h a l f b a k e r yThis ain't rocket surgery.
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I know we already have mobile homes. The idea is to have
whole communities designed around relocating north in the
summer, and south in the winter.
This way your kids would stay in school, with their same
friends. You would work for the same job. The mayor
would be the same, if you could get
a whole town to
movie. If you couldn't get the whole community to move,
you could do a neighborhood. You could try to move
businesses, and homes.
You can move a lot of weight with a train. If you moved
from the mountains where it is cold, to the valley where it
is warm, you wouldn't have to move that far. I know show-
low Arizona is cold, and Phoenix is hot. Maybe if the move
wasn't very far the energy saved from heating and cooling
would equal the energy used from the train that moved the
community.
The innovation would be the design of the community
managed by a business or government, that takes care of
all the logistics, that let you live in nice weather all the
time, even if you can't afford to live on the coast in a mild
climate. This would let you live, and be active, and play
golf year round.
I wonder if you could design them with configurable human-power sources and cruise along isolated stretches of track
http://www.shutters....com/pic-73811.html
[normzone, Jun 27 2009]
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Reminds me of the time me an' ma lady werked fer the carnie. We done moved all aroun' the country, wit all our friends in tow. But then ma lady ran off with that damn man from the fried cheese booth... |
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I know they are trying to bake this in boats with floating retirement homes, but it is impractical for any working community as trains couln't be made large enough to hold both housing AND businesses for inhabitants. The boats are even larger and simplify by catering to retired people. Also in trains you would weirdly create extreme transportation issues caused by the linearity of the arrangement. (-) |
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Every time I move house I say 'never again' ... it's all very well to move because you have to (say the bison have buggered off again) but I'm not sure that it would work just for fun. |
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Although ... thinking about summer holidays in Europe. Paris pretty much moves to the coast for a month, then comes back. |
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They even call September the 'rentree' - the 'coming back again'. |
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You could always transport a community in segments, reassembling at the destination. |
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A similar idea is proposed in James Blish's "Cities in Flight" series, in which he puts forward the idea of entire cities leaving the earth and becoming autonomous spacecraft. Moving communities around on the surface of the planet is small scale by comparison. |
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I like it, but there needs to be an economically viable reason for seasonal migration - all sorts of creatures from birds, bison and butterflies choose to up sticks every now and then - I might be tempted if I could find somewhere nice and sunny to work in the Wintertime, and come back in the certainty of work here in the summertime - that would be rather nice (especially if you could convince various tax authorities that you were non resident anywhere, perhaps by operating some kind of tri-mester scheme - but that's another story) but it's tricky. |
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So, what, apart from nice climate might be a suitably viable situation warranting trundling a whole town up and down a railway line every 6 months? |
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Well, unless you want to dink over your homegrown supply chains for fuel/food/comms/schools/etc. you'd have to bring those along too. Not nayin' just sayin'. |
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I heard that you are supposed to live in warm
climates, even if you have to run the air
condintioning all year long, because you are only
changing the temperature 30 degrees from 100,
instead of 70 degrees from 0. So in my mind, that
means we should all move to Hawaii, where it is 70
degrees all the time... |
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However, we won't all fit in Hawaii... |
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So I watch these train commercials, saying how
much they can move on a gallon of diesel... |
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Not very many people want to live in a
double wide, but train companies could probably
find stretches of track that would accommodate
extra wide loads... |
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Packing twice a year would be a problem... |
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So it would be nice if you could leave all your
furniture in the building... |
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It would have to be very modular. 4 or 5 units
would make a house... I'm not sure how they
would all interlink, but I didn't want to get too
much into the details... Someone would have to
design the houses, figure out how to move them
from the train, to where they would rest for 1/2
the year... |
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You would market to retired people, or those who
work on the internet... Not very many people
would want to do it, but I think we have 300
million people in the country, perhaps you would
start something like this, with 50 people, and it
could grow to 2 to 10 thousand... |
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[myclob], if you'll please just hit the [Enter] key twice every time instead of doing the ellipsis thing(...), or even in addition to doing the ellipsis thing, I would be happy to read that. |
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Thing 1: There are already houses available that are built from 40 foot containers, so sticking one on a train is no problem.
Thing 2: re //extreme transportation issues caused by the linearity of the arrangement// - if you park (dock? station? ?) the train on a circular or spiral track (off the main trunk line), and add folding walkways to be deployed, you can solve the 'linearity' issues (assuming the circular track is built to a standard at all sites).
Thing 3: Hooking up to local water supply, waste water, power, gas could be a problem. Carrying these services with you could be a bigger problem (back to 'linearity'...). |
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I wonder how much rail owners charge for private vehicles on their lines ? |
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// significant .. difference between ...Manchester compared with ...London? // |
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This idea would make sense for hurricane evacuation. A coastal town could roll itself inland for a few days until the storm passes over. The capital cost of the mobility would be high but the year-on-year savings of reparing damage would be massive. |
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Something bigger than a conventional rail track would be needed - it would mean moving units the size of a city block as a single unit, like one of those puzzle games where letters slide round a grid .... |
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This idea is simply brilliant. Of course you never take the homes off the track: you live in your box car (tarted up box car, that is) and just roll down the steps. The town doesn't have to be in a straight line: it would be much nicer to build the terminal tracks in a circle, with box cars going all the way around the circle. |
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In fact, we could build a giant railway that has tons of sidings with these circular Porto-Towns. This idea is really required by modern capitalism, in which labor is considered to be mobile. |
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This is similar to, but probably superior to, the sci fi version of this referred to as "tube racks", where you own a essentially a condo in a giant piece of PVC pipe, and ship it by truck to whereever you want to live. |
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Configuration is in rows and columns in a rack. |
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