JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

Here’s an interesting and pretty vision of the near-future of transportation–the truck-train. It was presented in the pamphlet Transportation of Tomorrow and its Relation to Society and Economics from 1935 (with drawings by J.F. Hickman) and presents us with smaller-version trains short-profile locomotives that hauled truck trailers where the “rail cars” could be immediately dispatched to a waiting truck at a rail head. On the one hand it seems to make a certain amount of sense if you figure the amount of time that rails throughout the country are employed, and that you could have a lot more rail traffic moving along them. On the other hand, you’d have a lot more traffic on the rails, which could lead to a of scheduling problems and delays. Also, once you got to the railhead, how exactly would trucks access the trailers in a way that was sensical and timely?  Anyway the convertible highway railroad train looks as though it would cause more problems than it would solve by re-inventing the U.S. railroad system on a smaller scale.