310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks in Japan
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
Anyone who has ever stepped on a Shinkansen can understand that Japan has a way of getting shit done. It may start a bit later than other countries, but when they finally decide to execute (and this is still in planning stages so it might not), it happens surprisingly quickly.
I've watched them totally revamp Shibuya station over the past 10 years in ways that make it utterly unrecognisable to someone who hasn't been here since then, all while never taking down-time. There is another article on the HN front page titled "Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes" right now... that's perhaps coloring people's expectations of the possible.
About that, I also noticed.-
Has anybody looked into how the lowering of the "illustration threshold" for visualizing ideas might influence how many, or which, or how hard it might be to bring them to reality? Or securing investment?
I am almost certain it is having some influence.-
The blurred line between fantasy/hallucinations and reality will only become worse, I fear.
PS. I am fond of "confabulation" meself, for AI-generated slush.-
Which completely undermines the title, hence the doubt.
If they haven’t picked a technology, they haven’t really done much more than express interest in having an option to do something. The talk about extremely long (and expensive) tunnels or conveyor belts feels silly when the obviously more economical solutions like autonomous trucks or traditional train rails are vastly cheaper.
The conveyor belt thing is just a PR stunt. Nobody could possibly think it’s a viable option compared to traditional alternatives.
Also bear in mind that pallet conveyor is slow - in most factories or warehouses where you are covering large distances the standard approach would actually be to put a rail guided vehicle in (often called a pallet monorail).
Plus conveyors would then need to be enclosed (they have lots of moving parts - it's not like train rails where you can just put them outside and let it get wet. The pallets also can't get wet, but it would take less infrastructure to cover the pallets than cover the full 310 mile route.).
A material ropeway would be another option - not commonly deployed but probably a much better fit for moving pallets across these sort of distances and much faster than conveyor (although still probably only 15-20 miles per hour!).
If they have dedicated conveyor tracks* above grade the system makes sense, but this is expensive due to the costs of grade separation.
It's possible but probably the most expensive route.
* The tracks should probably be catenary or third rail, not battery.
“1200 Japanese workers convert above ground train to subway line in just 3 hours”
Agree that the naysayers should pause while Japan attempts the feat. Their aggregate engineering capability speaks for itself.
They end up choosing rail or light rail. Other options are just early spitballing for PR like they always do. They might go for narrow rails if land use is important. Steel rolling on steel track is just too good solution for that distance.
Other proposals like carts on a tunnel, converter belts are too slow or too expensive if fast enough. Having small carts move on wheels just wears down the wheels in no time. Same for conveyor belts. The cost of rail per km is cheaper than alternatives. They may end up loading wheeled carts on the train and wheel them off at destination, but they don't run them for 500 km.
The all other options listed are just for show and PR.
So... most of the people there had to live in poverty just because that one guy gets paid so much for broken conveyor belts?
Blame the corporation that squeezes its employees for every dime, not a front line worker who actually manages to get paid appropriate compensation.
Clearly someone has been playing too much satisfactory and not enough factorio
There use to be carriages designed to be uncoupled from the rear of a moving train.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_coach
It would be nice if the empty containers and trains didn't have to travel back. I'm proposing edible containers.
Roads are dangerous, but also a lot more flexible than rail and so better for low volume use.
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.
(With downsides, of course.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
A small light railway between large cities makes sense where roads are congested and cannot be expanded.
Much better than the "AI" spamming, regurgitated garbage that's the current link.
Also, since neither article mentions it: The chief driver (pun not intended) behind this is new work regulations drastically limiting how many hours a truck driver can work. It's been called the "2024 Problem" because the law came into effect this year upending their trucking industry.
[1] https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/economy/20240623-19...
People keep proposing ideas like this and none of them have ever worked out, whereas freight trains are basically a solved problem.
Similar smaller-than-container transportation networks exist elsewhere, even temporary ones used for evacuating tunnels while they are being bored. Even coal strip-mining type of situations have extremely long length conveyor systems that work pretty well.
If you forget the nonsense AI picture for a moment, what they are doing is essentially not much more than extra-specialised rail, which when built for a specific purpose makes a lot of sense, especially when you want to factor in autonomy, or per-object routing instead of single-train based routing. It's already done in factories too.
Currently the world's longest conveyor belt is 61km. This is five times longer, and could equally be done with a narrow gauge automated railway. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150869/worlds-longe...
The unanswered logistics question: how do the packages get on and off this thing?
100km. The article you linked used miles.
That one transfers the load between different sections of its length. The longest conveyer that does not transfers the load is 31km at Boddington Bauxite Mine in Australia.
> This is five times longer [...]
Does that actually introduce any new technical difficulties?
Suppose I needed a 2m x 1m table. I could get some 2m long boards and put enough in parallel to get my 1m width. I could put 1m boards perpendicular to those underneath at the ends and nail the 2m long boards to them. Then add legs at the 4 corners and I have a table.
Then I need a 5m x 1m table. I could take the same approach except using 5m boards instead of 2m boards. I might need to nail some more perpendiculars in the middle part of the table or maybe add some legs in the middle.
As I need longer and longer tables that approach keeps working up to maybe 10m. I don't think my local source of boards has boards longer than that.
