[HN Gopher] US Army's Land Trains
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US Army's Land Trains
Author : lbrito
Score : 169 points
Date : 2022-05-16 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedrive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedrive.com)
| jefurii wrote:
| This must have been Neal Stephenson's prototype for the arctic
| land trains in Anathem (2008).
| Lio wrote:
| Yes! That was the first thing I thought too.
|
| I guess the future really is here but poorly diffused, as
| another great author once said.
| niviksha wrote:
| Great read! Minor nit - shouldn't they be called 'road trains'?
| The other kind are also land trains, no?
| izzydata wrote:
| I had the same thought. Not many water and air trains going
| around.
| hammock wrote:
| Trackless train. Backcountry train
| btbuildem wrote:
| "Road train" is a monicker for multi-trailer semis. These are
| quite common in Australia. In North America we sometimes see
| doubles, but I don't think they quite qualify for the name.
| [deleted]
| andylynch wrote:
| They are different from road trains- these were built to drive
| through untracked wilderness. Wikipedia calls them 'overland
| trains' Road trains were invented in Australia to haul
| livestock and general freight on their long, empty roads
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Unrelated, but in the Netflix series Snowpiercer - I never
| understood why its not a vehicle like but is instead a huge train
| besides Wilford just liking trains?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| is it the dumbest concept in all fiction?
| oneoff786 wrote:
| I haven't watched the Netflix adaption but I think they were
| trying to suggest it's a fixed loop with no driver. That felt
| thematically appropriate
| grendelt wrote:
| This sort of lore is drilled into the engineering students at
| LeTourneau University (my alma mater). There's an entire mini
| museum setup to LeTourneau's achievements on campus. After
| working there after grad school I realized much of LeTourneau's
| "genius" was some form of reductionism.
|
| problem: "We need a machine that can grab these logs from these
| trees we cut down." solution: "Why not make a gigantic claw and
| put it on wheels?" https://www.imcdb.org/i236846.jpg
|
| problem: "All these trees are in the way. We just need a way to
| quickly clear the area." solution: "Why not just stomp them
| down?" 'Stomp them down?' "Yeah"
| http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1964-tree-stomper-...
|
| problem: "Ok, RG. Some trees we can't just stomp" solution: "Ok.
| Let's just drive over them them."
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-9yvNESLPo
|
| There's this saying: _" Any idiot can build a bridge that stands,
| but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."_
|
| RG was never guilty of making anything "barely". Dude straight
| over over did it on a lot of projects. He took small simple
| machines and just scaled them tf up. He didn't do small. "You've
| got a big problem? You just need a bigger machine." is something
| that fits with what his machinery says about his design choices.
|
| He filled a niche for sure. His style and creations fit at a
| unique time in American history. American steel and manufacture
| was very much in it's heyday. He had access to all the stuff
| needed to execute his big ideas. His conservative religious
| fervor also fit the politics of the day, allowing him to link up
| with Billy Graham which had some factional differences of opinion
| from the likes of the overly conservative Bob Jones and Oral
| Roberts. Seeing large numbers of GIs returning from WW2 eager to
| work, RG put them to work building gargantuan creations. My
| personal, somewhat cynical take, is RG also saw that each of
| those veteran workers had GI Bill money sitting unused. He formed
| LeTourneau Technical College on the grounds of a shuttered
| military hospital to train employees at his factory a short walk
| from the campus. Being a "college" meant he could charge exactly
| the dollar limit amount of tuition the GI Bill afforded. Being a
| private college meant he could control what and how they studied.
| It remains a quite conservative Christian institution and
| students and faculty alike are reminded how it's a "ministry"
| until it comes time for a student who can't pay or an employee
| that asks for a raise. Suddenly the "ministry" facade shatters
| and the word "business" hops into the wording. As soon as the
| matter is closed, it returns to its "ministry" persona (esp when
| asked to do something above-and-beyond).
|
| RG is a fascinating character nevertheless. He's even listed in
| the Offshore Drilling Hall of Fame in Galveston (yep, it's a
| thing) for his work on _Scorpion_ an offshore rig for the Zapata
| Oil Company, then run by a young businessman named George H. W.
