Man Builds His Own Subway 174
jerryjamesstone writes "Everybody is into rail these days; it is the greenest way to get around next to a bike. Leonid Mulyanchik has been into it for years since before the Berlin Wall fell, since before the first Macintosh, building his own private underground Metro railway system. English-Russia says that he has been doing it with his pension, that it is all legal and approved and that he is still at it. Gizmodo calls it 'Partly the traditional, inspiring, one man against all odds type of persistence, but more the obsessive, borderline insane persistence.'"
Update: 06/02 07:33 GMT by T : And if you're the type to visit Burning Man, you can actually ride a home-made monorail this summer, too.
Interesting (Score:2)
Remind anyone of The Nite Owl, from Watchmen?
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It reminds me Cray supercomputers creator digging a tunnel under his home where he said he would find solutions to his problems while getting visited by elves ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray#Personal_life [wikipedia.org]
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
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You sure about that? What about the environmental cost of growing more food for the biker to do his biking?
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Cmon man, get with the times. Everyone knows Soylent Green is the best way to eat green.
It even has green in the name, that way you know it's good.
I bike to work on my made from fallen trees wooden bike, where I work at a recycling center re-using discarded plastics to make art, then I eat my yummy soylent green-brand gruel. It's fantastic.
Cmon, slashdot, go green, you jerks!
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hell, sometimes its blue, and sometimes purple. So we should get to work on that
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
not everyone likes the taste of soylent green. It varies from person to person.
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1.62 kJ/(kmkg)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Energy_efficiency [wikipedia.org]
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The proper response is "Why more calories? You would have wasted them anyway."
A lot of people eat, store, and proceed to waste 1500 calories a day while severely raising their risk for health problems. The bike transportation solves all of these issues, and requires no "extra" calories unless you were already on a reduced calorie diet. The only downsides are dangerous roads (probably thanks to someone gorging a 1500 calorie "value meal" while steaming down the road in their SUV paying no attention to any
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It's not just the exercise, or it wouldn't affect people in cars.
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It isn't as obvious as you state for everyone. Like it is for you. But generally it is a cost per mile. IE over the 5k miles I put on my road bike I replaced at least 5 rims*$150, 50 tubes*$15, and thus cost more to operate over those same miles as my car (lower maintenance wouldn't let me go as fast, granted, my choice). And the maintenance on the trails was just as extensive for the bikes as when the trails were used for trains. So the trains may make 1 million people miles before maintenance, no acc
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It isn't as obvious as you state for everyone. Like it is for you. But generally it is a cost per mile. IE over the 5k miles I put on my road bike I replaced at least 5 rims*$150, 50 tubes*$15
You're very unlucky, or perhaps need more air in your tyres. I've cycled 6000km in the last year-and-a-bit, and repaired one tube (puncture repair kit: £1). I haven't replaced any rims, as I have disc brakes.
Also, I don't see any inner tubes [wiggle.co.uk] costing $15; maybe bike stuff's expensive in the USA. You can buy cheap ones for £1 here, although I would probably spend ~£4.
And the maintenance on the trails was just as extensive for the bikes as when the trails were used for trains.
Hell no! Round here they run a special measurement train over every track every two weeks, measuring for twists and slips in t
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Never mind that whenever the biker needs to purchase something too heavy or bulky for the bike, he drives a car. Whereas the train rider can bring with him a couple of suitcases, a floor lamp, a pair of skis with little problem.
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I haven't owned a car for many years now. I use a backpack for shopping; works just fine. When I need to move something large, I go all communist and rent a farking car; why own for all 365days a year when I only need one for approx 2 of them? I hear that "what if I want to move something big" argument from people with trucks quite often...who, despite the argument, have spotless truck beds that tell a tale of never having been used to move something big. Bike+car rentals...it's not a complicated concep
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Never mind that whenever the biker needs to purchase something too heavy or bulky for the bike, he drives a car. Whereas the train rider can bring with him a couple of suitcases, a floor lamp, a pair of skis with little problem.
