7mo ago

Monster 310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks

newatlas.com Monster 310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks

The Japanese government is planning to connect major cities with automated zero-emissions logistics links that can quietly and efficiently shift millions of tons of cargo, while getting tens of thousands of trucks off the road.

Fuck Cars @lemmy.world

variants @possumpat.io

7mo ago

article

Japan is inventing trains

newatlas.com /transport/cargo-conveyor-auto-logistics/

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26 comments

All animals tend towards reinventing crab, all transport solutions tend towards reinventing train

It's only real if it comes from the Conveyor region in southern France. Everything else is just sparkling trains.

Uh..trains anyone?

Hot new invention! Train.
- Nah. This is different. This is a train with many more points of failure. If any part of a conveyorbelt stops, the whole belt has to halt. And if they use self driving trucks, a failure in any one of the trucks can still cause a traffic jam.
  
  I did notice that upon actually reading the article XD
  It's actually just trucks but the entire road is the drivetrain and every truck is driving all the time. If that sounds like "better" to you, then you may be a techbro

Japan, you were supposed to deliver us to our train powered future, not leave us in Tesla tunnels.
- Actually seems like a good idea. I wonder how long will it take for construction cost to offset regular trucks, but it will get them off the road, and hopefully keep them out of sight.

So. A long cargo train?

Because this is somehow more convenient for everyone than building high speed railways?

This idea is so lazy they even used generative AI to create the concept art 😂

Tech bro: Trust me, this will work.
- It's basically a train. We have hundreds of years worth of proof that it'll work.
  
  But why are all these companies so obsessed with fucking pods.
  Just link the pods together. Have a real train. We know how trains work, we don’t know if these stupid pod things will have any pitfalls.

I see Factorio is popular in Japan as well.

Looks like the engineers at the Tokyo-Osaka prefectures have been playing too much Satisfactory.
To be fair, the idea is interesting, transporting cargo in a way that can be mostly automated is good. The problem is when any part of the automation fails for any reason, like a container getting stuck, things can pile up, fall off or get damaged in a number of ways.

Exactly how it'll do this is yet to be nailed down, but individual pallets will carry up to a ton of small cargo items, and they'll move without human interference from one end to the other.
Someone's been playing Factorio.
- Yeah, just gotta use some automatic inserters and splitters.

So a train of truck? trackless train?

Smart. I assume this will reuse the current tracks already used to run Shinkansen trains as they are replaced, which is fantastic.
- Why would they use Shinkansen tracks for something so unaerodynamic?
  
  They're rebuilding and replacing the aging train fleet and had a bunch of ideas of how to reuse the existing tracks without scrapping them. This might be an answer to that problem.

- That was the first thought that popped into my head too :)

26 comments