| Bush.
| digerata wrote:
| Isn't saying "Land Train" like saying "Sky Plane"?
| hathawsh wrote:
| Trains usually go on rails; this is a train (a series of
| physically linked cars) that goes on many kinds of land instead
| of rails. The name fits IMHO.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Trains usually go on rails_
|
| Usually indeed. Besides accidental derailments, there was a
| time in the late 90s when a town in Canada intentionally
| derailed a diesel-electric locomotive and drove it down the
| street half a mile under its own power so they could use it
| as an emergency generator. The road needed to be repaired,
| but apparently the locomotive was fine and eventually
| returned to regular service.
| dervjd wrote:
| Here's a HN post from a few months back discussing:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26233736
| upwardbound wrote:
| References about the Canada story:
|
| https://gizmodo.com/that-time-a-canadian-town-derailed-a-
| die...
|
| https://steemit.com/history/@kiligirl/remembering-canada-
| s-w...
| moffkalast wrote:
| "Offrail Train" is more like it yeah.
| dheera wrote:
| Reminds me of Australian trucks
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iFkKRh5kcM
| VLM wrote:
| Very small compared to coal draglines like "big muskie"
|
| Why make a mere train to eventually make a building, when you can
| make a large building that moves?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Muskie
|
| Interesting to think that Big Muskie was significantly larger in
| all dimensions than the residence hall I lived in for my first
| year of university. One machine moved more material than two
| panama canals in its lifespan...
|
| Big Muskie was not a fast mover but it could have made that
| proverbial 400 mile trip in about 5 months, which isn't all that
| bad. I do believe it would have cost more overall, which is why
| they didn't do it this way. I would imagine trying to ford a
| river with Big Muskie would have been very exciting indeed.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Still digging... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293
| jacquesm wrote:
| Different continent.
| Severian wrote:
| it wouldn't have made it, as it ran off of electric power. It
| trailed a huge electrical cable. Which makes sense as it was
| operated by American Electric Power. You can visit the bucket
| at Miners' Memorial Park where it's on top of a hill ( which I
| have to visit to get cell service when I camp nearby). It's the
| size of a small house.
| tbalsam wrote:
| In his autobiography, LeTurneau talks about one of the land
| trains being nuclear powered, casually as if it was just another
| increment. This man was on another level. His faith was pretty
| fantastic too, it's a really enjoyable read of how he did a
| bootstraps-pull-up but also with the appropriate amount of good
| fortune ("fortune?") that generally leads to massive successes.
| The man was a prodigy/genius, absolutely amazing and from very
| humble roots.
|
| Now, the nuclear land train didn't materialize, but this guy is
| the guy that Elon Musk wished he was. The OG ironman back in the
| 50's or whenever you'd classify his active years to be in.
| Presumably because he died, on the nuclear powerplant front, but
| I got the sense from reading it that he was adored enough that
| despite the safety risks he could have relatively handily gotten
| something like that in production.
|
| Which would have changed the nature of our transportation today
| in a big kind of way. If you make a portable nuclear generator
| that can sit on a military land train (and this man could, just
| read his engineering reasoning you'll see why I speak of it with
| a sense of awe and wonder), then you can make that same generator
| and use it to power rural neighborhoods, remote electric vehicle
| stations, etc. The cost of infrastructure maintenance and
| installation would go down, and we'd have one more good option
| during the energy crisis today, with global warming and such as
| it is.
|
| Really and truly a peek into what could have been almost our
| current "alternative future". Probably not a bad one either,
| though presumably there would be negative consequences like
| Appalachia getting hit more hard economically due to further
| lowered coal dependence, etc.
| eastbound wrote:
| The daemonization of nuclear during the cold war, prerequisite
| for the MAD threat, led to hypersecure research centers,
| centralization of funding and research, preventing tinkerers
| from studying new solutions, and ultimately nuclear innovation
| completely halting. As you said, many suggest that if we had
| left it run its course, we might have seen nuclear stacks the
| size of a washing machine powering neighborhoods, and other
| applications entirely unimagined today.
