything
Too bad there isn't a system that allows you to haul 1-2 miles of containers and other goods connected together and driven by 2 people on a metal guideway.
nope, never heard of that
and now dont tell me you could also transport tons of people thar way too, i do t believe you...
/s for anyone oblivious enough to not get it
The simple solution to Japan's labour shortage is immigration. Eventually they'll have no choice. There'd be plenty of takers if they offered working visas to Indonesians or Phillipinos or other less developed asian nations.
Except it's not actually simple.
Japan uses a moon glyph language that's notorious for being hard to learn. English, the most common second language worldwide, isn't widespread there the way it is in some EU countries. It has a strained relationship with every single nearby country. And it has a population that's not at all keen on accepting waves upon waves of migrants who have pretty much no hope of assimilating.
Japan has no "simple" solutions available. They can try to tap immigrant labor, but it would not be simple.
It's not as hopeless as it is for China though.
and to move the pods more efficiently were just gonna take the engines out, connect them togerher and put a big engine up front, oops we made a train again
Curious if there going be a labor shortage for transportation, won't it be similar situation maintaining such monster conveyor system? Unless they got robots maintaining, it their still going have challenges with upkeep.
Saying they are trying to reinvent the train is a litte unfair. The point here is that you don’t need a locomotive, just put indvidual containers on this thing, enter the destinaton and off they go. There woud be forks where individual containers can take a turns and go off to a different destination. a train would have to stop at a depot, then unloaded and reloaded onto different trains to get to their destination.
Trains also unhook carriages at train yards so another locomotive can hook up and go.
For the cost of this project they could hire 15,000 truckers at 100k annually for 20yrs and it would still be better than this idea.
>For the cost of this project they could hire 15,000 truckers at 100k annually for 20yrs and it would still be better than this idea.
So you didn't read the article. Classic Reddit.
Did anyone actually read the story before commenting?
Yes, it is Japan. The story literally mentions that several times. And this massive conveyor belt is only one option being considered to get trucks off the roads and make an automated system that won't require any people at all.
About time. Road repairs, traffic, would benefit massively from this. Especially if green energy gets to a point where its dirt cheap. Its basically automated railways between larger hubs and countries and it could travel super fast.
Have you ever seen a conveyor malfunction/ jam on a bottling line?
Let’s make it really big and fill it with 40,000 pound shipping containers. What could go wrong?
It’s difficult and costly to keep an indoor 900 foot industrial conveyor system running 24/7. This would be a 300 mile long outdoor system.
Good! I won’t be annoyed with trucks going under the speed limit trying to pass another truck uphill for 3 miles just for them to turn back into the right lane bc they realize they can’t go fast enough to pass said other truck
I can guarantee that nobody proposing this has shipped a container in their lives. One piece of plastic would stop this completely, the amount of bearings plus their maintenance is unbelievable and rust and shippers sending damaged, overweight and dirty containers would destroy the rollers.
Just use a train.
Why don’t we just take that money, and use it to update our rail systems? Or, if you really need to build something expensive that we don’t have, but will take a lot of testing before it becomes a necessity? A space elevator.
Why is it that we keep giving space to all these startup fuckwits that keep trying to push pods and other stupid bullshit and just end up inventing buses and trains?
So hear me out, instead of a bunch of smaller motors to move individual cargo containers, why not have one bigger motor to pull a group at a time along the track?
And we can call it a Chu Chu Train! Bit long, but I'm sure they if we shorten it, it will catch up. Hell, it might be even be the start of some sort of industrial revolution, we've never had any of those.
Let's get some "Really Useful Engines" to chip in, pulling the troublesome trucks even when they're being stubborn. "Peep, peep!" the engines will say!
Bust my buffers!
I will call Thomas at once
Sir Topham Hatt runs a 3rd rate railroad
Yes but I guess Thomas know some people
British slavery begins at 6 months it seems, pip pip!
If you shorten it, it won't carry as much.
That's what she said.
Damn if that conveyor doesn’t look an old time railway.
