I feel like trains are similar in a lot of ways, and many orders of magnitude cheaper. That’s definitely cool to think about though!

Yeah but they're not techno-cool and futuristic and entreprenourial-capitalist! They're boring.

Much like highways and trains, the tracks are the easy part. The hard part is in routing and termination - think interchanges, onramps, and offramps. Being underground compounds the routing and termination problem dramatically.

not to mention tunneling costs. if you need a benchmark, look up what it costs the swiss build.

I think it also massively complicates the failure modes. Freight trains pretty frequently lose cargo and or derail. That's probably way more annoying to deal with if it's in a tunnel.

Only in the USA. Derailments are rare where the tracks are properly maintained, and train lengths aren't excessive.

Contrarian take, but tons of truck traffic on interstate highways makes driving far more fun (as long as there isn't road maintenance or undue stoppage).

I'm actually looking forward to future me being able to ride my motorcycle around a freight-train's worth of semi-automated cargo-haulers on interstates that are mostly devoid of vacationing families.

To each their own, but as a fellow motorcycle rider myself, I absolutely shit myself around huge trucks that won't be able to even see me.

I guess you’re supposed to reenact the space whale scene from treasure planet.

An absolute gem of a movie. Didn't see it until I had kids and it was one of the few movies that I didn't get tired of rewatching again and again with them.

It really is one of the top-tier movies and it’s quite sad it didn’t get the recognition it deserves.

With all this expensive AF gear it's humbling to know that a single tire can still end me quick enough I wouldn't even know it happened.... In the best case.

Only in Wyoming where, unlike Texas, truckers have the sense to stay to the right. Also, there is de facto no speed limit there because there are only a handful of WSTs. I suggest avoiding Wyoming <-> Colorado unless you have nose plugs or no sense of smell.

Wyoming is exciting because a gust of wind can blow a semi into you at any second.

Driving across I-80 we'd always count at least a couple of semi's blown over. Not to mention sudden blizzards, snow blowing sideways, or super dense fog.

Once while I living in eastern Wyoming we had an "80 car" pileup, probably more like 60 cars but one tank truck caught fire:

https://www.facebook.com/118611954828240/photos/update-on-i-...

Right, they can even do this for within city delivery. Imagine each home having a tube box, like a mailbox, that is vertically connected to the network of tubes underground. Small electric vehicles running through the tubes and carrying parcel from warehouse hubs to homes and even vice versa. Amazon Instant Delivery!

They built a tunnel just for mail trains between postal offices in London in the 19th century. You can even go down there now https://www.postalmuseum.org/event/tunnel-walks/

I'm... not convinced it scales well, cost-wise!

funny that one of the better f u t u r e ideas in this thread got heavily downvoted. This is probably one of the more efficient ways to automate package delivery, up to a small-ish size, and requiring a pretty high density. If NY wasn't a clusterfuck when it comes to getting projects built, they might actually have the density to justify the maintenance costs.

> Small electric vehicles

why not just use pneumatics? It's a proven technology used in sufficiently large facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_us...

A similar sentiment to other commenters in this thread... Why re-invent something incredibly resource-consuming like building specialized tube boxes?

If I were to invest into something today it would be medium size (about a tall van size) autonomous containers that can drive at night within city limits and drop off small reusable containers at delivery points such as apartment buildings. Case in point: Luxer One is a fairly common setup in SF today, the next step would be to stop delivering individual packages and, instead, deliver daily boxes for the whole building.

Then the first time one of those little shuttles gets stuck in the tubes you’re gonna have to start digging things up. Not to mention the bad actors that have a pipeline to deliver all kinds of dangerous things right into people’s homes or you know just mess up the pipe system completely. It’s a terrible idea. Why not just have functional drone delivery, it just makes way more sense.