| dallasg3 wrote:
| Mutual Assured Destruction
| jaguar1878 wrote:
| In case you weren't aware, the US also pursued nuclear powered
| airplanes[1] with actual test units built. They're still
| sitting out there in Idaho a few miles off the highway and you
| can visit certain times of the year. Reading the placards (or
| the wiki) honestly scares me a bit, despite my thought that
| nuclear power makes a lot of sense for our energy needs. I
| don't love the idea of 500mph reactors up above me, even with
| modern airplane safety records.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion
| hammock wrote:
| >read his engineering reasoning you'll see why I speak of it
| with a sense of awe and wonder
|
| Where can I do this please?
|
| I'm also generally curious what "engineering reasoning" is and
| how I may be able to use it to sell in new ideas at work
| andylynch wrote:
| A nuclear version would not have been competitive - they were
| _very_ special purpose vehicles; after the DEW line heavy lift
| helicopters became available and made them obsolete.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _LeTurneau talks about one of the land trains being nuclear
| powered, casually as if it was just another increment_
|
| Reminds me of The Big Bus, which was also nuclear powered.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bus
| moffkalast wrote:
| Just 50s culture I guess, the typical Fallout book of nuclear
| power.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >LeTurneau talks about one of the land trains being nuclear
| powered, casually as if it was just another increment
|
| This was a decade before hippies and greenpeace. It _was_
| casual to them. It was like saying "we're gonna use batteries
| and DC motors" would be today. About the most condemning
| response you'd get is "good luck with that I don't think the
| numbers pencil out".
| 8as746fd4a5df wrote:
| Wasn't it rather common for the time to fantasize about
| everything being powered by nuclear reactors? (Think: Ford
| Nucleon, ideas about civilian nuclear powered ships or
| aircraft)
|
| I also don't get the Musk hate. That man created more than 100k
| jobs for Americans, made rockets land and cars go electric. And
| with "made", I mean that he enabled the engineers at these
| companies to do what they did. If you don't believe that then
| mentally substract Musk from SpaceX or Tesla and ask where they
| would they be today? (Answers: Tesla would have died in 2004 or
| soon after because Tesla was not much more than an idea back
| then and SpaceX would have never existed at all).
| jcranmer wrote:
| > I also don't get the Musk hate.
|
| If Musk just stuck to SpaceX and Tesla, a lot fewer people
| would have problems with him. The issue is that he comes
| across as a smarter-than-thou narcissist who needs to "solve"
| every problem [1], can't stand being told to shut up (cf.
| coronavirus restrictions, or the Thailand cave rescue
| incident), and generally acts like a petulant asshole.
|
| I'll also point out that--in my opinion--Tesla just isn't as
| revolutionary as people think it is. Yes, they are today the
| largest producer of electric vehicles, but there is a very
| good chance that they will not retain this position by the
| end of the decade. And while Tesla may have accelerated
| adoption of electric vehicles, without Tesla, it's still
| likely that we would be moving to electric vehicles before
| much longer.
|
| [1] I could insert a long discussion about why his efforts on
| Hyperloop and Loop are worse than useless, but details aren't
| really germane.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > If Musk just stuck to SpaceX and Tesla, a lot fewer
| people would have problems with him. The issue is that he
| comes across as a smarter-than-thou narcissist who needs to
| "solve" every problem [1], can't stand being told to shut
| up (cf. coronavirus restrictions, or the Thailand cave
| rescue incident), and generally acts like a petulant
| asshole.
|
| Even if he "just stuck to SpaceX and Tesla," he'd also have
| to stop over-promising to the point where he seems like a
| pathological liar.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| "Seems"?
| pasabagi wrote:
| As a long-time Musk hater, I can tell you, I don't hate the
| player, I hate the game. I hate that, for a while, the most
| powerful man in the world (Trump) and the richest man in the
| world (Musk), were both essentially Twitter trolls with side
| gigs.
|
| All of his companies are fine, but it just sucks that we're
| at a point in time where the way he behaves is basically
| optimal behavior from a market standpoint.
| [deleted]
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I think the billions in government loans, contracts, tax
| credits, and subsidies contributed significantly:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-
| su...