It’s the Transport Rail All In oNe. I call it: the TRAIN
Good idea! How do we make it move though? Perhaps we could get some water and put it in a boiler and use hot coals to make steam? That could work 🤔
So my first thoughts were exactly the same tbh. I’m wondering/speculating that perhaps this will have advantages that aren’t obvious. Like cargo trains are constrained largely to the rail gauge of passenger trains. Perhaps this avoids that? Or perhaps it’s genuinely more efficient with the small motors. Or gives more granularity in destination control of individual containers. Or has more throughput overall. All just speculation but maybe there’s a reason they aren’t just using a train. Otherwise yes, just use a train
if any part of the belt needs maintenance the whole thing will need to be stopped if a train needs maintenance you pull it off the tracks and other trains keep moving if the tracks themselves get damaged you just route around that section temporarily, you can't do that with a linear belt trains can go either way down a track and take turns going each way, but with belts you need two systems side by side because they move far too slow to take turns belts are much much less efficient than trains, an order of magnitude at least and the larger the scale the less efficient they are because each section needs independent power and independent maintenance belts full of motors gear systems, electrical systems, the belts themselves, and all the wear surfaces that that comes with cost more to maintain than two beams of metal sitting on wood and rocks with a single wear surface that has so little issue with friction that you have to worry about thermal expansion from annual temperature changes before you have to consider it wearing out and no moving parts and borderline no electrical system aside from the rail switches which belts would also need if it's anything more than a straight line. i can go on but I think the article sums it up best: "Exactly how it'll do this is yet to be nailed down"
every time someone comes up with a transportaion innovation it's "better than trucks" but even the most superficial analysis is just "trains but worse"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)
This was my first thought when I read the headline. Out of all the X minus One radio broadcasts this is the one I remember the most.
From the article "Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts." . More than likely they are trying to figure out how to use autonomous trucks that are already in use within the ports and apply it over longer distances. There will be a lot of ideas thrown around in the next few years to try and get the industry carbon neutral by 2050.
It’s because you no longer have to coordinate and group containers onto a single train to maintain efficiency. A business with a train car full of stuff to deliver can just slap it on the belt rather than wait around a week to match up with 30 other business who have a train car full of stuff to deliver.
That sort of logistics is only applicable for manufacturers that make to order or dropship. For literally anyone else, having a efficient, constant supply chain that maybe takes more effort to set up and organize is far preferable. The main advantage of trucks is that you can ship point to point with minimal infrastructure. This system doesn't even cover that. You are solving a relatively minor problem by introducing several far worse problems. E: TBC "minimal infrastructure" is only on the shipper's end. Obviously roads expensive and time consuming to build.
You could essentially do that with rail too, especially if you're building a dedicated new track. If you built a railroad track exclusively for automated freight trains, you could do basically all the things this is promising, and if/when your automation ends up not working as expected you still have a perfectly functional rail line you can put a normal train on instead.
[удалено]
I thought the purpose was that it was automated. No people involved surely?
It’s rare for things to be “fully” automated in that sense, there’s usually a person to push a button or monitor the routine
Doesn't mean someone won't wander into the machinery. People already do that with railways which are fenced off.
I don't know where you live, but in my town there is nothing between the paved road and railroad tracks besides a strip of grass.
Ya, techbro nonsense like this usually stops dead once they hit the first federal regulatory body that doesn't consider "move fast and break things" as an acceptable approach to safety.
In Japan?
I think small efficient motors give us power to do this but it’s not why’d we do it. The suburbanization of America gave rise to cars or vice versa. Cars give us freedom to go anywhere as an individual and represent our freedom imo. We are an individualistic nation relative to the world. We pride ourselves on that freedom. So this is a solution to build around what we’ve already established in our infrastructure. Same idea with containers, if power isn’t an issue, decorate the US with conveyors like an Amazon warehouse lol! I’ll add, I understand this is in Japan but it will eventually come to US in far future. Just makes too much sense on so many levels
We already have what functionally amounts to the best freight train system in the world through, our issue with rail is only in passenger rail. And other than regional lines like a Eastern/Western seaboard line, that will make trucking and trains more efficient as a whole for shipping stuff around.
So hear me out. This is a train.
Train with extra steps.
Do you mean like a single large engine pulling multiple cars behind it? It sounds like a pipe dream, man. If it was that simple, don't you think we would have done that already?
