The track for HSR (>150 mph, preferably 175) is not compatible with the weights of US freight. [Neither are our roads, but that’s another matter.] Naturally around larger cities, existing freight tracks would be shared.
December 1964 Model Railroader pg 44-47 monorail article. Photos of the Seattle monorail. It includes a drawing of a high speed switch (turnout) design
Yes. Before they paved the Alaska RR’s tunnel into Whittier Ak, I rode the Alaska RR’s shuttle trains’ flatcar in a class c motorhome and a tour bus was in front of us on its flatcar. Train speed did not seem to exceed forty mph, but since I didn’t have any way to measure it, can’t be sure. Distance is only 12 miles so speed was not necessary. It needed, the motorhome had its own bathroom. Neat little operation.
[quote user=“BaltACD”]
Paul Milenkovic
So of the two engineers riding in the freight-train autorack, the guy who Mom didn’t like suffered from motion sickness and he threw up. As a kid, I thought karma was somehow involved – Mom generally liked people, and if she didn’t like you, there must be some justification for this, so that he got sick and threw up running an engineering experiment was in the natural order of things.Before you knock it, I learned from some model train guys at our local NMRA chapter that riding in an automobile being transported on a freight train is a mode of transportation used by recent immigrants without the required papers. If immigrants living in the shadows are the modern-day counterparts to hobo culture of times past, travelling on a freight train inside a brand-new luxury SUV sure beats riding in a boxcar. Even if the ride bounces you all over the place.
Riding in your own vehicle on a train presents a comfort problem for the real world - heating and cooling of the interior of said vehicle for the comfort of the occupants. I suspect operating the auto’s engine would be a ‘non-starter’ from the safety aspect of carbon monoxide poisioning - while the train may be moving - what is the condition of the air inside the railcar. Secondly, what would be the visual stimulation for the people inside their own vehicle for their 12 - 16 or more hour journey. Thirdly what are the sanitary
This is what you get when your test is conducted by the idiot-savant kind of mechanical engineer, who thinks ‘a freight truck is a freight truck’ regardless of expected speed, or load range. These are the same folks who cut down gondolas to make ‘open tourist-railroad cars’ and then complain about NVH … probably related to some of those ‘Excalibur clone’ builders of the bad-old pimpmobile days in the '70s who would whack the carosserie off something like a 460-engined Lincoln to install their “classic car” bodywork but forget to change either the springs or the damping.
Even introducing an intermediate ‘sprung bolster’ into a design using commercial three-piece truck components can give you a livable ride; the history of “high-speed” three-piece truck development in the late '40s and '50s is an interesting (and I think rewarding) study, particularly the designs worked out at Chrysler.
If you’re going to say ‘let’s do this’ – and I’m all in favor of that spirit! – at least start by thinking about what you do with the spring nests and bolster damping, and then work out if your secondary suspension needs some enhanced lateral compliance.
By the time I learned anything about RRollway, it was a transverse system (I don’t know how the corridors were supposed to work with typical car lengths of the mid-Seventies without having all the cars aligned at one edge and careful counterbalancing with some kind of pumped ballast) and there was some controversy over just how enclosed it was practical to make it. Why the Trains Magazine staff didn’t jump all over this when they published ‘The Case for the Double-Track Train’ I still don’t quite understand; it was a fairly obvious use (and I think there is no better sy
[quote user=“Overmod”]
Paul Milenkovic
We all are told that freight-car trucks ride roughly, but you don’t know until you experience it.
This is what you get when your test is conducted by the idiot-savant kind of mechanical engineer, who thinks ‘a freight truck is a freight truck’ regardless of expected speed, or load range. These are the same folks who cut down gondolas to make ‘open tourist-railroad cars’ and then complain about NVH … probably related to some of those ‘Excalibur clone’ builders of the bad-old pimpmobile days in the '70s who would whack the carosserie off something like a 460-engined Lincoln to install their “classic car” bodywork but forget to change either the springs or the damping.
Even introducing an intermediate ‘sprung bolster’ into a design using commercial three-piece truck components can give you a livable ride; the history of “high-speed” three-piece truck development in the late '40s and '50s is an interesting (and I think rewarding) study, particularly the designs worked out at Chrysler.
If you’re going to say ‘let’s do this’ – and I’m all in favor of that spirit! – at least start by thinking about what you do with the spring nests and bolster damping, and then work out if your secondary suspension needs some enhanced lateral compliance.
By the time I learned anything about RRollway, it was a transverse system (I don’t know how the corridors were supposed to work with typical car lengths of the mid-Seventies without having all the cars aligned at one edge and careful counterbalancing with some kind of pumped ballast) and there was some controversy over just how enclosed it was practical to make it. Why t
i don’t think either the popular or the trade press ever latched onto the ‘double-track train’ which, as I recall, the Trains staff came in for some heat over – it wasn’t exactly engineered, it wasn’t exactly practical as described in the magazine, as I recall it was invented by someone using HO snap-track for the model, etc. The point for a 19’ or greater semi-dedicated RRollway system was that you’d surely benefit more from four rails mutually lined and surfaced in pairs, net of superelevation, rather than just two spaced far apart, and the railroad would be perfectly usable as directional double track at all the times the special double-width passenger train were absent. I don’t think anyone has ever had the stones to propose an interchange fleet of 19’-wide double-height freight cars, although it’s possible today to think of some container niches for Breitspurbahn-style loading…
The version I remember seeing via Klauder was the one that had the cars all backed to the one side, transversely (with the ‘heavier’ ends inboard) and the passenger aisle the empty area along the ‘fronts’.
Science fiction in those days was the idea of full double-height cars, where you’d treat the ‘walkway’ almost as if it were on a ferry vehicle deck, with frequent stairs to a full upper level and at least a couple of elevators or chair lifts. But the idea of a skytop deck 19’ wide with interior partitions, ‘cabins’ and so forth certainly took my imagination…
[quote]
… The US DOT concept for an end-loading passengers-ride-in-their-cars Northeast-Florida auto ferry that I go
OK, how-do-you insert a photo?
I use https://imgur.com/
It’s free and easy to use. Once you get an account, you can upload a photo, click on the thumbnail which will open a page. Select “BBCode”, then paste that onto this forum.
You won’t see the picture until you post your comment.
If you want to use other photo hosts, Steve Otte has a good explanation on how to post photos:
Meanwhile; even more about monorails: https://jalopnik.com/heres-why-a-monorail-kind-of-sucks-1845133085
at least one design was commercially successful (and featured in a James Bond movie).