Afaik Estonia has something similar for their trash system

If the US rail network wasn't in such a state of disrepair and freight trains weren't miles long to cut labor costs, you wouldn't even need to dig tunnels for them. That also saves the cost of digging those tunnels and actually making them safe (i.e. having service tunnels, ventilation, fire escapes, fire suppression systems, etc etc). And of course with tunnels you'd want rail anyway because you don't want to be stuck trying to extinguish a battery fire in a tunnel 200' under the city.

The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.

> The US freight rail network is in excellent shape.

The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ao-24274Jw

[3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__315.html

There's no way this is true ⊙ ﹏⊙

In the US we really believe in efficiency and cost savings, so our freight trains double as roller doasrers. Whee!

Yeah sure. That why their is constant derailment.

The constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.

That makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.

Have you seen John Oliver lately? Please go watch infoedutainment materials first.

You have to understand how profits in the rail sector work.

Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents.

The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments.

There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)

Yeah and I'm sure they are paying for all the police, firefighter, cleanup and all the other issues caused. And they don't have to really pay for delay on Amtrak lines either.

They are systematically devaluing vital infrastructure to increase short term profit and have done the bare minimum of investment. Systematically devaluing vital infrastructure in the country.

For the US not to treat the railroads as a strategic infrastructure is borderline insane.

Yes and in Europe nobody cares about money or profit. That's why there is constant derailment there too. Ohhh wait.

There are a huge amount of accidents that have to do with bad infrastructure maintenance and bad signaling.

> if you operate the trains that way.

Yes, if you have badly maintained infrastructure and you run badly maintained trains on it, its gone cause issue.

The US has no passenger network. It's all freight rail. Passenger trains run on the freight network (and freight always get priority).

Amtrak in the northeast corridor is Amtrak owned track

Which is basically the only one in the entire country.

Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.

Untrue. Amtrak has an entire system https://ontheworldmap.com/usa/amtrak-system-map.jpg

What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Isn’t that a map of Amtrak routes? That’s different from a map of dedicated passenger rail, which is what I was referring to.

Brightline in Florida just started service between Orlando and Miami, with plans to expand to Tampa.

It is not in excellent shape. It is riding the coattails of investments made a century ago, optimizing profits through consolidation, relentless squeezing of costs, and minimal investment in growth. Freight rail companies have constantly reduced routes and cargo types while increasing latency, discarding just about everything in order to focus on low-cost bulk transportation of extremely high-tonnage regular loads like coal and grain, while becoming more and more uncompetitive and impractical for transportation of flexible or timely loads like containers, refrigerated products, and manufactured goods. The freight trains have meanwhile gotten longer and slower, and overgrown the rails that they run on. American freight rail is eating its seed corn without investing in the long term. It remains efficient at transporting the bulk goods that it is currently handling, but it's far below what freight rail's potential should be, or perhaps even what it once was. Trucking has taken up the difference, but that's not because trucks are better-suited to such jobs. It's because the highway investments are paid for by the government, and railway investments are not.

At the same time the infrastructure and their rolling stock is in horrible shape and in desperate need of upgrades and basic maintenance. Anybody who has ever taken an Amtrak knows all to well the hour long delays experienced because of a broken down freight train holding up the tracks further up. And those are on the shared tracks which are supposedly better maintained, I can only imagine how things are on the rest of the system.

Have you seen John Oliver lately? Here you go. https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY

You would want put in pure electric rail, since you don’t want to ventilate it to handle diesel fumes from the hybrid electric diesel turbine engines so common in the USA. Since the USA’s rail system is barely electrified at all, it would be a huge undertaking.

If you don't want to ventilate, it would likely need to be non-contact electric rail, unless you want the tunnels to have extremely high concentrations of ozone. The arcs from electric contact catenaries produce ozone, which is fine outdoors because of immediate dissipation and short half-life. Put it in a tunnel and you either have to invest in ventilation (what most subway systems do), or mitigation (via contactless power delivery, likely induction).