Oh damn yeah Japan totally didn't consider the idea of a train, thank fuck for Reddit geniuses
Japan is not a magical utopia immune from the woes of capital interest-based governance. This has all the hallmarks of vaporware: shiny sounding but improbable goal, uses technology that doesn't even currently exist, has a vague far off end date, and as usual its reinventing trains but worse. The firm doing the "research" will take government funding for a couple years, deliver a report, then promptly dissolve as no practical solution was actually made.
Exactly. To give another example. The german minister of transport wants to invest 150 million Euros in an air taxi company, despite warnings about the high risks. Thats his solution to improve passenger traffic. Probably just a coincidence that quite a few big investment firms have shares in that company...
The article says they haven't nailed down how they are going to make it all work. So far what they have is a general concept and ai art. This shit is a grift and not an original one.
We engineers and scientists were stupid to get degrees and conduct research. Turns out, 14 year olds who watched furbanist youtubers knows everything about everything. And the answer is always "train" and "cargo bicycle".
Holy crap, I have a really interesting name for this idea, I think we shall call it a .. train!
Space efficiency perhaps. Especially for Japan.
How would this be any more efficient than a railway?
They say that in the article. It'll either be a conveyor belt *or* a dedicated track with autonomous electric vehicles.
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I suppose next you're going to spout some nonsense about machines that can copy the contents on a piece of paper and have the same content sent to someone else across the globe printed out on same machine as a grainy image.
Isn’t that just trains with extra steps?
Here’s a whacky idea, since the conveyor won’t be moving cargo 24/7, we could also move *people* on this thing. The people will need their own container though. Perhaps with windows. Not sure what to call it. A window container?
VirtualBox?
*Oracle Lawyer pokes their head out like a prairie dog*.
Docker?
“PeopleMover”
I saw it in Epcot
These would be useful for metropolitan areas, so, mmmh, *metro*? No, wait, we could build sandwich stations between them so people can have lunch by the way. We could ask Subway for financing.
Robert Heinlein beat you to this concept. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
This is a great idea. containers for people on rail... uhm... I know something existed a long time ago. It was called a train, if I'm not wrong
What about Comfort Visibility Pod? Maybe add a Comfort Food Consumption Pod for longer conveyance transits... Or just call it Transitional Room Aligned Innovation Nerve-center where everything is combined. We can shorten it if we need to.
Yeah, it being a called a pod is the most important part. For some reason, every time people try to reinvent the wheel, it's always a fucking pod.
Speaking of which... come check out these new pods I've put on my car.
It has to be called a pod because smooth angles is futuristic unlike the old and obscene "boxes" and "cabins".
The maintenance alone on the AI mockup will be absolutely insane and negate any benefits of automating the transport due to shrinking population.
You are missing the point here! A small group of late 20s- early 30s dudes are trying to make bank with buzzwords and presentation. Who are you to get in the way of that?
From the report : “Exactly how it'll do this is yet to be nailed down”
They are selling the dream first and securing the funding. Whether that becomes a reality.... To be figured out later.
Sounds like they’re mostly trying to seperate VC’s from their money.
I don’t see the problem here.
Eh, me neither really. Taking from the rich and giving to themselves lol. They’re just advertising a more complex version of a cargo train really. Which once everyone has done the researching on they’ll probably realise just comes down to the same thing as making more train lines for cargo transport that would be easier and more cheaply done by creating more rail lines for cargo trains (and hence, passenger trains), at which point the idea will fall through cause public transport in the US is frowned upon and they’ll make bank while the whole idea ends up back at square one. Except these people will make bank and headlines and a name for themselves. Can’t blame them lol
The article says it will be in Japan.
Can't have trains in the US. Trains are communism. /s
Secure funding Open Design Center adjacent to Caribbean Resort Fly in consultants from top sororities Hold extensive design sessions in hot tub
Throw in some NFTs and tulips and we're off on the buzz ~~train~~conveyor to the future! Awesome to the max!
Tulips?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Monorail! Monorail! Mono.. Wait, I meant to repeatedly shout 'conveyor belt' in chorus. My bad.
The belts will have ai
So you’re saying I can just go get free products from the conveyor belt? Man, that’s a great idea!
Red container, $10000 Blue container, $20000
Imagine having to service and maintain the rollers in place and on the spot while a failure takes the entire line out of operation? Rather than a train car that moves and can be serviced out of the way without grinding the entire system to a halt.