Why can't the cyclist take the train for a day? That's what I do...
(Alternatively, I'd get the bulky item delivered, or use a taxi.)
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I ride my bike 21.9 miles each way to work. I could take the train, but it's not as green as riding my bike.
I think you need to look at it from a distance vs. greenness perspective. For the shorter commute (22 miles is on the very outside of what I would call a short commute) a bike is greener. For a longer commute (30+ miles) where biking is not really a viable option, a train might be a greener solution as compared to the only other option of driving a car.
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I think you need to look at it from a distance vs. greenness perspective. For the shorter commute (22 miles is on the very outside of what I would call a short commute) a bike is greener.
I think you need to realise 22 miles is not considered a short commute (even on the outside) in any country, anywhere, anytime, except in yours.
If the GP wants to be greener he should live closer to work.
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Stupid Idjit. Here in California a short commute is 30 miles that takes 45 minutes on the freeways. Now tell me another tale about what constitutes a short commute in the United States.
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Did you miss the bit where I said "in any country ... except in yours"?
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Come to Amsterdam. Se bicycling in all its urban glory!
I kid you not, man. There are at least 7000 bicycles, piled up in front of the Centraal train station, alone - any time, day or night.
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You're not kidding either. Even in the middle of the winter, I was standing outside of the Hotel Ibis, and I couldn't believe how many bicycles were there.
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I'm always forced to adjust to the bicycle's imminent right-of-way in NL - over man, beast and machine.
Step back! Here come bikes!
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Why is it that when something bad happens to someone (e.g. bike accident) someone has to reply with the adjective "stupid"? I mean, when you ride 22 miles X2/day each workday, accidents can happen - because you were tired, inattentive, unlucky, there was rain, whatever. /. and yes I am new here :)
Yes, I know... this is
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I'm more surprised that when something bad happens, the victim often says "I was lucky", when if they were lucky it would not have happened at all.
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Just like if you suffer for many years from a chronic disease and then you are cured, you thank God for the cure. Where was he during all those years of suffering?
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That's a good start. Pick up a nice sniper rifle. With enough practice, you'll be able to do the same thing from far enough away where they already be laying on the ground before the sound reaches them.
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Heck, if you are far enough you may hit them before they even hit the cyclist!
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I'm not sure that I should really mess with the butterfly effect. If I stopped him before he hit the bike, it could adversely change the future.
Then I have to wonder, would sniper golf have the same effect?
Mind you, my version of sniper golf doesn't match what you'd find on the Internet. It would consist of two teams. To start, Team A has a golfer playing traditional golf. Team B has a sniper in a tree stand. The golfer plays normally. The sniper is to sho
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Yeah, bloodless games are for pussies! Try this game in Texas, who knows, maybe it will be incorporated in their new educational system [slashdot.org].
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Confirmation bias. You only notice the bicyclists that piss you off so you associate that obnoxiousness with all cyclists.
Here's an experiment, next time you take out your 2 ton penis compensation mobile try actually paying some fucking attention make a conscious effort to disregard your biases and see if you can't spot the vast majority of cyclists that follow the rules of the road (at least as much as anyone else does in this country, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish there...). You might just be
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Electric assist is great for extending "biking distance". Effort per unit time can remain constant (if one so desires) while the effort per unit distance decreases.
More topically, e-biking can actually be more environmentally sound [google.com] than riding unassisted.
That's a matter of choosing one's employers wisely. My current one self-insures
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and what about pregnant women, injured people, older people, etc who might need to travel to work?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two."
The train is not a Green way to move a single cyclist, but bicycles may not be a particularly Green way to move thousands of tons of cargo.
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Maybe not, but I believe you have just solved the unemployment problem.
Make the unemployed build bicycle bags?
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Or, you know, a joke.
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It is only a fallacy from a direct economic standpoint. There's still something to be said for the idea that keeping someone employed will increase (or at least not decrease) his skills needed for a later job, when there's less actual unemployment.
