Rail lines on high TL worlds?

[Nelphine]

Right. So while maintenance costs don't get down by tl in traveller, up front costs do. Maintenance is then a percentage of up front costs.

So, we can assume a 30% reduction in those. We can also assume it will be on the low end, not the high end due to higher tl. So let's call it 25k per mile per year.

For cost of the engine, again, we need to go by what traveller has. Looking at vehicle handbook, we'd need to design 3 things. A grav car that's part of the train, an engine, and a train car.

If we assume both you and previous poster are correct, then we get a train engine of say 2 million. A train car of 150k. And a grav car of 50 million.

Assume a train or grav of 50 cars.

Train needs 2 engines for 50 cars, so a total cost of 11.2 million, with an annual maintenance of 12k per year.

Grav costs 2,500,000,000 (2.5 billion) and has an annual maintenance of 2.5 million.

So the train is cheaper (annually) if it has less than 1000 miles of tracks.

So a 50 car train is better than 50 car grav if they need to go less than 1000 miles (per train). Every additional 50 cars you need doubles the length of the track you can support for the same cost.

NOTE: I haven't looked at vehicle handbook. The numbers could be off. But it gives you a concept of how to determine when train is better than grav.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Real world example of how infrastructure needs to accommodate weather.

Buses (also known as light rail) can run in most weather up to winds of 35 mph safely. Steady wind or gusts over that you have to take it off the roads.

Fixed rail (Monorail or dual track) can run in everything plus winds up to 55 mph.

Airports get shut down at 35 mph steady winds.

That is why in Florida the railways are set to evacuate people and not buses.

Yay for Tri-Rail! lol

 

[MasterGwydion]

Right. So while maintenance costs don't get down by tl in traveller, up front costs do. Maintenance is then a percentage of up front costs.

So, we can assume a 30% reduction in those. We can also assume it will be on the low end, not the high end due to higher tl. So let's call it 25k per mile per year.

For cost of the engine, again, we need to go by what traveller has. Looking at vehicle handbook, we'd need to design 3 things. A grav car that's part of the train, an engine, and a train car.

If we assume both you and previous poster are correct, then we get a train engine of say 2 million. A train car of 150k. And a grav car of 50 million.

Assume a train or grav of 50 cars.

Train needs 2 engines for 50 cars, so a total cost of 11.2 million, with an annual maintenance of 12k per year.

Grav costs 2,500,000,000 (2.5 billion) and has an annual maintenance of 2.5 million.

So the train is cheaper (annually) if it has less than 1000 miles of tracks.

So a 50 car train is better than 50 car grav if they need to go less than 1000 miles (per train). Every additional 50 cars you need doubles the length of the track you can support for the same cost.

NOTE: I haven't looked at vehicle handbook. The numbers could be off. But it gives you a concept of how to determine when train is better than grav.

2.5 BILLION for 50 cars? That can't be right. I can buy 54 Free Traders for that price. Your number must be wrong or whomever wrote the Vehicle Handbook was on crack. 166 Shuttles for the same price. That can't be right. With the Shuttles that is 10ktons of cargo.

 

[Nelphine]

Sure that's why I said we need to look. But even if I'm off by a factor of 10, that still means 50 grav cars are the same as 100 miles of track. So in a high pop world, where you might need thousands of cars, it would be very hard to argue that grav is better than train.

If I'm off by a factor of 100 (unlikely, as that would be cheaper than the train engine), then grav would be better than train even on very high pop worlds.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Sure that's why I said we need to look. But even if I'm off by a factor of 10, that still means 50 grav cars are the same as 100 miles of track. So in a high pop world, where you might need thousands of cars, it would be very hard to argue that grav is better than train.

Show your math. 100 miles of track costing 25k per mile per year for maintenance. divided by 0.001 times 13 months is 325 million credits to build every 100 miles of track. So even if you are only off by a factor of 10, which I doubt, 325 million is still way more than 250 million and that is only for 100 miles of track. Not getting very far on that. Grav goes planet-wide. Also, I have yet to see a supersonic land train, but grav-trains can be hypersonic. Faster delivery means more cargo delivered by less trains,

 

[Condottiere]

Two important questions that you would need to ask:

1. What is being transported?

2. How fast do you need to take it from point Ay to point Bee?

By my estimation, most transportation, regional and intercontinental, is likely by spacecraft, especially heavy freight.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Two important questions that you would need to ask:

1. What is being transported?

2. How fast do you need to take it from point Ay to point Bee?

By my estimation, most transportation regional and intercontinental is likely by spacecraft, especially heavy freight.

and that is done by grav? yes?

 

[Condottiere]

Which is what the manoeuvre drive is derived from.

But that's aerospace freight, not a train, levitating or not.

 

[Arkathan]

Semi ballistic mag-lev tunnels.
Catapult them to the desired fraction of escape velocity and slow them down at the other end.
Not recommended for tectonically active worlds. Also not recommended for shipping eggs.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Which is what the manoeuvre drive is derived from.

