What made me think that they may be serious is the major industry players (at least equipment manufacturers) who are affiliated. They seem to be well along on planning the first installation. At over 200 million + does this make any sense? I guess the big selling point is that it uses much less real estate than a regular classification yard. And they tout speed of operation as well…
Love that animation…Someone needs to build a working scale model!
Something tells me this is one of those things that is better in theory than actually really working. Quite frankly it would have to be so big that I can’t see it taking up that much less space than a regular yard, and what about those little thingies that move the cars around? Although a life size one would be interesting, I don’t see it being a major new step in railroad technology just yet.
Okay, so the operation is pretty impressive… But, I see some problems. First of all, could more than one track feed the turntable, or is feeding the turntable strictly a one track operation? How much computer support would be needed to precisely track each car? How much congestion would this cause as trains entered the turntable. Wouldn’t there be a need for a staging yard for trains waiting to be “processed” as it were? What about getting an outbound train ready to go, while an inbound train is being processed? Or could that even be done. What about land usage? There would still be a need for tracks to hold the cars, correct?
I think we need someone like Nbrodar to chime in here, I can see this working to a point, but for a larger yard like Clyde, or Proviso, or even Eola, would this be an efficient way to build and classify trains. I get the feeling something is missing in the operation that the website shows for this turntable.
It makes absolutely no sense to me. Instead of just cutting a car out you need to have the turntable do it. What do you do when it has a problem? At least with a yard if a turnout is defective you just avoid it. With this thing if it breaks you go home.
HA!! you hit the nail right on the head… That’s what was missing while I was watching the video on the website. No fault tolerance, or none that was apparent to me.
Model railroad ok, outside in the cold the rain, snow, wind, heat, not likely to work very well. I think the learning curve for the yard masters, and crews would be very steep, and there seems to be a tremendous amount of people involved in this process.
Think about the sheer size of the pits needed for the turntables. Then the bearings needed to make them be able to spin the motors and indexing plus the fact during the winter the snow ice slush and other crap will build up and jam it up. RR got rid of Roundtables once already I do not see them building them again to sort trains what they have works plus you realize the size one of those would have to be for Bailey in North Platte.
I saw the same thing. When it breaks you are out of business until the part is shipped from who knows where. There are no work arounds like with conventional yards. Seems to me someone would have tried it for more than just a locomotive in the last 140 years if it made real sense.
Ok, I got it…man, for a second I thought Futuremodal had found a buyer…
This is about as nonsensical a concept as I have seen in a long time.
As pointed out, if the table breaks, you’re shut down till it gets fixed.
And all the cars entering the table, or yard for that matter would have to be pre-blocked in big groups for this to function efficiently…single car switching on this would take hours.
Oh well, at least someone is taking a idea and trying to make it work…but with railroading, as Larry already pointed out, KISS works best.
All right–I counted as many as 15 cars on that turntable. That’s 750 feet minimum diameter, or about 35 tracks wide.
Now, where are you going to find railroad trackage that you can steer from various compass points to a common center? Right–you’d have to acquire the land!
Just how many locomotives are going to have to give up their prime movers to power this thing?
And then there’s the matter of all of the other problems previously mentioned.
they could eliminate some of those locomotives/trackmobiles/whatevers by spinning the 750-foot turntable fast enough to utilize centrifugal force to propel these 140-ton cars into the proper (and properly-aligned) track.
Think Dan Harmon has been tinkering with that invention of his in the basement again…
“Scotty, beam me up another cross hopper car full of di-lithium crystals”
“Aye, Captain!”[(-D]
As a railroad surveyor, I want to see a yard in this country that would have the operating footprint to accomodate that thing…huge waste of land resources, especially in an urban area. (on top of the fact that there are too many failure scenarios to render the thing useless, including the inevitable blind shove into the pit with the train biting the turntable.)
No, won’t work. At first I thought maybe on some smaller scale like one car turn table. But seriously, what is the advantage to this turn table to say, flat switching or hump sorting???
But I still love wacky ideas. And speaking of Futuremodel, where is he at, I haven’t seen him promote his “ideas” lately?
Does anybody remember what happens if the handbrakes were not set and the table was not lined up? Thats right folks the big hook came out and someone got a butt ripping. Good luck cleaning up a couple cars of hazmat in the pit.
When I first saw this thing, I was impressed…for about 2 seconds. Then, all of the negatives began to pop into my head, the first one being the sheer size of something like this. I could not wrap my brain around this thing at all. There are far, far too many things that can go wrong, and this is not a solution, at least not for a large complex, and probably not even a small one either. Too many moving parts, and a reliance on only one way in and out.
Complexity breeds failure, and as Larry put it earlier. KISS… that always works best. I could only imagine the size of the power plant it would take to power this thing, not to mention the size of everything else. How would maintenance and repair crews gain access to repair something that may go wrong inside underneath the inner table. Who would want to crawl the 500 or so feet through maintenance tunnels to get to the problem…
No, this goes under the heading of “What happens when someone thinks too much”, or “A Solution in Search of a Problem”