There's also all kinds of social benefits to not having a load of people hanging around all day. See the suburbs of Paris for an example.
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There's still something to be said for the idea that keeping someone employed will increase (or at least not decrease) his skills needed for a later job
It's possible to employ someone in making something useful as opposed to destroying something just to make busy-work.
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Who's talking about destroying anything? The OP was talking about moving cargo by bike to battle unemployment. Surely that's useful, in some small way.
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I don't think that burning tiny segments of the environment contributes a lot to the environment, or how it does not =}
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You'd be disturbing the delicate balance of the local ecosystem...
Just say that you are smoking because you're an addict and everyone will forgive you xD
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The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
Of course it's off. You are taking a blanket term which really means everything and therefore nothing and trying to use it in a comparison.
What does your 'greenness' definition cover?
Probability to remove a vehicle from the road, probability to decrease the duration of congested traffic periods?, manufacturing costs, support infrastructure, aesthetic impact,
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It's really hard to say. Most of the costs of the bike come from the high mortality rate of riders. These are very hard to compare to the more easily fungible costs of the train.
Does anybody know of really good statistics on mortality per mile for various modes of transportation and efficiency for various modes? I do remember that in the 1990s the 1e-6 risk for a bike is about 10 miles, car about 10 times that, and about 2000 miles for a bus. Subways would presumably be off the map for safety since passenge
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It's really hard to say. Most of the costs of the bike come from the high mortality rate of riders.
Especially when hit by the train.
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The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
Iff you do not count the greenness of the road the bike rides on, but do count the tracks the train runs on.
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In practice in most of the US (don't know about Europe), the energy efficiency of passenger rail is on the same order as that of the automobile.
Unlikely (Score:2, Informative)
...given the type of construction used and the state of the tools in the tunnel.
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If you look at the first link [treehugger.com] in TFA (not the Gizmodo one), you'll see it's by an architect who takes a very skeptical view of this story.
The obsessive, borderline insane persistence (Score:2)
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with a hundred owls you mean? Everyone knows that in the future instead of rats the problem is owl infestation.
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you'd end up with maybe a hundred.
... a hundred really freaking boring people.
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The reason people come to /. is to excercize and relax the brain at the same time. If you do not like 'borderline obsessiveness' aka going into a little more dept than Fox news or equivalent than what is holding you back on going oul-out stupid and discuss what johny the football hero did last weekend -_-'
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Indeed, that kind of persistence can lead to great things, see Ferdinand Cheval who spent 33 years of his life single-handedly building the "Palais Idéal" [wikipedia.org], from 1879 to 1912. He wanted to be buried in it, but the clergy wouldn't have it ; so he spent another 8 years building his own mausoleum.
I don't believe this... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't believe this... (Score:4, Informative)
The abandoment of those tunnels as well a poor maps led directly to the great chicago flood of 1992:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Flood [wikipedia.org]
Damn you kids! (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess nobody's interested . . . (Score:2)
Well... (Score:2)
This guy will at least survive the upcoming nuclear apocalypse, I guess. Should there be any.
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You've got it backwards - it's a lot easier for an underground structure to survive a nuclear blast (one direction, less than a second) than an earthquake (random directions, half a minute).
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I'd bet he'd survive a nuclear attack in those tunnels. The chances of a direct strike are pretty slim unless you're in a pretty obvious target zone, or you're just damned unlucky.
Historically, there's a better chance of being in an earthquake than a nuclear attack. :)
accomplishments (Score:2)
some people single-handedly try to build subways others put weapons on robots. It's all good.
in soviet russia train builds you! (Score:2)
in soviet russia train builds you!
