trains that don't stop
I know, I know: two YouTube videos in one day? But this is really neat:
Of course, the design is also a bit impractical: got any existing tunnels or stations? Well, I hope you've got a lot of money, too, because you're going to have to rebuild them all.
But it strikes me (the person who knows nothing about trains) as a potentially feasible idea if implemented by simply delinking individual cars. New cars could be brought up to speed by an engine that hangs around a given city, accelerating passengers, connecting them to passing trains and then heading back to repeat the process. Disconnected cars could coast into station or be picked up by such a system. You'd have to figure out the right car to sit in based on your destination, but the upside would be to make every train an express.
The downside is no doubt the complexity involved in synchronizing speeds so precisely as to make such a system safe. But surely it must be possible — after all, this is a problem that's been well-addressed for over a hundred years.
(The train link comes via Chris via the EchoDitto del.icio.us feed which I'll immodestly point out often has interesting stuff in it.)
Comments
It seems to me the big problem here is passengers who don't follow the rules. In particular, if passengers take too long to transfer from the "local" car to the "express" car, then the door can't be closed safely, which in turn would mean that the local car can't be separated from the express car. In that case, either the whole train would have to stop, the passengers for that stop would have to miss their station, or the stragglers would get dismembered. I'd probably favor the third option, but that would probably prove unpopular with family members.
Well, I suppose that's a potential problem, but it doesn't seem any more serious to me than the threat of passengers sleeping through their stops under the current system. Ticket-checkers could help get people properly situated, too. It would be a change and no doubt some people would miss their stops while learning the system, but I don't think it would be all *that* bad.
I think what we need are single car autonomous trains that can carry both people and freight directly from their origin to their destination. If it works for the internet, it should work for (much) larger packets.
While self-driving cars are still a bit far away, I am sure that we can develop self-driving trains that operate more safely than human conductors.