Still can't find explicit rules for anything but the locomotives (whether steam or grav) and a crappy trailer/towing rule that's not applicable for railways, really. Am I missing it - as in I can't see the words for the trees?(!?) (or was it in GURPS?)
Still need to maintain tracks and right of ways. Grav-trains do not.
All of these are considered "light rail". Heavy Rail, is the 100+ cars of freight per train travelling between cities.
Why use an elevated train to go between arcologies instead of a grav-train? A grav-train can depart and enter an arcology at any level. No other train can do that. Trees or terrain in your path? No worries, you cruise over it. None of the other trains can do that.
This is only because the US is stupid and corrupt. (speaking as an American) Our infrastructure hasn't been upgraded properly in over 80 years. The last major infrastructure push in the US, Eisenhower was President.
A fusion powered maglev would not be 4 TL's behind an average colony. Sometimes it makes sense to have a set course with a dependable schedule. Sometimes a flock of grav-crates is logical. Just like some worlds can only build Traveller 2300 style orbital shuttles to move goods to a space station.
i THINK you're looking at heavy ground vehicle page 14.
Must be yet another version, because in my hard copies of both Supplement 5: Civilian Vehicles and Supplement: 6 Military Vehicles, those pages are all about weapons and weapon mounts.
Correct. Thank you.
To Me this is a Mag-lev train, not a Grav-train. Grav propulsion uses the Flyer (Grav) skill. Mag-lev trains would not.
Thanks, that clears up some confusion on my part.
Ah... I guess I never got the replacement book.
I had the same problem with having the wrong HG book. lol
Well, I suppose we can argue about what is heavy rail and what is light rail in order to try to exclude light rail from the discussion for whatever reason, but the distinction is kind of arbitrary. And the reason to have tracks is that the train stays on them better that way; there are other reasons depending, but the point is there are reasons. Flying trains could well be a thing, but they would work more like a combination of trucks and airplanes and have a slightly different use case (though overlapping)
I never included light rail in the discussion, and I am the one who started the thread. I have only ever been talking about shipping heavy freight over continental and intercontinental distances. Everyone else brought up the stupid light rail crap.
Same reason why we still use barges and ships today - water is the cheapest form of transport, then rail, then road, then air. Each has a role / niche to play. Most likely on higher tech worlds you won't see rail lines used for longer-range transport for people since they are the most time-sensitive cargo and they would go by grav vehicle. But if you are shipping 10,000 rail cars of grain then why bother with the expense of a grav lifter when you can transport it cheaper using rail?
The CA high-speed rail project isn't a good comparison. If you are truly curious about costs look at the available info for Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern or the other publicly-traded North American railways. They are private entities that spend billions on their infrastructure every year and are profitable.
