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Japan Transportation

Japan Plans 310-Mile Conveyor Belt That Can Carry Freight of 25,000 Trucks a Day (newatlas.com) 108

Posted by BeauHD from the ambitious-projects dept.
The Japanese government plans to create zero-emissions logistics links between major cities, potentially using massive conveyor belts or autonomous electric carts. The initiative aims to shift millions of tons of cargo, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and alleviate the anticipated 30% shortfall in parcel deliveries by 2030 due to a lack of drivers. New Atlas reports: According to The Japan News, the project has been under discussion since February by an expert panel at the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism ministry. A draft outline of an interim report was released Friday, revealing plans to complete an initial link between Tokyo and Osaka by 2034. Japan's well-known population collapse issues foretell severe labor squeezes in the coming years, and one specific issue this project aims to curtail is the continuing rise in online shopping, with a forecast decline in the numbers of delivery drivers that can move goods around. The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won't make it from A to B by 2030, because there'll be nobody to move them. Hence this wild logistical link, the first iteration of which the team says will move as much small cargo between Tokyo and Osaka as 25,000 trucks.

Exactly how it'll do this is yet to be nailed down, but individual pallets will carry up to a ton of small cargo items, and they'll move without human interference from one end to the other. One possibility is to use massive conveyor belts to cover the 500-km (310-mile) distance between the two cities, running alongside the highway or potentially through tunnels underneath the road. Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts. A 500-km tunnel, mind you, would be insanely expensive at somewhere around $23 billion before any conveyor belts or autonomous carts are factored in. And one does have to wonder if autonomous electric trucks might be able to do the job without any of the infrastructure requirements [...].

Japan Plans 310-Mile Conveyor Belt That Can Carry Freight of 25,000 Trucks a Day More | Reply

Japan Plans 310-Mile Conveyor Belt That Can Carry Freight of 25,000 Trucks a Day

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  • Rhymes with "brain"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @08:53PM (#64583989)

    Isn't this what freight trains have been doing for a couple hundred years now?

    • yes exactly... trains with automated dispatch and load/unload

      • So like Tesla Hyperloop but without all the pesky vacuum implosions and no magnetic suspension or battery problems.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ne0n ( 884282 )
      The obvious time-tested solutions (trains, canals) have already been done. And Japan's got heaps of trains already.
      • No, Japan does not have heaps of freight trains. Their network is optimized for passengers (unlike the US) and trains move less than 1% of goods. A quick search would have told you this. BTW, US has by far the best freight network in the world, both in miles and tonnage of goods moved.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Is the answer "crane"?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      I think they realize that trains do this, but what they want is a Zero-emission, driverless system (which yes, driverless trains are a thing) that is free of switching systems so that it it enables point-to-point logistics and remove the trucks from the equation.

      Cause right now even in countries like Canada and The United States, freight is sent by train, but a lot of sent by truck. Trains merely bring freight to the major city. All the smaller cities get everything trucked to them, even if the very same ra

      • Re:Rhymes with "brain"? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @11:21PM (#64584213)

        Imagine if that was a 1000km long conveyer system ... that just drops cargo in the city without having to stop a 2km long train.

        A mechanism that can remove cargo from a moving conveyor belt could also remove cargo from a moving train.

      • Re: Rhymes with "brain"? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by wgoodman ( 1109297 ) on Friday June 28, 2024 @01:43AM (#64584389)

        Canada and USA are both massive, low population per average mile sort of places, similar to, but utterly unlike Japan.

      • Re:Rhymes with "brain"? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by CaptQuark ( 2706165 ) on Friday June 28, 2024 @02:39AM (#64584427)

        Imagine if that was a 1000km long conveyer system (someone's been playing factorio I guess) that just drops cargo in the city without having to stop a 2km long train.

        OK, let's imagine it. Now imagine what to do if the receiving end gets backed up or a branch falls on the conveyor. Now instead of stopping a 2km train, you have to stop a 1000km belt. Assume there are pallets every three meters, each weighing 1000kg. Starting the conveyor belt again with it fully loaded means getting 3 millions tonnes of pallets moving again. Dividing the conveyor into 1000 individual 1km belts means keeping 1000 moving systems in perfect sync.

