Very, very ambitions project. I doubt it would succeed, even if a big corporation tried it.
Agreed. It's one hell of a long shot.
- Is this actually a problem? How much money can a Wall-Mart store save by using your system instead of their current system?
The construction will cost A LOT, but once it's running, the following issues will be eliminated:
High cost of gas
trucking taxes (heavy trucks ruin highways, and thus have to pay extra taxes)
truck driver salaries and benefits
most maintenance costs (there are two moving parts on this whole system)
issues with traffic congestion and driver fatigue, with this thing being able to send stuff 24/7
waiting to fully load a truck before sending it out so as not to waste space
100 mile trip will take 20 minutes instead of 1 hour 50 minutes.
The costs for running this thing is essentially just the electricity to move frictionless aerodynamic platforms around. So, initial cost will be HUGE ($500mil to $1bil for 100 miles of track), but once the infrastructure is built, it'll be cheaper than anything else available by a longshot.
- Getting approval for this from governments will be a nightmare, especially with automated vehicles. Every town you have to go through will object to your rails.
My hope is to ask to use the empty space between highways to build the rails, and push this as "green technology" that will help reduce traffic. There will no doubt be resistance, but hopefully more people will support it due to those two aspects. Also, regarding automation, the automaton of the trains is literally physically built into the tracks. To make the train move faster, track components are built a bit further apart, and to make it slow down, they are built closer together. There is nothing to control, and nothing to fail, and if one of the trains stops on the tracks, it will short out the entire system, causing all the trains to stop until they are manually restarted. Also, the rails will be enclosed in cages to keep out people and animals. It will require a lot of explanation and marketing to get people to accept this though.
- Why hasn't anyone done this already if it's so good?
There are now three types of maglev systems out there, the German electromagnetic one (currently built in Shanghai), Japanese superconducting one, and this one. The other two require sophisticated electronics to keep them stable, thus they weigh A LOT, and cost a lot, too (Shanghai one is about $40mil per mile). The one I want to use is brand new, and was only finished being designed a few years ago. We just got the patent in November. So, in sort, all he previously known maglev systems were prohibitively expensive and complicated.
- Your scheme is more like traditional rail than road transport. But traditional rail traffic has been declining (AFAIK). If businesses decreasingly value traditional rail's improved economy and speed, your system may not appeal to them.
Agreed. Competing with traditional rail, or eve a modified smaller version of one, will be a challenge. The main differences between my system and traditional rail is much greater speed (350mph vs 60mph), and each train car being self powered as opposed to a single engine pulling as much as it can. My thought is that the huge speed and service-on-demand will be the thing that sets it apart, allowing you to stick a package on a train in one location, and have it bounce around the "hubs" at great speeds, transporting just that one package quickly over great distances. Traditional rail is not able to do this at all due to heavily relying on scheduled transportation and bundling of as much cargo as possible, and trucking is only able to do this slowly and at great cost, by having a separate truck deliver just the one package.