But that's aerospace freight, not a train, levitating or not.

Grav is grav isn't it? Or do all grav drives not have an acceleration number.

The higher your TL, the less distinction there is between things like planes, cars, and spaceplanes. Look at Grav-cars. Grav-trucks, etc. Hell, even the air raft can reach orbit, you'll just die without a Vacc Suit.

Look at Our current world. What is the difference between a semi-truck and a train? Semis can have multiple trailers. Both have a propulsion section and separate cargo sections. Trains are larger and carry more cargo, but also require rails, whereas semis just need roads. They are basically the same things just on different scales. They even move the same types of cargo and use the same cargo containers.

Air Freight does none of those things.

 

[Nelphine]

Show your math. 100 miles of track costing 25k per mile per year for maintenance. divided by 0.001 times 13 months is 325 million credits to build every 100 miles of track. So even if you are only off by a factor of 10, which I doubt, 325 million is still way more than 250 million and that is only for 100 miles of track. Not getting very far on that. Grav goes planet-wide. Also, I have yet to see a supersonic land train, but grav-trains can be hypersonic. Faster delivery means more cargo delivered by less trains,

There is a London train station that gets hundreds of trains through it, per day. (Best guess is between 200 and 500 trains, but its actually really hard to get concrete train schedules apparently).

Even if we assume the average is 10 cars per train (obviously freight will be way higher on average, but I can't tell easily how many are passenger vs freight), and even if we assume that they are all ultra short runs and every train goes through that station 4 times per day (this assumption is absurd, but I don't know an east way to get an accurate count of duplicates), that means that one station still has 500 - 1250 seperate cars going through it.

For one train station in one city of a high pop world.

I would arbitrarily say that you probably need 10 to the power of (population -4 +1d2-1d2) cars for a given world.

So on a pop A world, you would need 100,000 cars if they did virtually no transportation of any kind, up to 10,000,000 cars for a world that maxed it out.

And given how conservative my assumptions are, its possible the top end should be closer to 1,000,000,000 cars.

With my 'off by a factor of 10' assumption, that then means that making them all grav, is the same cost as 200,000 miles of track/20,000,000 miles/2,000,000,000 miles.

For comparison, there are ~160,000 miles of railroad track in the US. That would mean, if there are more than 80,000 cars active, then it's better to do so by train than by grav.

For further comparison, there were ~1,631,000 train cars active in North America in 2020.

Number of North American freight rail cars by type 2020| Statista

Despite their iconic status from so many U.S.

www.statista.com

 

[FreeTrav]

Consider that it may be administrative/regulatory rather than technological. There have been several prototypes of flying cars - not grav, aero - but even though we're a quarter-century past the year 2000, "where's my flying car" isn't happening - it takes a lot more 'school' time and practice, and the rules are much more rigorous, for flying a little single-engine-big-fan-on-the-front airplane (Cessna 172 or Piper Archer, for example) than it does to drive a road vehicle of equivalent power and passenger capacity. There's a safety perception, too - while motors (in either cars or airplanes) don't fail often, there's a bit more of a perception of danger and potential casualties if a plane (like the aforementioned Piper or Cessna, not a 727 or larger) falls out of the sky onto a building than there is if a car (NOT a truck) crashes into that same building at ground level.

Considering how most people perceive the other [idiot] drivers on the road, do you really want them flocking into the air like sparrows that have the attention span of particularly stupid... hey look! a squirrel!... dogs?

As regards "mass transportation" - Anstett, a bus and light-rail are two different things, although their niches overlap. A bus uses the same infrastructure as a car; light rail needs the construction of ... well, rails (and sometimes power distribution). It also tends to be "local" in scope; limited to a city and possibly its immediate suburbs. Heavy rail (what you called "fixed rail") is generally inter-city in scope, and the trains tend to be higher capacity (Using my area [NYC] for an example, each two-car "train" on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail has seats for 140 people, and can accommodate up to 250 additional standing. On the MTA and New Jersey Transit commuter services, each car of the (typically) 8-car trains has seats for 125 people, and can accommodate another 80-100 standing. Amtrak rolling stock is similar. A bus - city bus, school bus, commuter bus - typically has about 40 seats; city busses can probably handle another 60 standing; commuter busses only 40 standing, and school busses can handle 60 standing, but are not allowed to handle any by regulation.

In an evacuation, you want to not rely on there being electrical service for the trains, so HBLR isn't going to be available - and about 3/4 of MTA's rolling stock and about half of New Jersey Transit's will also not be available. Amtrak's non-Northeast Corridor services are all diesel, so will be available for an evacuation. When you need it, you can load up train after train and send them out at the closest intervals that the signal infrastructure will accommodate. Busses will be available; you can grab any sort of bus - school bus, commuter bus, city bus - and load people up and send them out of the city to wherever, at much closer intervals than trains. If, as seems common in the southern US, there are provisions for making both sides of a divided highway (like an Interstate highway) run the same direction in an emergency, your road infrastructure can get an amazing number of people out of an area affected by a disaster, for as long as said infrastructure is intact enough. Ditto the heavy rail infrastructure. You're not gonna be flying people out by the planeload; there won't be enough planes available, it takes longer to load them up and get them ready to move, and the airports are generally the first chunk of infrastructure that's closed down.

