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Vacuum Assist Transport System | |||||||||||||||||
This might be way out there but I’ll call it a quick transport system to move vehicles from one portion of the country to the other. Let’s say you are somewhere in Ohio and you needed to get to Nevada in a short amount of time, you would go to the nearest transport terminal, board and enjoy the ride. How would it work? Glad you ask. The system would work with the same principal as the bank teller vacuum document tubes except on a grander scale. Large enough to drive your car into, the tube would feature a transport tube, what actually moves inside the vacuum tube and the passenger compartment, the part which you and your car would be inside of. The passenger compartment portion would be of course air enriched, due the vacuum system. This system could be setup to move ten, twenty or more compartments at a time to a certain location like a train or one at a time. The system will have exit sites that would take you off onto a side tube at the location you want. A side gull wing style door on the vacuum tube would open and your compartment would slide out sideways. Then the end would open and you drive off. The ideal of this is to move you closer to your destination faster without driving a long distance with the convenience of having your car with you to finish your journey. Like I said, this is way out there and probably expensive. Or, is there a possibility of using our present day railway system to carry our vehicles to our destination at a very quick rate? Just think about it, a couple of hours across the country instead of a couple of days in your own vehicle.
Michael, May 01 2004
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Lots of people have been working on this sort of thing for decades Michael (though web searches don't provide many results).
Some of the more creative plans include a vacuum line running under the Atlantic ocean, and using the Vacuum of outer space to launch vehicles into orbit.
Re transporting your car on a train while you ride the same train: They have been doing this in the U.S. for ~33 years; it's called the Auto-Train. It only runs from the outskirts of Washington, DC to Orlando, FL. It was originally a private company but now is run by Amtrak. I have thought for years that they should run this service to more places. People really want to have their own car at their destination. This is one of several things that causes people to drive 1000 miles or more, when it would be much faster to fly and sometimes even the train is faster. Renting a car is a hassle and it's becoming more of a hassle every year as car rental companies make things more complicated. And as controls on cars get more complicated, such that it may take an hour just to figure out all the controls on an unfamiliar car. One thing that is discouraging Amtrak from expanding the Auto-Train service (besides the fact that they are too financially strapped to do almost any expansion of service at the moment) is that the facilities for loading and unloading cars at each end are very expensive.
Interesting, I did not know they already have this in place. Well like they say, everything has already been invented, now just rearrange it. hhmmm ... So I guess we need to concentrate on the loading and unloading vehicles easier and without unhooking the train cars, like the train pulls along side a dock and a side door on the train car opens and your car is unloaded side ways by a conveyor. hhmmm
Michael, the standard engineering term for this sort of the thing is a "capsule pipeline".
I think this a great idea. I had a similar idea, except for freight transportation. This would reduce the number of trucks on public highways. Of course, a packaging system would have to be used which could conform to any shape and fragility of the item(s) being shipped. Distribution tubes would be put under post offices, Fed Ex, UPS stores, etc. as exit sites.
cost prohibitive.
See thsi photo, or do a Google picture-search on Rollende Landstrasse.