There are lots of tunnels that do electric rail in Europe and China. Even that very long one in Switzerland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

I think it is using overhead wires.

Yes, and that tunnel has massive ventilation systems, not just for emergencies like fires too. Fun trivia: the tunnel is so deep that without ventilation the temperature in it would be 40 centigrade.

It does, but the ventilation is still not designed for diesels. I guess we are just discussing boring, in that case, electric something is required, maybe battery would work out better than overhead or below lines. Or maybe the only way to do this right without any ventilation is via supercooled magnets or air pressure.

As I said earlier though, the problem with batteries is they're a PITA to extinguish if they catch fire and you don't want to have that problem deep underground unless you plan to flood entire parts of the tunnel (which brings its own problems not even considering cleanup itself).

As any emergency worker will tell you, the problem with batteries compared to ICE engines is that if the battery is on fire it doesn't just stop once you extinguish it. You need to keep at it until it has cooled down sufficiently to prevent spontaneous reignition and that takes a while. Plus the entire time it burns it generates large amounts of toxic fumes.

Compare that to an electric line that just needs to transmit electricity and just stops if you shut it off. Yeah, ozone accumulation is a problem but so is heat so you'll need some venting anyway (plus you probably want the air in the tunnels to be breathable because we're humans after all).

If they did the whole vacuum tube thing, you’d want to sealed anyways, and maybe propel it using maglev, although I’m not sure what the heat properties are of that. I’m guessing they have to expend energy to keep the magnets cool anyways.

Interestingly enough, even if you don’t have any arcing you still need to ventilate because there’s nowhere for heat to go, and eventually running enough trains over many years heats up the ground.

Seattle has some underground light rail tunnels that are shared with buses

That was a horrible hack that was understood at the time to be unworkable. Much ink was spilled in The Stranger about it.

The Downtown transit tunnel (better known as the Bus tunnel). It was built for both buses and light rail, however it only hosted buses for the two decades of operation. Shared buses and trains only lasted for 10 years. A couple of years ago the buses were kicked out of the tunnel and it only services light rail now.

To my knowledge it has never serviced freight, only transit.

I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne...

> I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept.

Go through the Bus tunnel and Ride the SLUT.[1]

[1] South Lake Union Transit. I presume all the paraphernalia around 'ride the slut' is semi-official at best.

Used to be, not anymore

I really wish the link stopped at the old 9th Ave stop to connect with busses

Less now that I've moved out of premiere on line, but still

Or you know, build like a normal as train along side the highway.

SSSH! Stop making sense doing things the easy, conventional, cost-efficient way. It must be completely new, expensive, unproven, and different!

I suggested this to my US Representative, but I'm pretty sure he's a Lich, so it didn't go anywhere. I think the tunnel thing might be more his style: dungeony.

That sounds like railroads but worse. What's the advantage? Tunneling is incredibly expensive to do, yet you're proposing it in a situation where it'd need enough coverage so as to ban large freight transport over roads.

Not a compelling reason but it’s probably harder to steal a lot of copper or cargo in a tunnel.

I’m not arguing with you here but it would be interesting to know what about tunnelling is fundamentally expensive.

Things I can think of: it is slow, so you burn through a lot of wages. To compare with road building the only major road I can think of, built in my lifetime, was the M40. It is 90 miles long and took 4 years to build but I don’t know what the cost was. The channel tunnel is much smaller than a freeway — two train tunnels and an escape tunnel in between. It is 30 miles long, took 6 years to build, for £9bn at the time.

Tunnelling also must require a lot of energy. What it probably doesn’t lean heavily into, in terms of cost, is either compulsory purchasing of the majority of the route or the political consultation and planning process. Those were both a huge deal when building a motorway through the Oxfordshire countryside.

You could calculate the cost to tunnel under one linear mile at 40 ft diameter and then realize that whatever number you got, it is the cheap part because you haven’t reinforced, drained, ventilated, or surfaced the tunnel.

