Fuvk it; still better than cars. The physics alone are an improvement.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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We have a lot of abandoned rail here in Canada. I've often thought about making a very simple low-speed "rail chair with wheels" that I can put in my backpack and mess around with for fun. Hooking up to old rails is cool, but not as cool as having trains. Bring back trains!
I can see this working in places where there's a single abandoned line and no budget to recover it. I've seen plenty of these in SE Asia. A small government investment (skip all the app bullshit etc) could make these work to inter connect small villages that otherwise would waste hours on shitty poorly maintained roads. If it can be made low-tech, I can see this being useful.
and unsurprisingly it's a german project, a country which is absolutely fucking covered in rural lines that are just rusting away
like, holy shit, can we stop branding everything that isn't a bog-standard train as "tech bro gadgetbahn"? this thing very explicitly has a specific problem it's trying to solve.
Trains are expensive, high-capacity vehicles.
If these small cheap vehicles can repurpose tracks in low demand areas, what's so bad about it?
exactly, i'm catiously optimistic because if this works it could be kinda revolutionary, if rural germans can be convinced to use some form of public transport that's a huge step towards weaning that hideously car-brained nation off the deathmobiles.
and the big thing with these is that they just run on normal tracks, so you can just.. start running normal trains once you see that ridership with the monocabs is reaching sufficient numbers!
Because 9/10 times they are awful, expensive, unused, and quickly shut down.
You don't see any of these niche techslop pods operating anywhere you actually go, because they don't work.
have you actually looked at what we're talking about, like at all? or are you just following the programming of "small vehicle=bad"?
okay so where do these things actually work?
They need public transport but they are too proud to admit it
See the whole video. Adam is using a clickbait title but the problem is actually a local Dutch government not the bros themselves, and the solution is a tram train.
But you see, this is a small capacity, on demand monorail "pod" that serve the purpose of antisocial that is unwilling to share a public transport like the rest of the peasant do.
I'm pretty sure this is just a way of utilizing abandoned rail lines that aren't fit for full size trains.
That’s exactly why tech bro solutions always have pods. Tells you a lot about their world views. Everyone outside their close social bubble is disgusting to them and needs to be separated from them.
But they’re not wrong. Look how many people use Uber instead of calling a cab. Look how many use Doordash instead of calling to order from a restaurant. Look how many use self checkout instead of going through an ordinary cashier lane.
People don’t want to interact with each other anymore. They don’t want to make phone calls with strangers. They don’t want to deal with strangers in person. They just want to push a button and get whatever it is that they want.
I think this is some kind of mass stress response to the alienation we all feel from living in modern cities. Of being sequestered into suburbs and having our lives regimented into school/work schedules. We’ve lost the sense of community we had from when we used to live in villages and walk around to get places and we knew everyone around us.
Any close reading of the subject of small villages shows they were/are hotbeds of murder
The bigger question is why? And is it universal or is it specific to some places and/or some times.
Like I doubt small Japanese villages are hotbeds of murder. At the same time I fully believe American small towns have a lot of murders. So it’s a pretty strong claim to leap to the conclusion that small towns cause murder.
Hmmm... lately I've been reading a couple Japanese authors, Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Yokomizo, in case you're interested. (Not all set in remote places, but part of the classic murder mystery genre within a very different culture from Agatha Christie.)
Now that sounds really interesting! I saw the movie Yojimbo recently and that one depicts a Japanese village full of lawlessness and banditry, but that was set during the samurai era. My impression of Japanese villages today is that they’re rather idyllic places, albeit boring and lacking job opportunities (hence the exodus to Tokyo).
I will check out those authors though. Thanks for the info!
Because people are to unpredictable. The self checkout computer may have issues, but they're the same issues every day. It doesn't have emotional breakdowns, it doesn't freak out over some product I'm buying, it doesn't bore me with small talk while not scanning my shit. The only thing I don't like about self checkout is you have to go bag everything yourself after paying and making everyone else sit there and watch you play tetris with your groceries. This same line of thinking applies everywhere because the root of it is the people.
As I'm typing this out it occurs to me that maybe we've done this to ourselves with too much convenience. This is what happens when convenience seeps into the service market. I want my interactions to be as seamless and convenient as possible. This necessarily means eventually removing the human element. The most unpredictable variable in the whole chain.
Glory be
Aside from it being built by tech bros, i actually like this. It could serve a purpose similar to public transport like car sharing (not carpooling) and rental bikes. This would be far from as efficient as regular trains or street cars, but those modes of transports need volume. As soon the population that uses the rail decreases to a point it becomes to expensive to run a train every one or two hours, often the expensive physical infrastructure remains while the service disappears. In those cases i could totally see this being a better option than heavily subsidising or totally removing trains on that section of rail. But to be honest, I can't imagine there are enough of those places on earth carry the costs to develop this tech, also because these cars are only the best fit if the abandoned line is a single track line.
I can't wait for the horse to be invented again! Then running, then walking, then crawling, then swimming, then floating, then not moving at all and then death!