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Comment by kumarsw | Hacker News Reader

I recall someone (possibly Adam Something on YouTube complaining about a similar idea) coining the term "Not a Train" to describe concepts such as Hyperloop and this, the idea being that they are (1) futuristic and exiting and (2) because they are different, allow for arguments that the upfront costs will be much lower than trains, whose costs are well studied and known to be high.

Usually these systems are more costly and have lower throughput than trains because: 1. Trains use existing, mature technology and there are plenty existing manufacturers 2. Because trains are coupled together into trains, throughput is higher because there is not a need to space self-driving carriages apart 3. Because trains are coupled together, the expensive bits go in the locomotives and the carriage construction is simpler and cheaper

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Trains are great for bulk transport. If you want to ship the daily output of a steel mill or move a military division worth of vehicles, trains are unbeatable. But if you want to ship less than a couple of train cars worth of stuff, they quickly lose out to trucks. That's the market most of these "not a train"s are targeting.

That's why this proposal has tiny cars and even tinier overhead vehicles. It's not so much a train-but-worse, but a truck-but-on-tracks.

Of course we could just put autonomous small vehicles on existing train tracks, but that won't happen in the next two decades because they are incompatible with the existing users of those rails.

Much of US rail is literally trucks on trains - not even containers but actual trailers.

https://www.bnsf.com/ship-with-bnsf/ways-of-shipping/equipme...

This allows a quicker switch to last-mile whilst still moving much of the distance on rail.

The problem with trains is that you need large signalling blocks and distances between trains and blocks for safety reasons - a fully loaded freight train can have a braking distance of well over 1.000 meters, and accelerating and decelerating them takes a lot of time and energy. Also, shunting carriages between trains takes up lots of space for the yards, a lot of time to couple/uncouple and verify the correct operation of the brakes.

The CST system seems to operate at almost zero distance between carriages, which even with the lower speed of 30 km/h should still have a greater total bandwidth than an equivalent-sized two track railway system. Also, it can operate 24/7 unlike rail systems (because of noise complaints and co-existence with passenger trains), which should further increase the available bandwidth.

I can't comment on the Swiss, but in the US if you live next to a dedicated freight line, the train company can and will send trains through at all hours of the night and the only thing you can do about it is find somewhere else to live. CSX, Union Pacific, BNSF, etc could not care less about noise complaints.

If you find yourself living next to tracks, the best you can do is try to drown out the noise like this person did [0]

[0] https://biotinker.dev/posts/seismograph.html

My personal experience was that after a few weeks I just ignore it and sleep through all the noise. The actual train itself was very quiet because of how slow it moved. The real issue was they are required to blow the train horn multiple times at each road crossing. This is extremely loud, since it is a horn.

The only really odd thing I noticed was there was a wall that would squeak as the freight train approached. I suspect this had to do something with the houses construction however.

If the residents in an area get together with their local government and work with the railroad, they can often get the crossings covered to a no-horn Quiet Zone.

The main cost is the double-sided crossing guards necessary, and/or closure of some crossings deemed no longer necessary.

https://railroads.dot.gov/highway-rail-crossing-and-trespass...

This was in Alabama. The local government is generally interested in hookers or embezzling funds.

In Europe, most railways are mixed between freight and passenger trains - in some cases, you have everything from high-speed long distance trains, regional trains, city trains and freight trains on the same set of tracks.

As the railways here belong to the nation states instead of the private freight companies, freight trains are at the bottom of the barrel in priority... and given that it takes a lot of energy to accelerate a fully laden freight train, most operators tend to run freight trains exclusively at night where the amount of stops is minimal.

If you put your house in the acoustic shadow of a tall cinder block wall with a row of trees behind it, you can deflect a great deal of that noise. Build it for shade, just not from the sun.

A conventional train and close headways are not an either-or proposition. Freight trains can (and do in places) operate under computerized moving block systems that allow for headway as short as relative braking distance. Automatic train operation with moving blocks is a relatively mature technology available from a couple of major vendors.

There are certainly advantages to single-unit cars that avoid the need for shunting, but the maintenance cost on these will be tremendously higher on a per-unit basis. Hard to say that it's a clear win.

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