        Now imagine the security needed. You would either need to completely enclose the conveyor in a secure enclosure or risk someone just pulling one or two pallets off the conveyor to sell whatever is inside.

        A train still sounds like a more economical and flexible system.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          This seems to actually be a train, at least in some of the pictures in TFA. Just a train with individual powered units that take one container each.

          Presumably the whole thing moves relatively slowly, so merging in units and removing them at their destination wouldn't be too difficult. Japan actually has quite a lot of monorails with points (I think they are called turnouts in US English, where the rail can be reconfigured to go one of two or three ways). The conveyor part implies that the track provides the

          • Since trains transitioned to diesel, they've been electric and use the diesel to generate that electricity. America's freight trains are rather good, because they generate a profit. High speed passenger rail requires the kinds of subsidies to support it that aren't popular in the US. Even in Europe it's still cheaper to fly than take a train.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Japan is mostly electrified trains, and their high speed rail makes a profit. They help subsidise the tickets with things like turning the station into a huge shopping centre, and lining the tracks with solar panels.

        • Now imagine the security needed. You would either need to completely enclose the conveyor in a secure enclosure or risk someone just pulling one or two pallets off the conveyor to sell whatever is inside.

          I went to Japan in 2018 for the first time. I've done some world traveling before, but had never been to Japan before. It was pretty amazing. This conveyor belt idea shows you what you can do when your entire bleeping country isn't filled with psychopaths like the USA (where I live) is. Most Japanese people will simply behave ethically and just not steal the stuff. I'm sure a few will try to exploit it, but probably not enough to be a big issue. Yes, we could never do that in the USA because peop

      • I think they realize that trains do this, but what they want is a Zero-emission ...

        Did you know that most trains run on electricity in advanced nations?

        Except in the USA where the railways are about 75 years behind technically. Most Americans, plus Elon Musk according to his Hyperloop proposal paper, don't seem to realise this.

        • Since trains transitioned to diesel, they've been electric and use the diesel to generate that electricity. America's freight trains are rather good, because they generate a profit. High speed passenger rail requires the kinds of subsidies to support it that aren't popular in the US. Even in Europe it's still cheaper to fly than take a train.

          • Since trains transitioned to diesel, they've been electric and use the diesel to generate that electricity.

            Case in point about misunderstanding railways. The fact that diesel-electric locos use an electric stage in their transmission does not make them "electric trains", any more than the lubricating oil in a diesel powered car's torque converter means that it runs on lubricating oil. Electric trains pick up electricity from an over head wire, conductor rails, or even batteries, using electricity generated any way you like, as it as it would be for this Japanese conveyer belt or electric road vehicles.

            • By your logic, there are no electric trains, because the generators that send electricity through those wires is probably coal or gas.

        • I think they realize that trains do this, but what they want is a Zero-emission ...

          Did you know that most trains run on electricity in advanced nations?

          Except in the USA where the railways are about 75 years behind technically. Most Americans, plus Elon Musk according to his Hyperloop proposal paper, don't seem to realise this.

          This is about freight trains

          • This is about freight trains

            There is no reason at all why a new railway in Japan built to carry freight (instead of this conveyer belt) would not be powered by electricity. It would be astonishing in this day and age if it were not.

            • This is about freight trains

              There is no reason at all why a new railway in Japan built to carry freight (instead of this conveyer belt) would not be powered by electricity. It would be astonishing in this day and age if it were not.

              Irrelevant. You wrote : "Did you know that most trains run on electricity in advanced nations? Except in the USA where the railways are about 75 years behind technically"

        • You should learn something about trains before commenting. I don't know of any country that relies on external electric to power freight trains. Almost all, including US, use diesel electric locomotives as the best means. Heck, most countries don't use their rail networks for goods transport since they are mostly optimized for passenger transport; US is very much an outlier.

          • You should learn something about trains before commenting. I don't know of any country that relies on external electric to power freight trains. Almost all, including US, use diesel electric locomotives as the best means.

            The UK uses electric locos for some of its freight trains, and some locos, such as the Class 92, were built for freight haulage. A specific example (shared with France) is the freight shuttle train which carries lorries on flat wagons hauled by electric locos through the Channel Tunnel.