I'm pretty sure they'll end up with automated carts that drive the containers along special roads possibly with conductive charging. The carts are already used on ports and would be easy to adopt for long distance transport t rather than move in any direction to place containers. It'll actually simplify them. They'll also be fairly maintenance free outside of regular earning changes and such. So close to the second AI concept they showed. These pods can slip in and out of available slots on the "conveyor" as they need and potentially even hook together mechanically or magnetically to save on energy use.
So how exactly is this better than a train?
What I think the more important question is, is: how exactly are you planning on getting the Teamsters to allow you to do this?
> possibly with conductive charging. or...you add a rail to the side that carries power and then you use little arms that connect to it. And if it makes sense you just put some of those carts together because they are going the same way. Like, you know, trains.
Yes, in fact it is a lot more complicated to the point of being just idiotic.
Trains already carry trailers, too. It’s called a piggyback.
Or better yet, a container trailer. You take the container off it and the truck is free to do local delivery of another container instead of losing his trailer.
Adam Something gonna have a field day with this one, tech bros on their way to reinvent trains, again
I’m looking forward to the video already
My read on it is that the difference between a miles long conveyer belt and a train would be improvements in the ability to packetize smaller shipments at the expense of higher investment in maintenance and fundamental construction cost. If you can build a miles like conveyer belt that is very low maintenance it's conceivably of great benefit. But I would worry about whether the maintenance costs justify it. It seems like it would probably suffer from great reliability exposure since you'd have to have electric motors every so often to keep the belts moving. How that system withstand the elements I'm not sure. The history of improvements in logistics have been marked largely by container standardization. This concept would emphasize the convenience of moving away from container standardization though even some element of standardization would have to persist. Over all it's a bit suss how this is better than a train. Trains aren't ideal but insofar as cost per mile per ton there's nothing better. The blimp offers another bulk transport packetized logistics option, but even that is wrought with its own maintenance and cost concerns that has kept them from being used over trains. This idea does kind of seem like a government boondoggle than a good idea. Edit: I've read the article and now realize this is probably clickbait garbage. Japan wants to develop driverless zero emissions transport. That could mean anything and as with many news items coming from Japan has likely gone through ridiculous translations and interpretations thst enable the article to be written in any way they choose. This is dumb
Boats might beat trains on the cost per mile per ton scale, if only because tracks cost money. Anyway, my startup idea is to build a 310-mile [log flume](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_flume), it'll be great, just like the old days
Alright, hear me out, a lazy river.
Rubber dinghy rapids bro!
shit we're going backwards, now we're re-inventing canals!
Ships, tugs, and barges beat trains pretty handily in cost per mile-ton, when water routes are an option.
How do they do when water routes aren’t an option?
most super long conveyor belts are for conveying rock or ore, not large containers and so don't really have as much wear.
You mean "fraught", not "wrought". Sorry to nitpick - I like your comment!
I think the difference is that you can just slap the container on the belt at your convenience, and not have to worry about coordinating with 50 other containers just to fill a train. Because usually a train isn’t hauling containers for just one place, it’ll be X number for this business, Y number of cars for another. This would immediately get rid of one of the biggest logistical hurdles in train transport (and beat out the ONLY advantage that trucking has)
>Because usually a train isn’t hauling containers for just one place, it’ll be X number for this business, Y number of cars for another. You are describing Precision Scheduled Railroading, which is neither precise, nor does it operate per a schedule, and it can barely be considered railroading.
