There is a reason that freight trains are a thing.
Clearly someone has been playing too much satisfactory and not enough factorio
Clearly someone has been playing too much satisfactory and not enough factorio
(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.
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.