This doesn’t require a discussion to figure out. You just have to mentally walk through the process and do some back of the envelope math.

It's even easier than walking through that. Just Google the costs per mile of a typical subway line extension. There's a reason subterranean rails only makes when land costs are at a premium.

Even then most subways would be better as elevated rail

That adds a huge amount of clutter to the surface, and is very noisy for anyone nearby.

The most expensive parts of tunnels are where you come to the surface. The Channel Tunnel is cheap in that regards because there is countryside on either end and no exits in the middle.

Designing a high capacity train station or highway exit in the middle of a city is quite expensive.

What? The chunnel cost £26 billion in (2023 equivalent), and is 31 miles long. That's nearly a billion a mile. This is by no means cheap (yes yes cheap is a comparative term), tunnelling is absurdly expensive and not realistic.

It's impossible to make the case for thousands of miles of underground tunnels that will add no benefit (what happens when something goes wrong? you can't simply overtake when something inevitably goes wrong (three train derailments per day in the US), it's underground so it's hard to access / fix problems etc etc.

It's a foolish, expensive idea, when the US struggles to take care of it's own railway systems.

The more modern tunnel project in Seattle, USA would be useful to compare (instead of the Chunnel).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Route_99_tunnel

London's Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) is probably a better example of the cost of a modern tunnelling project (at scale)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

Keep in mind it also has to navigate its way around what’s under London which is a lot more complex than most places, considering it’s full of tunnels, Victorian sewers and mass burial pits.

Less issues if there’s little down there to begin with. Although personally I don’t see why America can’t just build a train like a normal country.

Indeed, if there are administrative overheads of constructing in built up areas then it would be important to compare with a major highway building project also done in or near a built up area.

I’m still left wondering though, in the open countryside, what the complexity (and cost) comparison is between laying down a mile of freeway and boring out a mile of tunnel. It feels like tunnelling is hard and complicated, but so too is making millions of magic coloured tiles that are all connected to each other so we can see each others cats and, very rarely, make phone calls.

A road is just 2d tunnel.

The one advantage I can think of is no weather to deal with like snow/ice.

Perhaps not no weather--water intrusion/management will still matter.

Also as a practical matter, a lot of systems stop running to discourage traveling; the underground may be safe but you still have to travel on the surface to your final destination

Subways work well, but I have a hard time seeing people travel long distances such as between metro areas knowing their entire journey would be underground.

Maybe people would get used to it. I don’t know.

I was only thinking of freight really since it doesn’t matter.

There are two areas where such tunnels make sense. You are either going underwater or you are going through mountain. That is you need to it to go through an obstacle.

For rest, over ground or above ground is preferred.

Is this a problem for rail? Afaik they just put some special thing in the front of the train to clean up the snow

There's not.

Tunnels probably only make sense in cities, not wide open rural spaces.

Right of way acquisition is still one of the most expensive and time consuming parts of constructing new railways though.

Don't worry, once you factor in tunneling expenses it won't be!

Its away from weather and extreme temp changes.

Its super common in Australia for railways to shut down due to warping of the rails from heat.

I'm not sure, but maybe it's just a problem of their design? There are many countries where rail works fine even during summer

Some advantages:

- no impact on environment, birds, bugs, animals, trees, etc...

- can use surface land for other things

- no weather exposure

> - no impact on environment,

It requires tons of concrete, which causes lots of CO2.

Also might require ground water control, which might impact lakes etc. nearby.

Tunnels often are still beneficial, but it's not like there is no impact.

Why go underground (expensive 3rd dimension down) when we have the whole 3rd dimension up almost unused? The freight can be trucked by large Zeppelins for example (and electric at that with the most of the energy generated by the solar panels covering the upper surface of the Zeppelin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017937). The issues are pure engineering ones. These freight Zeppelins can be fully automated, flying around any densely populated places.

Just shoot durable goods around with a railgun.