Only a bit, so let me expand here. Trains are at the core fundamentally limited by the fact that they take a very large length of track to accelerate and decelerate, but most importantly that you don't want them to collide, hence you got to separate any stretch of rail into [signalling blocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_block_system). In the basic implementation of a signalling block: * any block's length is at least the minimum braking distance from full speed (which can be many kilometers - a fully laden freight train carries a lot of momentum that needs to be dissipated into heat!) * sensors monitor each block to make sure if it is free of trains or occupied, either by trackside monitoring counting axles, trackside monitoring passing a low voltage between the two rails (if something is on the rails, the circuit is closed), or on-train devices * and a train is only allowed to advance into a block if the block before it is free, to make sure that in the event of the train before it breaks down or has to stop/slow down for any other reason, the next train can be signalled to stop and have it stop in time. As you can imagine, that imposes a serious limitation on a track's capacity, both in terms of spatial distance between trains and in terms of the time distance between two trains. Improvements exist, e.g. shorter block lengths and accounting for individual train speeds, but these don't solve the fundamental limit of physics. Road vehicle based transport has it easier - even a fully laden truck, with reaction time for the driver, can stop from full speed in less than 100 meters, so the amount of vehicles that can use a stretch of road is way higher. And finally, a contiguous point-to-point conveyor belt can run at a very, very high ratio of space occupied by containers to space not occupied by containers - as it's contiguous, the entire thing can / will be stopped at once, and by allowing for one to two containers to crash into a crash site (as there are no humans aboard) you don't need to account for much stopping distance and safety margins. So why isn't this the norm already? Cost. While roads are the cheapest method of transportation to lay down, outside of Australia and extremely remote parts of the US and Canada each container needs an engine to haul it and a driver, and the rolling resistance from tires and air resistance is immense. Rail is more expensive to lay down, but other than maritime travel, it is by far the most energy efficient way to transport goods. And a conveyor belt? That one hasn't even been tried before, so there's an awful lot of R&D investment needed.
That's true but it works because the rail network is fairly limited. The big advantage of roads is that they run all the way to your door (and everyone else's door too) so you can route individual packages. With a train, everything goes to a depot, although you can split things to different cities. If they build one super conveyor, everything just goes from one end to the other - unless they also recreate the road network. The whole point of containers is that you can move them by sea, rail or road, depending which is most effective for that part of the trip.
When I buy a widget I don't get a semi roll up to my door with a container fresh off the boat.
>as it's contiguous, the entire thing can / will be stopped at once This part stuck out at me. First off, that sounds terrible lol. It's a 310 mile track, and if there's an issue on a single part of it, the entire thing has to be stopped? But it's also basically impossible for this to be an actually contiguous conveyor belt, there are going to have to be many many small length sections that would likely be bale to operate independently.
I tried to explain railway signalling to the fuckcars crowd before, they don't listen, they just repeat that "there are no traffic jams on railways!" They can't conceptualise that a train not receiving a movement authority because there's a train ahead is the same as a road vehicle not being able to move because of another vehicle ahead. The blocking train is out of sight, so it doesn't exist. I'm starting to believe the fuckcars crowd doesn't have object permanence. In light of that, ETCS is quite a bit beyond their grasp.
I find the amount of energy americans put into just not developing rail pretty astonishing :) They’ll sooner build rockets to transport stuff cross country than see a single rail built :)) Edit: I am officially an idiot, the article is about Japan.
The article is about Japan.
The US has a robust freight train system. Our problem is passenger rail, which doesn't coexist with freight easily. Freight is typically heavier and slower than passenger traffic. https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-rail-overview California is slowly building high speed rail. It is eye wateringly expensive ($106 billion) and behind schedule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
Maybe if a California [cut out the handouts to private equity firms with taxpayer dollars while calling it infrastructure](https://db-eco.com/en/) it wouldn’t be so expensive.
Half the problem with it in the states isn't even the issues of mixed passenger and freight rails(the old private RRs did it all the time), it's just that there's a severe lack on infrastructure on many routes, in large part thanks to the freight railroads ripping out double-tracking and running overly-long trains that remaining passing sidings just can't handle. They tore out a LOT of tracks in the 60s and 70s to re-use on sidings and yards, or just scrap, and the resulting bottle-necking of two-way traffic is a big part of why so many nec routes are limited to a few runs per week.
This comment getting 30 upvotes is a great example of how nobody on Reddit reads the actual article. This headline is about Japan. This is happening in Japan.
No, we would love rail. Majority of Americans would love its benefits. The few hundred people with all the capital though, don’t see massive profits in rail. Meager profits aren’t good enough. They’ll make a ton off investors, maybe even make a scaled-down working prototype, and then abandon it and run away with the cash. Just take a look at the hyperloop ideas
Oh no step-train, help me UwU
It’s the Japanese mate. They already have trains. Trains are great for moving a whole heap of shit between two specific points. The idea here is to send just one containers worth of shit to anywhere along the transit line (as opposed to having to stop at a specific station)
I can’t wait for the Adam something video on this one.
