duorail passenger future?

[Anonymous]

This is an unpublished letter to a libertarian magazine, with a copy
of the equipment list from a 1967 GN timetable enclosed:

To the editor, Liberty:

Has Randal O'Toole the railfan emerged from his car culture closet?
("Can Trains Be Saved?" Liberty, April 2006) Not completely; let me
indulge my "foamer" (rail industry term for trivia obsessed railfans)
proclivities by pointing out the 1950s Empire Builder did not open
all non-revenue space to all passengers; the full-length "Great Dome"
was reserved for Pullman passengers. For more non-revenue space in
Amtrak's double-deck Superliners, let's put glassed-in observation
lounges in the "transition" cars (to single-deck level), allowing a
view over the top of the train as on beloved but now almost by-gone
Vista-Domes. Long-distance travel was marketed as entertainment as
far back as the late 1940s California Zephyr of glorious memory.

Not so trivial is citing some unnamed government source alleging
negligible subsidies for air and highway travel, as if they were
creations of a near free market.

Nor is asking the wrong question.

Can highways and airlines be saved? See what happens when the cheap
oil runs out in James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving
the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Although it
does not cite a single Austrian School source, it is surprisingly
insightful on currency matters and concludes that suburban sprawl is
the greatest misallocation of resources in human history, which will
not go on much longer.

Nor is expecting freight railroads to handle passenger trains, as if
rising traffic and shrinking plant had not obviated the rail
overcapacity problem a decade ago. The December 1975 TRAINS said the
traffic on the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac could be handled on
parallel I-95 without anyone noticing. In the November 2001 issue the
same author said truck congestion on the Interstates was the chief
source of complaints to the Virginia governor's office and the U.S.
Secretary of Transportation wondered if coastwise shipping was the
answer to rail and highway congestion.

Nor is expecting an antiquated technology, even of such blessed
memory, to meet future needs. The thumbnail area of contact between
wheel and rail might be a hallmark of efficiency for hauling coal and
grain. For passenger vehicles, however, it requires large, rigid
masses in constant impact, concentrated stresses, complicated,
expensive suspension and braking systems, and tank-like structures
with million pound buff and draft capability for safety on the main
line. For much higher speeds it requires entirely new, prohibitively
expensive and disruptive rights-of-way.

There is little more to a linear induction motor, however, than the
grade school science experiment in which the kid wraps a wire around
a nail and makes an electromagnet. Long used to move metals from
powders to ingots directly, without intervening machinery, under a
steel beam it can generate magnetic force both along the line of
travel and about ten times as much perpendicular to it. Thus it can
both propel and suspend a vehicle, to 1/10 g acceleration, before
knocking standingpassengers off their feet. Not pure maglev just yet,
the linear motor still needs caster (training?) wheels to maintain a
3/8" gap between motor and beam.

The overhead steel beam need only be supported by columns every
eighty feet or so. Thus the structure does not need another swath
through city or countryside. It need not disrupt near-by activity.
Thus it might go over the Interstates of the past half-century, much
straighter and more direct than rail routes of a century ago.

Making as much noise as an elevator, the vehicle can go as fast as
passengers can handle. Swinging like a pendulum around curves, it
might get away with the 1/8 g allowed for elevators. It might even be
a simple carriage for trucks and buses, making the system a sort of
High-Speed High-Occupancy Lane. Thus truckers need on pick up and
deliver, not take it over the road. Divide 150 or 200 mph into a
travel distance and see if the result competes with air travel.

Linear induction motors might even launch satellites. Mechanical
Engineering, Feb. 2000.

Figure you have several rotary induction motors around the house in
your blenders, fans, hot water pumps, old-fashioned clocks, etc.,
just in case the linear version still seems a bit exotic. Unlike
highly if sometimes subtly subsidized forms of transportation, they
should survive a transition to a truly free market.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

O'Toole had a previous article on everyone in New Orleans with a car
getting out. They did publish my letter reminding him of Houston,
Rita, and the 100 mile traffic jam, January 2006. I do have my
complaints about libertarians who do not properly follow through on
their own philosophy, in particular,descendi ng into socialistic car
culture.

[SR1457]

And the knee bone is connected to the leg bone., and the thigh bone to the etc.bone...

[al-in-chgo]

And airplanes don't have to pay property tax on the air!  They pay indirect tax thru landing spaces and (sometimes) having some control of the air terminal. 

 

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

I once had a passing acquaintance with the author of said unpublished letter.  He always struck me as being more attuned to the theoretical than the practical and philosophically was not too far from the various theories of Lyndon Larouche.

[tomikawaTT]

The new right-of-way for high speed conventional rail would be environmentally and socially disruptive, but an elevated linear-induction maglev monorail wouldn't be???

What has this guy been smoking?

Note, too, that his first major citation is of a gloom-and-doom prediction by an ivory tower theorist.  Right, Chicken Little!

Chuck