Atmostrack General Comments
What is Atmostrack?
Atmostrack is a scalable transportation technology that readily integrates with other infrastructural components such as communications, water, electricity.
How does it work?
Atmostrack vehicles have no engines, transmissions, heavy axles or fuel tanks. Vehicles receive their motive power by connecting to tubes running below (in conventional layout) or above (in overhead layout). Atmostrack vehicles are therefore light in weight.
Atmostrack is powered by compressed air and vacuum: Compressed air pushing and vacuum pulling. For braking and speed reduction, the kinetic energy is fed back into the system and stored. This makes the system very efficient in its energy usage.
What does it look like?
To visualise Atmostrack, think of a large scale roller coaster (only a network of tracks, not just a single line), but without the overhead loops. However, Atmostrack is fully capable of loops.
Unlike every other overland transportation technology, Atmostrack is not sensitive to gradient. In some applications, Atmostrack will easily handle requirements for vertical travel.
Atmostrack does not need rock cuts or tunnels. It can snake up and over the landscape using the most efficient and customer servicing routes. A comprehensive transportation infrastructure can rapidly be constructed with very little civil engineering.
What sort of vehicles does Atmostrack use?
Scalable. From small 4 - 6 passenger vehicles through passenger vehicles the size of a large bus to freight vehicles that hold an ocean container or a loaded articulated lorry (tractor-trailer, or semi).
How about getting on and off?
Indoor, flat floor stations with no stairs! Read more at Atmostrack Stations
How could Atmostrack survive Californian earthquakes and fires? How could Atmostrack preserve homes and life when these disasters strike? Go to: Atmostrack California
Is it a derivative?
Atmostrack is based on the atmospheric railway system as used by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and others early in the 19th century. Although Brunel's atmospheric railway failed (mostly due to materials available at that time), nevertheless Brunel achieved better than 60 miles an hour with a train weighing about 38 tons.
Atmostrack considered the compelling advantages of the atmospheric power concept, resolved the design shortfalls of Brunel's attempt and applied modern materials and technology.
TheAtmostrack patent breaks the link between transportation and oil. Atmostrack uses less than half the power of conventional transportation technology and can use any source of power. Thus, transportation can now be provided by more environmentally friendly sources of power such as wind, solar, biomass, tide, wave, geothermal etc. It can also be powered by existing greenhouse gas waste such as oil refinery flares or methane from land-fill.
In above ground green field installations, the Atmostrack system can be fitted with a dynamic foundation that will make Atmostrack earthquake-proof, or, at least, highly resistant to earthquakes.
Atmostrack is a driverless system. Software is used so vehicles route themselves according to the desired destination of passengers or freight.
To see the Atmostrack advantage, see Atmostrack and Changing Britain
To learn how Atmostrack will contribute to the built environment, see Atmostrack and the Built Environment.
To catch a vision of how Atmostrack will help alleviate poverty and AIDS in the Sub-Sahara and other parts of the developing world, see Atmostrack and the Developing World.