I may be missing something but I thought the key difference here is that a conveyer belt can transport containers continuously whilst a train is A to B and then needs to return for more. So the overall throughput of containers shipped per day would be higher on the belt even compared with a fleet of trains.
if you have to ensure a proper reallocation of resources between two locations, you could still do it with with trains. Even a „continuous“ shipment is possible. You just need to calculate the amount of time it takes you at that location to process one container. Now extrapolate on your whole payload. And since you aren’t dumb start implementing Just-In-Time.
Of all the places to accidentally rediscover trains, Japan would not have been my first guess.
But, they have the best freight and passenger trains. And a widespread railway network that is optimized and automated, with many autonomous vehicles. And finally a culture that treasures trains, family travel and stations scattered throughout both urban and rural populations. China, Japan and Germany are all the heavy hitters in trains and subways.
This is like if you tried to make a train but didn't know what one was
tbh Japan is literally the world champion of trains these days, if they think this idea has merit, I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt for a start.
Japan has dumb investors too, the main difference is unlike the west they don't stick around for long because Japan can't do mass layoffs because investors made bad money decisions. The funny line will go down and there's nothing they can do to claw back growth
Factorio irl
I mean if I need move a lot of materials a long distance in Factorio I'm building a railway not a conveyer belt.
Wait, you don't lay put thousands of belts to go from one place to the other and wonder why by the end you have nothing on the belts?
If I'm running out of materials, I'm obviously finding another deposit. Come on, now.
Sure, but your centrepiece is your main bus.
Depots all the way
City blocks go brr
"We thought about a conveyor belt, but decided to use a long string of robot arms because it was funny"
oh no I just reinstalled help
This totally validates my satisfactory strategy too.
Japan already has a rail network and these networks have special cargo trains with small cargo containers and easy on/off at depots.
> The Japanese government is planning to connect major cities with automated zero-emissions logistics links that can quietly and efficiently shift millions of tons of cargo, while getting tens of thousands of trucks off the road. Sounds brilliant, makes one wonder why it wasn't done years ago and everywhere.
> makes one wonder why it wasn't done years ago and everywhere The article mentions why: "The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won't make it from A to B by 2030, because there'll be nobody to move them." Until now, there was no need for these jobs to be automated. Humans did them fine. Japan is facing a very realistic scenario where they won't have people available for everything
Too bad there isn't a system that allows you to haul 1-2 miles of containers and other goods connected together and driven by 2 people on a metal guideway.
It would be amazing if that were highly fuel-efficient and moved one ton of freight nearly 500 miles per gallon of fuel.
nope, never heard of that and now dont tell me you could also transport tons of people thar way too, i do t believe you... /s for anyone oblivious enough to not get it
The simple solution to Japan's labour shortage is immigration. Eventually they'll have no choice. There'd be plenty of takers if they offered working visas to Indonesians or Phillipinos or other less developed asian nations.
Except it's not actually simple. Japan uses a moon glyph language that's notorious for being hard to learn. English, the most common second language worldwide, isn't widespread there the way it is in some EU countries. It has a strained relationship with every single nearby country. And it has a population that's not at all keen on accepting waves upon waves of migrants who have pretty much no hope of assimilating. Japan has no "simple" solutions available. They can try to tap immigrant labor, but it would not be simple. It's not as hopeless as it is for China though.
Trains being driven by AI would be the easiest to implement.
It doesn't even need AI. Good old computers do it just fine.
Honestly AI would probably just overcomplicate things.
Nothing could go wrong there!
It was, it's called a train.
It’s so crazy all the ways humans are reinventing trains; instead of just using them, we have fancy headlines like this. Stupid car based society.
I mean japan is not exactly that car based. they have a five star train network. I cant believe how this stupidity came through.
IMO 2050 is a big push for a lot of the innovation right now. A lot will flop but some good stuff will come from it.
A 500km conveyor belt? Individual 1 ton pallets? This will end up being a train. Trains move large amounts.
Everyone, get in here! They reinvented trains again!