            It is not a case of "relying" on them. Most freight trains in the UK are still hauled by diesel electric locos, but the point here is that there is nothing in principle why a freight train cannot be electrically hauled (

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by eth1 ( 94901 )

        I think they realize that trains do this, but what they want is a Zero-emission, driverless system (which yes, driverless trains are a thing) that is free of switching systems so that it it enables point-to-point logistics and remove the trucks from the equation.

        It doesn't have to be a "train", but a narrow-gauge electric rail system with individual powered containers on wheels would be far better than a conveyor belt. A switching system would actually be an advantage, not a disadvantage, since without one, you have to build individual point-to-point systems, possibly duplicating a lot of infrastructure instead of sharing it.

        You could even de-centralize the control of the switches by adding a routing cartridge to the individual containers that contains an RFID or o

    • Re:Rhymes with "brain"? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @11:00PM (#64584181)
      No. Freight trains are not continuous. For, lets say 100ft of track, in 1hrs time, the amount of freight occupying that segment of track is a fraction of its potential. I refer to this as time-on-track. If its a near conveyor system then the time on track for a given hour of time will be near if not at 60 min. Not 15 minutes or 25 minutes. This is about reaching theoretical limits far better than trucks or trains.

      • Continuity has limited benefits though; bi-directional capacity is likely more useful. You would likely want shorter trains with higher frequencies (and shorter sidings), that can take advantage of staggered, limited stops for maximum throughput. Add automated pallet/container [un]loading and staging and you have an essentially continuous flow.

    • You really don't need to tell Japan anything about trains. If they see the need, they know why :)

      I'm telling you this as the guy who waits for the train for about 2-3 minutes every day on a small Japanese rail station, and in that time I see two large freight trains roll by.

    • The US did this in Chicago in the 1900's up to the 1960's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It used 2ft. narrow guage rail to move freight and mail around the city but economics caused it to be abandoned. The abandoned tunnels are a flooding risk to this day.
    • One break and 25000 trucks come to a simultaneous halt.
    • No but this is a radically new idea! They'll secure two parallel strips of metal on the ground & the "pallets" can be loaded onto "carts" on wheels that run along the metal strips without needing anyone to steer them. They can be built alongside already existing motorways/highways, thereby minimsing the cost & the disruption to the countryside, villages, & towns they pass through or by. One or more "motor carts," with electricity pulled from overhead wires, can be linked together with "cargo car

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CEC-P ( 10248912 )
      But you see, the different is, this one is WAY louder.
    • Trains are a whole lot cheaper and less sexy than a conveyor belt, just do the cheap option

  • Adam Something (Score:4)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @08:54PM (#64583999) Homepage

    Waiting for an Adam Something video on the reinvention of trains, badly. Honestly, this idea sounds daft.

  • Factorio, Satifactory ?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Marc_Hawke ( 130338 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @09:09PM (#64584031)

    Someone's been playing the automation video games and decided it was just crazy enough it might just work.

  • whiskey etc (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday June 27, 2024 @09:16PM (#64584043) Homepage Journal

    Alternatively, the infrastructure could simply provide flat lanes or tunnels, and the pallets could be shifted by automated electric carts.

    And then you could put them on rails, and then you'd have a train, which was what you should have built in the first place. It could be narrow gauge, however. You can still have kind of an amazing amount of train on that. If it must be able to carry only pallets, you could make it lighter than usual, but that takes away some of its durable charm.

    • Re:whiskey etc (Score:4)

      by Marc_Hawke ( 130338 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @09:31PM (#64584077)

      If it's not a 'train' but a bunch of 'self-powered carts' this works.

      Part of the problem with the current infrastructure is that it's not spontaneous. It's not 'instant.' You'd have to fill up a whole train before it could leave the station. I think the idea of the conveyor belt/carts is that they are small. If a package needs to move, it starts moving immediately.

      That's definitely the beauty of a conveyor belt. It's always moving, there's no additional cost for putting an individual thing on it vs putting a whole lot of things on it. So someone orders a new shoelace, it ships instantly. Of course, the drawback is that you're burning money even if you're not shipping anything.

