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Comment by shabble | Hacker News Reader

I'd imagine (on the basis of common sense, rather than evidence, so I may well be wrong), that there should be rail facilities fairly close to any major port.

Trucking from the railhead is probably unavoidable, but the article talks about a 1000mi trip, whereas according to wikipedia at least, greatest distance across the 48 states is 2800mi. Surely the nearest freight depot should be less than 1/3 of the country away?

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You're right about the port. Here's a link to the Harbor Island map (in Seattle, WA where we get lots of shipments from Asia), note proximity of rail lines:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Harbor+island,+Seattle,+WA&...

I don't know much about it, but the machinery at the port looks really impressive. It seems to lift cargo from the ships onto the trains.

The issue isn't so much the distance from the train, so much as once you take it off the train, you split it up into much smaller loads....with different owners and destinations, and those loads probably change hands, and are pretty hard to put -back- onto trains.

It sounds like we need an RFC for automated packet-switched transport of physical goods. Surely the existing algorithms used for physical logistics and IP network routing could be used to create a highly-reliable automatic package delivery system.

The closest I can think of is Personal Rapid Transport[1], which is a light-rail/monorail network of individually powered (small; 3-person or so) vehicles. Various schemes for routing have been proposed, many of which are conceptually similar to packet-routing of the carriages.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Personal_rapi...

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