|
| "He enabled the engineers at these companies to do what they
| did" is a weird way of saying he's an extremely abusive
| manager.
|
| Work at enough companies and you'll see that a lot of them
| succeed _despite_ their "founder"/owner, not because of
| them. They end up surrounded by people who insulate them
| enough, clean up their messes, and so on.
|
| With a competent manager, it's likely Tesla would have long
| ago mastered things like "paint a car properly", not taken a
| decade to make a single-gear transmission that lasts more
| than 30,000 miles (and can be driven in heavy rain without
| risk of water ingestion) and "have body panels align the same
| on the left side of the car as on the right", as well as not
| faced the huge production problems they did because Musk was
| obsessed with switching to automated production.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Why not by ship? Was the area completely inaccessible due to the
| ice? Too far from shore?
|
| I'm sure they thought of it, I just wonder why it was ruled out.
| walrus01 wrote:
| most of the year it's frozen over, the barge transport season
| to take things to nunavut is very short.
| worldsoup wrote:
| These stations are all along the Northwest Passage which was
| extremely inaccessible back then, especially for the large
| commercial shipping that would be needed. It's become much more
| accessible recently with warming waters but still mostly just
| by small craft in the summer.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| > Oh, your pickup has a lift? That's cute.
|
| My favorite fact about land trains is that the tires were later
| reused on Bigfoot monster trucks[0].
|
| [0] http://bigfoot4x4.com/blog/bigfoot-5/
| exhilaration wrote:
| Fantastic link! don't miss the videos at the bottom:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGcFtWnPUOs&list=PLkNbuDiWyZ...
| smm11 wrote:
| Is Monster Trucking still a thing? Seems I'd see it all over
| the place a while back, and haven't really noticed a thing
| about it in 10-15 years or so.
| morepork wrote:
| I went to a Monster Jam show in ~2018, looks like they're
| still going: https://www.monsterjam.com/en-US/tickets
| jamescun wrote:
| > The VC-22 was quickly assembled in a little more than a month.
|
| Most incredible takeaway from the article.
| [deleted]
| DerekL wrote:
| The title needs "(2020)".
| frankus wrote:
| I read somewhere that these had a mechanism that made all of the
| wheels follow in roughly the same track, but I haven't been able
| to find an explanation of how they made that work. Anyone happen
| to have a link/explanation?
|
| Edit: Found this https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Steering-
| scheme-of-a-roa....
| [deleted]
| pimlottc wrote:
| Since it's not defined in the article, the "DEW Line" is the
| Distant Early Warning like, a string of radar stations in the far
| northern regions of Canada designed during the Cold War to
| provide early warning of incoming planes or troops from the
| Soviet Union.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line
| capekwasright wrote:
| In an episode released a few years back, Omega Tau spoke with
| two individuals who had worked on the DEW Line back in the day:
| https://omegataupodcast.net/248-dew-sage-and-the-f-106-delta...
| eggy wrote:
| It didn't seem to help Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze in the
| 1984 movie Red Dawn ;) Interesting NATO is disbanded in that
| movie, and the harvest in the Ukraine suffers for some reason
| (blight? war?).
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It didn't seem to help Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze in the
| 1984 movie Red Dawn ;) Interesting NATO is disbanded in that
| movie, and the harvest in the Ukraine suffers for some reason
| (blight? war?).
|
| Of course. The DEW line was mean to warn against a Soviet
| nuclear attack, but in that movie no such attack occurs.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Actually the downed jet pilot mentions DC, NYC, and a few
| other cities getting nuked.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Actually the downed jet pilot mentions DC, NYC, and a
| few other cities getting nuked.
|
| Oh, that's totally possible. It's been a long time since
| I've seen the movie, and I just recall that nukes didn't
| feature in the plot at all.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The Ukraine harvest suffering isn't as random as you might
| think. It produced the majority of the food for the Warsaw
| block, and avoiding a famine leading to revolution is a good
| reason to start a major war.