      As soon as you move away from the 'always on' conveyor belt, you start running the math of balancing 'frequency' vs 'capacity' and they are enemies of each other.

      • I imagine, instead of a conveyor belt, a roller conveyor. Japan is good at motors and machining, so they can do more or less all of it themselves. Then you can use a lot of brushless motors that can be somewhat redundant, "intelligent" (self-controlling anyway) and also self-diagnosing. Belts themselves are a liability. Ironically, Japanese CVTs are extremely good proof of this...

        • I imagine, instead of a conveyor belt, a roller conveyor.

          The artist's renderings in TFA look like they might be roller conveyors.

          When it comes to negotiating hills, I think a belt might be better. Cargo is less likely to slip on a belt than on rollers. Also, cargo on a belt is being driven by all of the rollers driving that segment of belt, instead of only the ones within the footprint of the cargo.

          • A belt is only driven by the rollers at the ends, and maybe any which are under the cargo in question, because otherwise there's no friction.

            Belts might make sense for inclines, though. There's no reason they couldn't use both strategies on a single line.

      • So in other words, freight trains that work more like electrified passenger trains.
      • What puzzles me a bit about the proposal is that it seems like you already have the option of compromising on speed vs. economies of scale with trains:

        If you want cheap you can do a relatively massive ratio of dumb transport boxes to expensive drive/control cars and either only run it when it's full or tell everyone that they'd better not be late because it only runs X times a day.

        If you want fast you can go as far as the extreme case of a single car engine-with-some-cargo-space that leaves as soon as

      • You don't have to fill up a whole train. Just like passenger trains don't wait until they're full, freight trains can be run on a schedule.

      • If it's not a 'train' but a bunch of 'self-powered carts' this works.

        Part of the problem with the current infrastructure is that it's not spontaneous. It's not 'instant.' You'd have to fill up a whole train before it could leave the station. I think the idea of the conveyor belt/carts is that they are small. If a package needs to move, it starts moving immediately.

        That's definitely the beauty of a conveyor belt. It's always moving, there's no additional cost for putting an individual thing on it vs putting a whole lot of things on it. So someone orders a new shoelace, it ships instantly. Of course, the drawback is that you're burning money even if you're not shipping anything.

        As soon as you move away from the 'always on' conveyor belt, you start running the math of balancing 'frequency' vs 'capacity' and they are enemies of each other.

        I think the issue with trains is you still need trucks to take things to and from the train station, once you factor in the cost of that extra load/unload it's probably just cheaper to leave things on the truck and drive them straight to the destination.

        I don't think this new system would really change those economics.

        But for Japan in specific, if there's a tight enough labour market, and there's enough packages moving between the cities, it could make sense. I do wonder however about the feasibility. I dou

    • Something roller coaster size. And you could double-deck it. Osaka to Tokyo at ground level, the reverse trip on the upper tracks. You could send batches of like five cars each, timing them by the amount of cargo to go.

      No need to steer, just don't run into unit ahead of you and when the switching system shunts you off the main track to the siding stop at the RF beacon, or for that matter the red light.

      It's not a bad idea.

  • Real life Factorio (Score:4, Funny)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @09:24PM (#64584061)

    Will Japan have a main bus or embrace the spaghetti?

    • I've been trying to learn to "embrace the spaghetti" myself. After taking the "main bus" strategy to its inevitable conclusion, I've decided that the congestion issues outweigh the additional materials cost for extra belt.

      • ....mind, you I still haven't really figured out how to use the logic blocks so maybe they could fix the main bus strategy, I don't know.

        • Same, i've recently been doing a replay and I decided to go no outside blueprints and it's been fun, ended up with just a mashup. I believe the lead developer said he consider spaghetti most in the spirit of the game. Excited for the expansion, probably going to open up more options.

  • The Roads Must Roll (Score:5, Informative)

    by lispm ( 455966 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @09:26PM (#64584065)

    (Robert Heinlein, 1940)

  • Better build some walls and turrets to defend against biters!

