Freight trains are great for moving huge quantities of freight from classification yard A to classification yard B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_yard), not so great for moving smaller quantities door-to-door. Ever wondered why, despite the existence of freight trains, there are still so many long-haul trucks driving around? Because freight trains aren't the answer to all logistics questions!
So put a sorting conveyor belt at the end of a train line?
I could see a conveyor if and only if it saves a bunch of complexity at source /destination, or if it can be built in places that would be much more expensive to make trainlines. After all trains are just concentrated cargo, and are therefore much heavier.
> So put a sorting conveyor belt at the end of a train line?
Done right, a conveyor can fairly seamlessly branch off at arbitrary locations along the way. Individual items can fan out onto smaller sub-branches without any significant delays; a long train has to stop and start to accomplish the same.
I think the main challenge here would be the maintenance of such a thing. Rail requires plenty; a conveyor has many, many more moving parts over hundreds of miles.
Have you seen the automated sorting and distribution in a amazon warehouse? And yes, those are complex machines, but this way to build a logistics hub is way superior to 1:1 cranes. There is a difference between squential arrival and non-blocking sorting to various hubs to process. And arrival and blockign sequential move to a truck.
Sure and the mass of a package is what? 50lbs max?
Long distance = High volume = weight/mass.
The laws of physics aren't changing any time soon. redirecting a cargo container like a box shooting through a warehouse would not end well for some portion of the system (including the contents)
The idea is to replace TEUs with smaller more manageable standard though. Even though the art shows containers that's not what they are trying to do. In similar systems the proposal is like one cubic meter boxes with max of 100kg. Something easily manageable and can be switched and routed on a conveyor system.
> The idea is to replace TEUs with smaller more manageable standard though.
SO a pallet?
> proposal is like one cubic meter boxes with max of 100kg.
A pallet, the normal shitty wooden ones are rated for 10x that much mass. A cheap pallet jack is rated for 2500kg.
I get what they are proposing. But it is disconnected from the realities of distance and mass... If you need to move 10 pallets of water does it make sense to make 10 trips in your car or 1 trip in a truck? Breaking down goods into smaller units doesn't change the amount of cargo it just creates congestion... It's like a high speed network without jumbo frames.
> Ever wondered why, despite the existence of freight trains, there are still so many long-haul trucks driving around?
You don't think there aren't tons of spurs that drop 3-4 car loads of cargo on a semi frequent schedule? that there aren't spurs that move massive amounts of goods both in and out of production facilities?
Just in Time moved a lot of cargo off rails and into trucks... that market is going away now as more planed and centralized logistics comes back into style. Transport costs were out of control but no one was paying attention to them... not the case any more.
With all the recent research effort for self-driving cars, I wonder if there are also projects for self-driving rail cars that could cover the "last miles" to the destination without being part of a train. Of course, one problem is that in the last decades, most companies that might benefit from something like this were built on sites without rail connection...
Self driving trains have been in real world use for more than 20 years. What makes them easy compared to cars is with rail you just put a fence around the track and there is nothing else to hit so you don't need complex sensors to avoid killing people (more likely you put the tracks in a tunnel or elevated). Of course that gets into why we don't do this to individual houses - either the fences trap everybody in their own house (maybe they can visit a neighbor or 3, but not the whole neighborhood) or the costs to build it is extremely high.
Roads are dangerous, but also a lot more flexible than rail and so better for low volume use.
Like with roads rail requires a lot of maintenance if you put the heavy load on it. Having to shut down the transport periodically isn't good for business.
Perhaps with containers on rollers it is possible to replace one without shutting everything down. Kinda interesting puzzle, the rollers should fit in the containers. A telescope would make them to weak, picking up the old roller, rotating 90 degrees, bringing the new one, rotate 90 degrees, drop it in place.
Clearly someone has been playing too much satisfactory and not enough factorio