Efficiency is NOT MPG

[GasSavers_Howard]

Originally Posted by Fuel Miser

Moving freight by rail is 3 times more fuel efficient than moving freight on the highway. Trains can move a ton of freight nearly 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel.
http://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-c...el-efficiency/

A ship is even more efficient. The rail system as it exists is grossly inefficient for anything other than unit trains, and needs a major rethink. I have devised a system that would be massively larger, and would NOT start and stop, allowing cars to be cut in and out of a larger train on the go, as well as allowing freight containers to be moved easily and rapidly on and off a moving train. Eliminate the stops, and for both freight and passengers, rail quickly begins to make lots of sense. I even devised a system which would allow traffic in opposite directions on the same mainline by using "time windows", and sidings that did not require stopping and switching...Trains times to hit a "pass point" at the same time so they could blow by each other without ever slowing down. Parallel track segments with synchronized loader cars would allow freight and passengers to be embarked and debarked seamlessly from a train moving 50 mph or so......... There is a lot that could be done to improve rail. The bottle neck in public transportation is and has always been the need to stop at short intervals. Eliminate the starting and stopping of an entire load just to remove some freight or some passengers, and you not only save fuel, but save time. On light passenger rail, it appears that nobody has yet realized how simply this could be done... a "merge rail" with a loader car, which falls in behind the main train, and couples up briefly, allowing passengers to walk on and off. If you are getting off, you get on the loader for the station before the one you want off at, and the loaders advance one station with each cycle....... simple.... You get on the loader, and walk onto the main train...... walk from the main train onto the loader which then stops at the station.......the train never stops. In high stop density areas, the loader might be picking up passengers at half a dozen stops, and dropping them off at half a dozen stops, the main train just blasting along the full distance, so if you are going the full 100 miles for example, you never stop except during a brief period at each end of your route. It's dead simple..... a "no brainer", so why isn't it being done? This sort of thing would greatly improve the willingness to use public transportation. A properly designed shuttle bus, could even do neighborhood pickup / dropoff, and interface with light passenger rail with a bit of imagination.

Howard