So if I need a 30m x 1m table I need a new approach. I need to figure out something that doesn't require single boards that span the whole thing. It has to be limited to boards I can reasonably get. Let's say I figure out how to make that 30m x 1m table using no boards longer than 4m.
At that point I expect that I'd be able to build tables of any greater length by just doing whatever I did in the middle of the 30m table but doing more of that.
I'd expect that a similar thing happens when you build a 100km long conveyor. The specific project was "build a 100km long conveyor" but to solve it you figure out the solution to "build an arbitrarily long conveyor" and then apply that to "build a 100km long conveyor".
Then they can say they're doing something about the shrinking worker problem and call it a day. No one need be shamed.
(Also I can't wait for Adam Something's youtube video on this conveyor belt. Another one for his list of "why is this not a train?")
Afaik, the project looks dead?
In my mental model the trucks just have to go "somewhere else" to pick up the cargo, which might be a bit closer, but that's it?
I’d envision this like the old USPS Railroad system. In those days they’d drop a sack of mail at each station and pick up outgoing mail with a hook without stopping. You’ll have small stations and you send the pallet off the main conveyor. That might be directly delivery, or a van or some other arrangement.
The big thing is you avoid cross docking and middlemen, LTL type freight.
Also, they’re talking of 500 km, or 1,000 km round trip. That’s easily a day of driving.
and various other media articles
Well lol, the news just came out 3 hours ago...
> One possibility is to use massive conveyor belts to cover the 500-km (310-mile) distance between the two cities, running alongside the highway or potentially through tunnels underneath the road. Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts.
At the time these were slightly modified busses that could disconnect the steering (or maybe the driver just let go of the wheel), and were fitted with rubber bumpers and/or wheels on the corners (I can't quite remember) and drove in a concrete channel a bit wider than the bus, but not much, and the bus just kind of bounced off the wall until it settled in a straight line. The bus driver just disengaged the wheel and floored the accelerator and it sped along its section until it got to the suburb it needed to be, then he slowed down a bit, the walls got a bit further apart and he re-engaged the steering wheel and just carried on driving normally as the concrete sidewalls ended and it turned into normal road.
Looking at the pictures now, it seems they've revised this design a bit and there are now 2 sets of concrete channels that the wheels sit in and the concrete doesn't go high enough to require bumpers and just operates against the tyres instead. I guess they discovered that it didn't cause enough tyre wear to be a problem, or they have extra thick sidewall tyres or something. Also possible I've just misremembered that detail after 25 years!
Anyway, these weren't driverless, but there's no real reason why they couldn't be. They could just slow down and stop in a bay at the destination city and then have a driver hop in to take it the last leg of the journey. To fulfil their green ambitions they should maybe add charging and power rails to power the vehicle along the route (also helps avoid inconveniently having one run out of fuel halfway and cause everything behind to be blocked up) and leave the battery with plenty of charge for the local part of the journey.
Normally with infrastructure projects, the next steps would be to invite civil engineering companies to produce plans of what might actually be feasible to construct, and they will do their concept art at that stage, and then the government will select from those ideas what they want to pursue, and then put that out to tender to different companies.
Of course, the project may be cancelled way before then when they realise it's probably too expensive.
Funny detail: Asahi Beer is asking in a slightly roundabout way to make it able to handle heavy objects and beverage-specific pallets, with a picture of a metal beer tank for illustration. They haven't decided if it's ever built or where depots will be - but it must carry beer IF they're going to do it!
0: https://www.mlit.go.jp/road/ir/ir-council/buturyu_douro/inde...
Surely just use self-driving trains.
Even a dedicated rail link or even a whole network would be much, much cheaper than a conveyor, which are also notoriously unreliable and would halt the entire system on every fault.
Interesting idea though. I hope they come up with some cool ideas.
(I work in logistics automation design, 310 miles of traditional pallet chain conveyor just isn’t feasible imo for loads of reasons)
So what I was trying to say is: Why can't shipping containers be more "automatically" routed over rail? Perhaps fully automatic rail car couplers would be more helpful in general than yet another gadgetbahn?
The technology already exists for this in airports[0][1]; when you check in a bag in a big modern airport after the gate agent sticks the sticker on the handle it won't be touched again by a human until it gets chucked into the aircraft hold. Your bag goes through the curtain and it is dropped into a standard bucket which is conveyed around under the concourse on a rollercoaster like automated rail system to screening then either to an automated vehicle for transfer between terminal buildings or to an automated storage system for people who have checked in too early or have a long transfer, finally to the stand/ramp for loading into the aircraft. Big international airports like Amsterdam Schipol, Paris Charles de Gaul, Madrid Barrajas and Heathrow all have systems like this.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVesQ07GrRY&list=PLWwq_41dNV... edit: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cac411oBqSE&t=57s
In IT we learnt that mainframes was gem of tech but it's better to build many cheap desktops in cluster... In the aerospace mega-planes are mostly relic of the past because yes their single fly is cheaper but all the rest is much more expensive then using far less big planes. In the naval sector large oil tankers are essentially a relic of the past for similar + environmental reasons. Semi-abandoned office towers and some construction engineers state the same for big buildings https://www.israel21c.org/skyscrapers-are-huge-mistakes-warn... curiously for certain big things, built by the private sector but paid by the public, the private involved disagree...