Revolution Among Innovations at InnoTrans 2018

The trade fair InnoTrans 2018 attracted attention of multiple major media. “Komsomolskaya Pravda in Russia”, one of the largest information portals at Runet wrote about one of the most unusual and impressive new products at this exhibition – high-speed SkyWay string transport.

Please read at the site kp.ru (in Russian) about why the transport market is waiting today for really bright innovations and what the new logistics will look like, when SkyWay transport will spread as widely as motor-roads.

High-Speed SkyWay: Revolution Among Innovations at InnoTrans 2018

The largest exhibition of rail transport InnoTrans 2018 takes place from 19 to 21 September in Berlin. Above 3,000 companies from 60 countries of the world are exhibiting there. More than 140 world premieres are planned to showcase: trains, trams, monorails, cable ways and even buses moving on rails. There are many novelties in the field of specialized software, control systems, safety. All this is displayed under big-name brands: Alstom, Bombardier, Siemens, Hitachi and others. The goal is to show what the railways of the future will be.

As it was reported, “InnoTrans 2018 is held under the motto “Mobility: innovations – diversity – sustainability”. German Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer speaks about high requirements imposed on the industry: “We want to surprise the passengers of railways. The railway industry can make a huge contribution to this with its future-oriented innovations. You can "feel" these exciting technologies first-hand at InnoTrans. Our goal is to turn the railroad into the most eco-friendly mode of transport in the digital society, and to make train journeys a human passion.”

All this is spectacular and well-intentioned. However, it remains unclear what relation to innovations, the reference to which lies in the very name InnoTrans, do railways have? It all looks like a show of dinosaurs against the background of modern trends towards the development of unmanned electric vehicles, flying taxis, sharing mobility and so on. Trains and roads for them are known since the XIX century and have hardly changed since then. The addition of Wi-Fi and other electronic chips do not remove the knocking of wheels and the railroad ballast. This exhibition could have become another variation on the theme “rails-rails, sleepers-sleepers” without one premiere among all the other ones offering a radical transformation of the sector – a revolution among innovations.

A new car: rail-based?

The fact that the car has pushed aside the railway long ago is not a secret to everybody. The reason for this is quite evident – the car has offered a more convenient and flexible mode of transportation, from door to door, at any time, to any place. Moreover, the car from a certain point has become affordable to the majority of people. A train? Large, loud, expensive and capable of transporting only from station to station – no. Besides, railway transport is noisy, and the roads for it are of the same stable configuration, which does not allow it to be as flexible as automobile transport, where there are highways, urban and country roads, asphalted, gravel or sandy roads, each one with its own cost and purpose of use.

But the railway did not disappear at all. It has become firmly established in its niche and the reason for it is its affordability due to its engineering simplicity and efficiency. For example, the efficiency factor of a railway steel wheel reaches 99.8%. With only two kilograms of force, a trolley weighing one ton can be moved along the rail, which is unthinkable when using a pneumatic tire rolling along the asphalt. Even wooden rails with wooden wheels in this respect are significantly more advantageous, and that’s why they began to be used for transportation of goods long before the appearance of locomotives, since the VI century BC. In the middle of the XIX century, horse-drawn trams, harnessed by one or several horses, could easily manage transportation of a large number of passengers in major cities. Thanks to this and other features, rail transport still offers some of the lowest tariffs for transportation.

Attempts to combine the benefits of railway and motor-road transport eliminating the shortcomings of each of them were undertaken from the very beginning of this whole story. Rail cars (locomobiles), as well as rail buses (rail motor cars) and similar monsters in various layouts are used everywhere to this day. The former ones are used for inspection trips, repair work, military operations and so on. The latter are mainly used for servicing passengers on lines with low traffic, as well as for some other purposes. For example, motor vehicles are used to service high-ranking officials in Ukraine.

Rail cars and buses have many additional benefits. For example, some of them can run both on rails and on motor-road between different sections of a railway. However, all this is suitable only in a few cases and it is not capable to develop into a separate mode of transport in principle. The result is that no matter how you adapt the car to railroad tracks, it turns out neither a car nor a train – neither fish nor flesh. Not saying anything about attempts to adapt the locomotive to motor-roads. However, what if we change the railways themselves in such a way that the rails remain, but they could be laid to any place, in different variations, at a cost up to the cost of the simplest country road? In theory, you could not wish for anything better. In practice, this is exactly what SkyWay developers proposed and implemented delivering their own version of the locomobile and their own version of rails for it to InnoTrans.