Now, let's look at grav. Unless you've got the reliability and perceived safety of the road - that is, you're not going to have a perceived higher level of damage or casualties from a grav car falling out of the sky than a road vehicle hitting the same building - you're going to have the same regulatory situation where licensing the grav car is going to be more complex and restricted than the road car. There's also the same look-a-squirrel problem when everyone has grav cars - and just like when there's an evacuation, the busses have to contend with all the idiot drivers in their little cars, the grav bus or grav train is going to have to contend with the same look-a-squirrel idiots. All in all, there's sound reasons for grav not to become a 'default' transport mode even when it's available.

 

[MasterGwydion]

There is a London train station that gets hundreds of trains through it, per day. (Best guess is between 200 and 500 trains, but its actually really hard to get concrete train schedules apparently).

Even if we assume the average is 10 cars per train (obviously freight will be way higher on average, but I can't tell easily how many are passenger vs freight), and even if we assume that they are all ultra short runs and every train goes through that station 4 times per day (this assumption is absurd, but I don't know an east way to get an accurate count of duplicates), that means that one station still has 500 - 1250 seperate cars going through it.

For one train station in one city of a high pop world.

I would arbitrarily say that you probably need 10 to the power of (population -5 +1d2-1d2) cars for a given world.

So on a pop A world, you would need 10,000 cars if they did virtually no transportation of any kind, up to 1,000,000 cars for a world that maxed it out.

And given how low my assumptions are, its possible the top end should be closer to 100,000,000 cars.

Okay... So, I just looked this up. You are talking about the London Subway. It says that there are 500 trains across its entire network and that about 100 of them are over 50 years old.

Latest TfL figures show the Tube reaching 4 million journeys per day

.

tfl.gov.uk

Please tell Me that you are not trying to compare a city subway system to a continental or global train system. That is like trying to compare a city taxi company to a national trucking company. For the record, the London Underground doesn't carry freight, only passengers.

 

[Nelphine]

No, I'm not talking about Subway. I'm talking about trains.

But I found better numbers for North America anyway, editted above.
And strictly, that's just freight apparently, not even passenger at all.
10 freight cars per 1 mile of track in NA.

 

[Nelphine]

total side tangent..

i don't know if you've ever seen them, but if you ever get a chance, you should visit a railway 'graveyard'. There was one near my grandparents. You'd be driving down the highway for about 15 minutes, and the entire 15 minutes, next to the highway, is nothing but old abandoned railway cars on a (now unused) portion of a railroad track. Like.. 20 or 25 kilometers of just old cars.

 

[MasterGwydion]

total side tangent..

i don't know if you've ever seen them, but if you ever get a chance, you should visit a railway 'graveyard'. There was one near my grandparents. You'd be driving down the highway for about 15 minutes, and the entire 15 minutes, next to the highway, is nothing but old abandoned railway cars on a (now unused) portion of a railroad track. Like.. 20 or 25 kilometers of just old cars.

I could get lost exploring in there for years! I would be in heaven!

 

[Nelphine]

I could get lost exploring in there for years! I would be in heaven!

Super dangerous though .Everything is rusted and damaged (and, I'm sure, all the local teenagers have picked through it hundreds of times)

 

[ottarrus]

Answering the OP here, there's a lot of good reasons to maintain an older technology. The Darrians maintain older systems as a backup for another disaster, for example. Sometimes a technology just works and people don't want to fix something that isn't broke.
The Third Imperium has 11,000 world and that means 11,000 societies with 11,000 ways of doing things. Some societies reject the rapid adoption of technology in a race of bigger /better /faster /more. They may not go all the way into the Vilani spectrum of actually retarding technology for the sake of social stability, but some world will definitely have a certain Luddite characteristic.
Consider power generation in Charted Space. Fusion power is clean, safe, and has no environmental or social costs. It simply works... it does its job with very little fuss and scales up to the point of powering entire civilizations. But if the Zhodani, with their highly organized society, or the Imperium, that lucratively rewards the successful, decided that antimatter was the way to go they could reach that plateau in a couple hundred years. But fusion works and thus far no civilization in Charted Space has felt the need to pursue other power systems. There's just no reason to.

 

[ottarrus]

I could get lost exploring in there for years! I would be in heaven!

We have such a thing here in Washington State. Website link below.

Northwest Railway Museum | Snoqualmie & North Bend, WA

Welcome to the Northwest Railway Museum where you can experience how the railroad changed everything. Explore events, visit us, and ride the train!

trainmuseum.org

 

[ottarrus]

Super dangerous though .Everything is rusted and damaged (and, I'm sure, all the local teenagers have picked through it hundreds of times)

The local teenagers weren't picking it for parts. They were trying to find intact boxcars to party in!