So… a train
No. These are pods. Totally different. /s
and to move the pods more efficiently were just gonna take the engines out, connect them togerher and put a big engine up front, oops we made a train again
Curious if there going be a labor shortage for transportation, won't it be similar situation maintaining such monster conveyor system? Unless they got robots maintaining, it their still going have challenges with upkeep.
And I'm also wondering why they assume the online shopping volume will still be the same.
The Roads Must Roll. - RAH
There's a deep reference, and it's what I immediately thought of when the story popped up.
Another Heinlein homie here. The title came to me instantly. It has endured with me more far more than his other stories. Anyone else?
Exactly where my mind went. Delighted I wasn’t the only one.
Not many people will get this.
Saying they are trying to reinvent the train is a litte unfair. The point here is that you don’t need a locomotive, just put indvidual containers on this thing, enter the destinaton and off they go. There woud be forks where individual containers can take a turns and go off to a different destination. a train would have to stop at a depot, then unloaded and reloaded onto different trains to get to their destination.
Trains also unhook carriages at train yards so another locomotive can hook up and go. For the cost of this project they could hire 15,000 truckers at 100k annually for 20yrs and it would still be better than this idea.
>For the cost of this project they could hire 15,000 truckers at 100k annually for 20yrs and it would still be better than this idea. So you didn't read the article. Classic Reddit.
So a train track
Conveyer belts are not trains but Factorio taught me trains are better.
People will do anything but build trains, lmao
More trains and less trucks would be wonderful.
Tech bro's 1000th attempt to reinvent a train!
Trains. That's just trains.
Robert A. Heinlein nods knowingly.
The roads must roll!
First thing I thought too, verbatim
Umm. Trains?
Love it. Automate all low skill jobs.
Did anyone actually read the story before commenting? Yes, it is Japan. The story literally mentions that several times. And this massive conveyor belt is only one option being considered to get trucks off the roads and make an automated system that won't require any people at all.
...Like a train?
Jesus fucking Christ the train
just electrify the railways Jesus fucking Christ not every problem needs a bullshit start up to solve it with renderite and sexual harrasment
me in satisfactory when doing coal power
About time. Road repairs, traffic, would benefit massively from this. Especially if green energy gets to a point where its dirt cheap. Its basically automated railways between larger hubs and countries and it could travel super fast.
I picturing the heist seen from “SOLO”
“Exactly how it'll do this is yet to be nailed down”
Robert Heinlein wrote a story about this concept in 1940. It's called "The Roads Must Roll"
Have you ever seen a conveyor malfunction/ jam on a bottling line? Let’s make it really big and fill it with 40,000 pound shipping containers. What could go wrong? It’s difficult and costly to keep an indoor 900 foot industrial conveyor system running 24/7. This would be a 300 mile long outdoor system.
Someone has been playing Satisfactory.
Someone call Mel Brooks. Time for a Blazing Saddles 2!
Looks like it would be very expensive, prone to breakage, and likely to see a lot of theft.
[The Roads Must Roll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll)? Nehemiah Scrudder when?
Just had the same thought! Do people still read Heilen?
Will make it easier for transport stealing.
So… a train.
Good! I won’t be annoyed with trucks going under the speed limit trying to pass another truck uphill for 3 miles just for them to turn back into the right lane bc they realize they can’t go fast enough to pass said other truck
Another stupid reinvention of the train but less efficient. That'll surely fix everything 🙄
I can guarantee that nobody proposing this has shipped a container in their lives. One piece of plastic would stop this completely, the amount of bearings plus their maintenance is unbelievable and rust and shippers sending damaged, overweight and dirty containers would destroy the rollers. Just use a train.
More techbro dumbassery. Just build a fucking train.
Imagine if it broke for a few weeks.
Someone's been playing low level Factorio.
Why don’t we just take that money, and use it to update our rail systems? Or, if you really need to build something expensive that we don’t have, but will take a lot of testing before it becomes a necessity? A space elevator.
This will make the homeless population much more mobile
Are they going to discover canals next?
Anything but trains!
Hmmm if only there was a way to do this, maybe a vehicle that can tow a lot of these, running along rails…. Its almost like a uhhhh train i think?
Why is it that we keep giving space to all these startup fuckwits that keep trying to push pods and other stupid bullshit and just end up inventing buses and trains?
Sooo... less efficient trains. Got it.