  • No mention of "The Roads Must Roll" by Heinlein??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @10:21PM (#64584131)

    OK y'all, turn in your geek cards if your first thoughts were not of the Heinlein classic "The Roads Must Roll". I cannot believe you young whippersnappers haven't mentioned this in the comments I skimmed, and it is especially atrocious that the writeup doesn't mention it.

    SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOUR VERY FIRST THOUGHTS!!!

    • And now I see comments on it. lispm and smithmc can keep their geek cards. Maybe I should turn in my slashdot card for not looking hard enough.

    • Thank you! I was going to say the same thing! I remember listening the radio show of this story several years ago.

  • It would probably work in Japan too. You have high confidence where things will end up needing to go. Not so much here in the USA, where people move around and population centers fluctuate.
  • Just put everything on a boat. or a train.

  • Quite a bit longer than Morocco's (Score:4, Informative)

    by Preston Pfarner ( 14687 ) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @10:59PM (#64584179)

    Morocco's conveyor belt [atlasobscura.com] is "only" about 100 km, transporting about 3 million tonnes of phosphate each year.

    But if this one in Japan is underground it probably won't be visible from space like Morocco's [nasa.gov]. The lack of dust being blown off of the parcels would also cut down on that.

  • The current longest is 61 miles and it can be seen from space https://earthobservatory.nasa.... [nasa.gov]

  • The problem arising from low population is more about 'last mile' ie delivering individual packages to 'Homes' and not moving goods between 2 cities in bulk which is anyway not very human intensive.

    So unless they make conveyors going to each home this is not a solution to their problem.
    The solution is more sex

  • Trainphobia Again - is there a Cure? (Score:3)

    by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Friday June 28, 2024 @03:57AM (#64584535)
    Many people seem to suffer from train phobia (Elon Musk is another example), even to the extent that they cannot even mention the word in an article on options for moving freight.
  • Like many armchair futurist proposals, the journey itself sound great but it fails to address what happens at the start and finish. You need to be able to load and unload fast with some method of supplying/removing the stuff equally fast, or it all backs up. This would have been one of the failings of Elon Musk's BS Hyperloop proposal unless it had been reserved for a wealthy few like himself.

    Even the existing fast transport methods of rail and air have this problem. From a London suburb, it takes me as
    • Conveyor logistics companies like Daifuku have advanced loading and unloading mechanisms for warehouse level operations. No idea how well these could scale. But it would be a key functionality need. A small scale prototype will help evaluate feasibility. Something besides Sagawa, Yamato, and other delivery companies parking blocking traffic while they unload

  • I guess the conveyor belt will be powered by a perpetual motion machine.

    Can we please stop calling everything zero emission? There is no such thing.

  • They could do something awesome like a maglev network but honestly, you have to understand it is not the U.S. There is half a century of ultra-high precision operations under their belt. That means they could probably do this for almost free by adding autonomous centrally controlled bullet trains that get slotted into the existing bullet train network in gaps. Say launch a short bullet train 5 minutes before and after the human one takes off. No need for human pilots, the trains can do start and stop, or e

  • that is all

  • Why does it have to be 310 miles long? Maybe start with a one-mile conveyor belt, and then see how you feel.

  • ...all the sushi it could carry!

  • Japan is always awesome

  • immigration, what a show

  • Can you imagine the maintenance nightmare for a 310 mile long conveyor belt system? Also: hijacking of goods in transit. FFS Japan you're good at trains, what's wrong with using that instead? Build a 310 mile long electric freight train line.
  • The Roads Must Roll [wikipedia.org].

    Classic SciFi for the win.

  • But, instead of a conveyor belt why not lay two super long metal sticks a few feet apart. Then place a container that has metal wheels on it that can easily roll on those metal sticks. To stablize the metal rods and ensure they stay parallel we can use planks of wood or some other material. I seriously feel like if we did it, that would enable cheap and energy efficient transportation.

  • Many of you are missing some basic facts. Steel on steel transport is incredibly efficient. I'm not sure it is possible to make a conveyor type system as efficient as trains. That is a very lofty goal. The reason Japan can't use trains is because their network is optimized for passengers and most of the population has come to depend on that for daily transport...be very hard to switch to mixed use and not politically feasible. So it seems they are looking at other ideas on how to move goods without relying

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