Daily Archives: May 30, 2016
Chicago South Hyperloop (No. 6 ) Now It Is Getting Clearer
We started out ahead of Hyperloop declaring the intent to build a passenger railroad from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. We had several intermediate stations along the way. Then along came Hyperloop. Not a railroad but a whole new concept! Things would be different! Big distances like San Francisco to Los Angeles. Freight. Why didn’t we think of that? Too used to seeing little UPS and FedEx trucks clogging highways.
Then we see this:
Hyperloop’s first priority is local runs, not Elon Musk’s S.F.-L.A. original idea
Rocketing commuters between Los Angeles and San Francisco isn’t the first run expected by top executives working on Elon Musk‘s hyperloop idea
Hyperloop One is planning to prove it can move freight first, and then people, through local tubes it hopes to build along existing routes, such as highways 101 or 280 from the South Bay to San Francisco.
“We don’t have to go 800 miles to add value with hyperloop,” Rob Lloyd, who became Hyperloop One CEO after leaving his job as Cisco Systems No. 2 executive last summer, told me in an interview for this week’s Silicon Valley Business Journal cover story.“We can go 40 miles and add a tremendous amount of value.”
Musk dreamed up hyperloop in 2012 as an alternative to the $60 billion-plus high-speed rail project that California officials approved.
“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?” he asked in a paper that elaborated on his idea the next year.
But Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One — perhaps the most advanced of the groups working to make Musk’s dream a reality — aren’t looking to compete directly with the high-speed rail proposed between the Bay Area and L.A.
“Everybody talks about L.A. to San Franscisco, but that isn’t the big story,” Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir Technologies who is a Hyperloop One investor and its vice-chairman, told me. “That’s exciting but what is 100 times more exciting is L.A. to L.A. and S.F. to S.F., East Bay to S.F., or North Bay or South Bay to S.F. What is much more exciting is a metropolitan impact.”
Hyperloop One did its first test run on a half-mile track it built in the desert north of Las Vegas on May 11. The test involved a 10-foot sled with a propulsion motor that went on a 2-second trip at about 116 miles per hour before it hit a pile of sand to slow it back down. It didn’t have any brakes yet.
Just saw another new article:
Futuristic chinese bus concept: the elevated bus rides high above the roadway allowing traffic to pass underneath.
Well, we have the idea to run down on the Interstate 65 median strip.
We are not so far off at all.
Two competing L.A. companies are developing a “hyperloop” to move people at 750 mph in a frictionless tube. Can it really work?
At a high-tech garage in West Hollywood a computerized robotic system ‘stacks’ cars for efficient use of parking space.
In Fillmore, a 1913 steam powered locomotive is still going strong giving passengers an authentic taste of classic railroad travel.
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1966 Poughkeepsie Train Wreck
I found this short video on You Tube on the train wreck on the Maybrook Line in Poughkeepsie in 1966. It is very grainy film.
http://www.youtube.com/v/QVFE–bum1A
The bigger wrecking crane (“derrick”) was the D-100 from New Haven. The smaller ones from Maybrook.
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TTC to open Leslie Barns streetcar maintenance facility
The Toronto Transit Commission officially open its Leslie Barns streetcar maintenance and storage facility.
The nearly 280,000-square-foot building features a “green” roof, a streetcar simulator training room, numerous storage tracks, a substation and a stormwater management pond. The facility has 30 streetcar service bays and will provide maintenance for TTC’s entire fleet of 204 streetcars.
The agency began operations at the new facility in November 2015.
The city, Ontario and Canadian governments funded the facility’s construction.
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Walk Bridge Failure Causes Railroad Delays
A mechanical failure left the Walk Bridge in Norwalk stuck open for hours and caused major delays for trains moving through the area, according to Metro-North and Amtrak.
Norwalk police say the drawbridge was stuck in an open position around 3 p.m. causing significant delays on Metro-North’s New Haven Line and slowing Amtrak trains between New York and New Haven. As of 5 p.m. the railroads had restored limited service, but significant delays of up to 90 minutes continued.
Around 10:30 p.m. Metro-North reported that train service had resumed to three of the four tracks over the Walk Bridge and delays were only expected to be around 20 minutes. Sunday service is expected to run on schedule.
This is not the first time a failure of the Walk Bridge caused issues for riders. In 2014 Gov. Dannel Malloy called a “crisis summit” after multiple service disruptions left commuters delayed for hours. After that, experts began formulating solutions to repair and eventually replace the bridge.
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John Escreet: Exception To The Rule
John Escreet admires the legacy of Paul Bley, Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor – his compositions are sometimes simple but significant pieces, sometimes full of notes, he doesn’t help our listening, contemporary sounds, a restless atmosphere demanding our total concentration.
Track Listing: Exception To The Rule; Redeye; Collapse; They Can See; Escape Hatch; Wide Open Spaces; Electrotherapy; The Water Is Tasting Worse; Restlessness; Wayne’s World.
Personnel: John Escreet: piano, keyboards; David Binney: alto saxophone, electronics; Eivind Opsvik: bass; Nasheet Waits: drums.
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Robots Making Supply Chain Inroads
Robots aren’t coming for our jobs, are they? In a recent survey, supply chain professionals see them having a big impact in the very near future, so it may be a good idea to keep working hard! On the Wall Street Journal site, Loretta Chao takes a look at the survey information and provides an opinion or two. Read her article HERE.
PenneyVanderbilt 