A train car carries about a kiloton of cargo. How many zeppelins would that take?

Edit: Actually, I can't count. Only a few hundred thousand pounds. That's still probably a bunch of zeppelinworths though.

Hinderburg-like at 100 ton itself can carry about 120 ton payload, ie. payload of 2 train cars.

And where does one dock this massive beast in a city with controlled airspace?

In a distribution center outside of the city the cargo is transferred onto local electric Amazon/UPS/etc. delivery trucks/vans.

So, the equivalent of a 100 car freight train would be a 50 Hindenburg zeppelin fleet?

It's actually fairly easy logistically imo

Design the Zeppelin for literal tons of ballast, trade out sandbags/dirtbags for product or waste on docking, andaybe add an aerodynamic shield if you don't care about speed as much

We already sacrifice significant speed for boats, but I grant they're several orders of magnitude better at balancing buoyancy with cargo given they flot in the water rather than atmosphere

That cannot operate in wind or inclement weather.

Why do people keep trying to invent more expensive, less traffic dense railroads. Did they stop teaching arithmetic in school?

Because a controversial centibillionaire didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation and proclaimed it to be so. Also, people hate people like Thunderf00t who tear down dumb ideas that people desperately want to believe in because feelings and tribal toxic positivity > logic.

Hectobillionaire, “centi-“ means 1/100

"Centi-" as a prefix can mean 100, though metric use is more common.

For example, "centipede" nominally means 100 feet, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede says "Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number."

Centibillionaire is the obvious extension of centimillionaire, and "centimillionaire" has been around for a long time. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-ch... shows a use in 1883, explicitly referencing $100,000,000 of Vanderbilt capital.

(A Google Books search finds two other uses of centimillionaire in the 1800s.)

Another old word using centi- to mean 100 is "centimillennium", for 100 thousand years. Here is an 1882 use: https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/m... and Wiktionary adds several more recent uses at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium .

> didn't do the math on 0 atm tube transportation

I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it?

Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough.

It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.

The more I see how shitty developers are about recognizing prior art the more I realize why so many planners are shitty about recognizing prior art

Being intelligent yet humble isn't mutually exclusive, but I see a lot of elitism in that 'oh I have this concept which must be totally novel and I'm gonna implement it now' with engineering at large before we all start laughing at their inevitable failures from things they could have learned in the past. Crypto is cool, even cryptocurrency. 99.9% of people in the space though have no idea what they're doing with it. I still think it could be useful for voting and/or DNS for distributed consensus, the cryptocurrency aspect could be improved and already is a better backend imo than our batched out wire transfers with traditional banking (but it lags well behind credit cards or cash for point of sale transactions), and hell merkel trees are supremely useful already for supply chain or ex version control, but the hype and path of crypto currencies is an embarrassment in light of history.

Recent examples:

- mastodon and the fediverse in relation to the threads backlash

- cryptocurrency markets and the desire for regulation for when things go wrong (someone stole my coinz! My smart contract was exploited! My exchange was hacked! Fraud!)... Like it was speed running what the Netherlands+UK+us faced over 400 years in a period of 4 years

- any libertarian when they start to run their own government (sorry grandpa)

-- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

-- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project

> railroads

Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power.

So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.

You have, once again, described an expensive and bad train.

TODIL cargo ships are slightly cheaper to operate than good trains.

I still haven't seen the math to prove ground effect aircraft are less efficient than cargo ships, but I suppose it's true or it would've been done already.

But why? In the US we have so much room it just makes sense to lay more surface rail, which we already don’t seem to be able to do efficiently.

I like the idea but why underground? Why not above it so they can be easier serviced and managed. Also it makes repairs in case of incidents lots easier. Also we could stick multiple trucks together to safe space and make then run at a more similar speed. We could also remove the need for each container to have its own pulling engine, lets put a strong one at the front.

I just invented trains again didnt I? Whatever you do, you always end up with trains