|
| NATO being dissolved is pretty deterministic as well. The
| average American in 1984 couldn't conceive of the Russians
| actually making it all the way over to the US. Nuking the US,
| but not a successful land invasion. So there had to be some
| reason the US got weaker. NATO dissolving doesn't put any
| blame for that on the US, which is important for a flag-
| waving film.
| aksss wrote:
| > Average American in 1984 couldn't conceive....
|
| "Couldn't conceive" is pretty strong - it was the era of
| the Cold War, GI Joe, a hangover from the Cuban Missile
| Crisis, the contras. Maybe accurate to say the average
| American would find it highly improbable, and our eventual
| victory always assured because Chuck Norris, Rambo, and the
| inherent virtue of our cause against totalitarianism.
|
| Anyway, I think the paratroopers that appear in Red Dawn
| are from Cuba or a socialist country in Central/South
| America, right? Which isn't terribly far-fetched in the
| context of the eighties imagination - maybe more accessible
| idea than a Soviet D-Day-style invasion. Also not out of
| line in history - didn't the Germans court the Mexicans in
| WWII? The French during the Civil War (I use the word
| "court" loosely with the French 'intervention', but hell,
| we got a holiday out of it).
|
| The film was marketed saying that no foreign invasion of US
| soil had happened, though it ignored the Japanese invasion
| of Alaska. The "average American" probably still doesn't
| think of Alaska very often except for reality TV, much less
| its history.
|
| https://www.archaeology.org/issues/433-2107/letter-
| from/9780...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > So there had to be some reason the US got weaker. NATO
| dissolving doesn't put any blame for that on the US, which
| is important for a flag-waving film.
|
| I don't recall exactly where I read it (it was some
| interview or something with the people who made the movie
| 10+ years ago), but I think it was a little more extreme
| than that. IIRC, (the perhaps unstated) bit of the
| backstory was domino theory was true and the US was badly
| on the wrong end of it. The NATO dissolving thing was just
| part of the picture.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Of course, that was the Cubans that invaded.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Of course, that was the Cubans that invaded.
|
| In the backstory for the movie it wasn't just the Cubans.
| The Russians directly led it, and also Mexico went
| Communist and the invasion actually proceeded from there,
| so I'd assume Mexican forces participated as well. That
| would have been obscured because the main antagonist
| characters were a Russian commander and a Cuban commander.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn#Plot:
|
| > In an alternate 1980s, the United States is strategically
| isolated after NATO is disbanded. At the same time, the
| Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies aggressively
| expand. In addition, the Ukrainian wheat harvest fails
| while a socialist coup d'etat occurs in Mexico.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| It's like the exact story happened in reverse
| jacquesm wrote:
| Except for the small detail that nobody cares about
| invading Russia.
| macintux wrote:
| China might, as Siberia warms and Russia's military
| forces are depleted.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| No, China has no interest in this.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Invading, no, but regime change? Absolutely (see Western
| involvement in the Russian civil war and, well, all of
| the cold war)
| wombatpm wrote:
| Tom Cruise was not in Red Dawn
|
| In the 1984 movie, paratroopers dropped from supposed
| commercial flights, which was the approach the USSR used for
| their 1980 invasion of Afghanistan
|
| Nukes were used later against the Chinese, which was why
| there were 500 million screaming Chinese in our side. 13 year
| old me was a big fan of the movie.
|
| John has a big mustache. The chair is against the wall.
| mzs wrote:
| The Soviets did not parachute from commercial flights
| during Storm-333.
| skmurphy wrote:
| I had to look up "John has a long mustache. The chair is
| against the wall. " They are explained in this blog post.
| https://www.housemorningwood.com/red-dawn-code-words-and-
| wol...
|
| "John has a long mustache" is a callback to the movie "The
| Longest Day" as a signal to French Resistance.
| aksss wrote:
| Tom Cruise wasn't in Red Dawn, as I recall - maybe thinking
| about Charlie Sheen (the discount Tom Cruise)? Yes, wheat
| harvest fails in Ukraine, coup in Mexico, NATO disbanded.
| Cuban paratroopers in the first wave if I recall correctly.
| Still a highly enjoyable movie - one of the best eighties
| adventure flicks.
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