Good ideas for new rail types in the future.

[Expresso]

Vacuum Tubes
Suggested appearance: somewhere around 2100, due to the forcefield requirement.
Description: This railtype would be able to achieve speeds greater then maglevs. Those speeds could be reached by combining the vacuum, maglev and forcefield technologies. The forcefields would be there to seperate the vacuum tubes from the rest of the world - including stations. Only vacuum vehicles and rails should be able to penetrate those forcefields.

Wormhole Generator Network
Suggested appearance: somewhere around 2500, maybe even later. due to tech and power requirements.
Description:The wormhole network consists of a bunch of powerful forcefield generators, keeping the wormholes open in the direction they are needed, thus allowing junctions. The effect of a wormhole would be that time is compressed, in effect decreasing the amount of time spent traveling which results in even greater speed then vacuum tubes.
The vehicles should work on antigravity principles because no actual rail is available in the wormholes. These vehicles are designed to maintain normal physics on the inside while being able to handle the warped physics of the wormhole on the outside. The vehicles have a forcefield as a rail when not inside a wormhole.

[PouncingAnt]

I like these ideas! Also I commend your for thinking of somthing faster than in-vacuum transport (even if it is fantasy )

[DeletedUser21]

With that kind of fast vehicles, greater maps would be cool. (You know, past 2048 x 2048 ) 4096 x 4096 would suffice. But loading times and save-games would be enormous so I have to work on that first.

[Griff]

Vacuum tube? Wormhole generator?

You watch too much futurama and stargate. Nice ideas though.

[SoofMan]

Vacuum tube? Wormhole generator?

You watch too much futurama and stargate. Nice ideas though.

Sounds more like Star Trek to me... hehe

[Brianetta]

A World Out Of Time, by Larry Niven. (:

Vacuum-tube intercontinental trains weren't the only fabulous ideas in that paticular yarn.

[Purno]

Vacuum tube? Wormhole generator?

You watch too much futurama and stargate. Nice ideas though.

Vacuum tube is not that strange. It's doable with the current technologies.

[DeletedUser21]

Something along the lines of this?
Imagine city in background.

[Mateo]

There are already some plans for vacuum tube trains, check out this article http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/5e ... drcrd.html

Definitely a good idea for OpenTTD

[DannyA]

It all sounds a bit like those pipes you see the checkout girls at the supermarkets putting the cash in, then wooop it gets sucked up through the roof - into some rich guys lap I suppose.
Be more fun to send off something less pleasent than a fat wad of cash in one, and see what came of it...

I guess if you put enough of them together you could transport cargo - cheap alternative for those battling railroads - supermarket cash sucker?

[Ailure]

While Wormholes are neat and all, wouldn't they destroy the needs for transportation when you can teleport something instantly on the other side of the map?

The vaccum maglev trains should be able to travel on regular maglev tracks (but not the other way around since regular maglevs aren't made for vaccum), with a heavy penalty obviously.

I would playing with thoose vaccum tubes, although they should be made to work best over long distances. I rather see severeal kinds of tracks being used at once than vaccum tubes all over the place. The trains maybe should take quite some time to both accelerate and deaccelerate from/to stations (and in other cases, such as that curves needs to be really smooth...) so it works best over long distances.

They should arrive around 2030-2050 infact, as long they don't replace regular maglev for every purpose. I can't see it used for towns that have a distance of 10 KM, but maybe for 100 KM.

One limit could be that train needs to stop competly when it switches from vaccum tube to regular maglev. And that stations are always regular maglev stations.

[Griff]

It might be doable, certainly is not refined enough for such a vast undertaking..mind by 2050 odd we'll all have hover cars anyway...

[Sacro]

I would like to have 3rd and 4th rail tracks, for doing subway systems (London Underground for one!)

[Expresso]

I forgot one: smalltrack. Would be nice to have for game which start in 1850 (or something like that).

[Griff]

Rail gauge
Broad gauge
Standard gauge
Narrow gauge
Dual gauge
Break-of-gauge
Breitspurbahn
Tramway track

[DeletedUser21]

You missed one out:

Highspeed gauge

[dasy2k1]

you missed anotehr one
Interlaced Track

[charlymorton]

And also:

Funicular and cable-car

[Griff]

Highspeed gauge is the same as standard guage isnt it?

Interlaced..never heard of that before.

Cable car..umm, i guess.

[Archonix]

While Wormholes are neat and all, wouldn't they destroy the needs for transportation when you can teleport something instantly on the other side of the map?

Well, it's not on the same scale but try reading Peter F Hamilton's "Pandora's Star" and "Judas Unchained" for an example of just about exactly what expresso was talking about. They're good books. However, since they're large, I'll condense it: the idea is that the power requirements of wormholes and the still-present need to marshal massive amounts of goods necessitated the creation of a "wormhole railway". The trains spend most of their life navigating huge junction complexes before shooting through a wormhole to the next junction at their destination. The idea is that it's unfeasible to run a wormhole from every point to every other point where they might be needed, so there's still a need to box things up, put them in crates and run those crates through the wormholes.

In the books, apart from the interplanetary rail network, there's also a planetary express that circumnavigates the earth in about 5 hours, and lots of smaller, normal railways that distribute goods from the huge wormhole complexes.