High-speed SkyWay rail car

The vehicle shown at InnoTrans 2018 is something fundamentally new in the world of rail transport. It can accelerate up to 500 kilometers per hour, while consuming only 0.93 kilograms of fuel per passenger per 100-kilometer distance, which is unprecedentedly little. At 100 km/h speed, this figure will be only 0.105 kilograms. This is achieved due to the high efficiency of “steel wheel – steel rail” system, as well as the fact that this pod runs along an overpass. Due to this, and also due to the unique shape of the vehicle, the developers managed to achieve the indicator Cx = 0.06, which is close to the theoretical limit. The control of high-speed SkyWay is fully automatic, due to which it is possible to provide a minimum safe traffic interval of 2 seconds. Performance at such parameters can exceed 200 thousand passengers a day. Thanks to the high efficiency, travel fare can be several times less than in modern high-speed routes, not to mention airplanes.

Video presentation of high-speed transport: 

New rails: string-based?

The cost of laying a railroad consists mostly of the cost to erect the ballast. Even tramways require a large amount of earthwork. Compared with cutting down of a clearing, and sometimes just flattening the ground for car passing, this is always more expensive. Is it possible to lay rails without earthwork? Yes, it is – on supports, but this alone will not solve the problem. Supports will have to be set at a small interval for conventional rails, and therefore it would be expensive again. The option is to stretch rails in the longitudinal direction, thereby providing the necessary bearing capacity and the possibility to install supports at spans of up to 5 kilometers. Clearings at a height may be not required at all and it turns out that a track can be a single rail and two supports for five kilometers. Will it be more expensive than the most inexpensive car option? Obviously not. Will this be a railway in the usual sense? Obviously, not either.

By the way SkyWay tracks already built on test sites in Belarus are called string ones. Yes, just because the rails in them are stretched in the longitudinal direction. This results in material savings, a sufficiently large margin of strength and flexibility that railways lack. And in principle it is arranged as a hollow steel beam with wire cables passed inside and stretched between anchor supports. The internal space is filled with a special noise-absorbing mixture. Depending on the loads, all this is supported with intermediate pylons installed at intervals of 40 meters to 5 kilometers. Sometimes it looks like a flyover, sometimes as a monorail, and even as a cable way. By its features SkyWay is superior to anything that looks alike externally. Just because the string rail is still a rail – an even metal surface along which a steel wheel of SkyWay railroad car rolls with the maximum efficiency, ready, like a usual car, to take you from door to door, to any place, at any time, but with considerably less energy consumption, damage to the environment and, in general, in a completely different way.

New logistics: a person needs a cabin only

Buying a car today, a person uses it for the intended purpose during 10% of the time on average. The rest of the time his car is standing: in a garage, at a parking lot, at an impoundment lot, etc. The presently popular model of car sharing initiates right from this and offers either to use personal cars jointly, as it is done in UBER, for example, or even abandon personal cars at all and use cars as public transport: you take a car, arrive to a needed place, pay to the car for the trip and that’s all. SkyWay offers a trendy, but more efficient and original option – a personal cabin, a sharing or public running gear. In other words, your cabin is staying in the garage of your home, to which a string-rail track is extended, like a road to any today’s car. If necessary, one of the running gears traveling in the network of stringed routes will dock to your cabin and deliver it to the destination. Thus, you do not need to spend on the motor and other hardware that is of no value to you. You buy a cabin that costs a thousand dollars. You retain your personality without extra expenses. Although, of course, you can buy the option that SkyWay has presented at this InnoTrans – a family minivan, fully charged and is always ready at your service.

Disadvantage: lack of infrastructure that will have to be created, one way or another

The only drawback of SkyWay transport systems is the lack of ready infrastructure and the need to build a new one. However, the current situation levels out this circumstance. Given the increasing volumes of traffic in cities and raising of mobility requirements on intercity routes, a new infrastructure will have to be created in any case. Even the transition to autonomous cars, car sharing and the like is a global reconstruction of highways that will require enormous expenses. In addition, such changes will solve the problem only for a while, since the number of cars and roads will still continue to grow with the growth of cities. All the shortcomings of ordinary roads will be preserved.

In addition to the fact that string transport changes understanding of railway possibilities, it is also a possible basis for a global infrastructure transformation. If the traffic is carried out on various overpasses, the land remains untouched. Forests and cultivated fields can grow on it. Cities can be completely pedestrian and unprecedentedly comfortable – without traffic jams, smog and other modern attributes. The change in speed and mode of transportation can change very much, if not everything. Thanks to SkyWay, the world can become faster, and hence more accessible.