Anonymous asked:
Why don't you just have a ramps on the ends of the trains with tracks that go along the tops of the trains so instead of crashing into each other when theyre on the same track one can just go over the other?
amtrak-official answered:
It would slow down the train to a massive degree and probably also damage the engines from having to carry the weight of another train
also, standard railcars are extremely limited in the level of incline they can handle because at a high enough angle (and it's a surprisingly low angle actually because steel on steel has a pretty low friction coefficient) the downward force of gravity no longer provides a high enough normal force for the static friction between the wheels and the rail to be greater than the force of propulsion from the engines, and the wheels would slip, leaving the train at the mercy of inertia rather than locomotion. In order for a moving ramp to have a low enough grade that a train can use it, it would have to be extremely long (for a train 14.5 feet tall, a ramp at a 1° incline would have be 1.9 miles long, minimum), and more importantly, these sorts of ramps would require a complete overhaul of the entire railroad because they would add to the grade of the tracks that are already there (if a train is rated for a 3° incline and there's a section of track with a 2.7° incline, the train can go on that track, but if there's a 1° incline mobile train ramp on that same stretch of track, now it's a 3.7° incline and the train can't locomote), so we would have to engineer lower grade tracks all across the continent just to accommodate the possibility of these ramps being in use, and at that point it is legitimately cheaper to just build a second set of tracks every now and again so that trains can move out of each other's ways when necessary
Thank you, this has seriously helped to put into words the flaws of this idea and was just a fascinating read through in all honesty