Sounds like a modern-day Burro Schmidt (Score:5, Informative)
William “Burro” Schmidt started in 1902 and spent 33 years digging his 2087-foot tunnel through solid rock on Copper Mountain. About all people could get as a reason was that it was a "shortcut."
http://www.desertusa.com/mag05/sep/tunnel.html [desertusa.com]
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The First Macintosh? (Score:2)
I didn't realize that the Macintosh was as significant an historical milestone as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It really speaks to how materialistic a society we've become that we define events by the advent of a some product.
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Well, considering that it seems most people are beginning to forget what communist Russia was like, what Nazi Germany was like, what the holocaust was like (and it wasn't just Jews, although they certainly bore quite a bit of it, it seems)...
It seems that we are tending to brainwash young folk to believe a certain thing about society and people (generally, we're good people, and society is good, and we can all reach peace and happiness if everyone just "gets along." And don't criticize me, either). When c
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The Stanford prison experiment [wikipedia.org] - "Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early".
Meh. (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of these running under the Gaza-Egyptian border.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Funny)
Also, the Mexico-U.S. Border.
Gizmodo? (Score:2)
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DIGG had the SCOOP on this underground tunnel story... What's it to you?
har har har har har
Re:Trains? (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt anyone who's stood in a British railway station watching a diesel locomotive idling at the platform spewing out black clouds of particulates could really consider them 'green'
Your evidence seems to about on the level of "I know some guy who says ...".
Yes, diesel trains burn diesel fuel, with all the pollution associated with that. The key is that they burn a lot less oil than moving the equivalent amount of stuff via cars and other road vehicles. For the Underground, you're looking at the energy usage of the train versus the energy usage (and other costs) of each person on that train driving their own car.
The health issues are one of the major reasons most major cities make their light rail systems electric rather than diesel.
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Not to mention the fact that one train being maintained by professional mechanics is much, much easier to keep running at peak efficiency that the equivalent number of privately owned cars. Regardless of that the "official" specs are for a car, the average owner isn't a mechanic and is, statistically, well know for not maintaining things like tire pressure, engine tuning, etc. Regardless of whether it's well implemented in the case of London's Underground, if you wanted to improve the situation the first
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The health issues are one of the major reasons most major cities make their light rail systems electric rather than diesel.
Including London. The GP is, as we say in Britain, talking bollocks. The study comparing taking the London Underground to smoking compared only the mass of the particles in the air -- and the ones in subway tunnels are pretty harmless (dead skin and iron from the wheels/rails).
Diesel trains are still used on some rural routes in the UK, although two of the largest are to be electrified soon (starting this year, IIRC).
Re:Trains? (Score:4, Informative)
if you're running trains on a regular basis all day long you can pretty much guarantee that most will be half-empty.
...as opposed to the car, which, based on my observations as a commuter, is typically run 4/5ths empty?
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That would depend on your car. Mine runs 1/4 to 3/4 empty. I've seen plenty of SUV's that are 7/8 empty. The best I've seen are motorcycles at 1/2 to 0/2 empty. :)
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I think the meta logic is more interesting... 'emptiness and fullness is a crappy way to compare vehicular efficiency.'
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Probably more than 3 if you grind them up first.
Personal Rapid Transit (Score:2)
Fixes most of the deficiencies of the train and the car.
Uses less than 50% of the energy per passenger kilometer than a train does.
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I doubt anyone who's stood in a British railway station watching a diesel locomotive idling at the platform spewing out black clouds of particulates could really consider them 'green.'
Remember kids: Pollution you can see is 5x worse for the environment than pollution you can't see.
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I doubt anyone who's stood in a British railway station watching a diesel locomotive idling at the platform spewing out black clouds of particulates could really consider them 'green.'
Remember kids: Pollution you can see is 5x worse for the environment than pollution you can't see.
Especially if it's made up for the shitty tabloid newspapers.
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They use diesel on the London Underground?
No
Seriously?
No
Most subways are electric-powered.
So is the london underground.
Heck, most modern commuter trains run off electricity. Third rail, much?
London Underground actually uses a four-rail system [wikipedia.org]. It's one better.
I don't know whether to blame GP for jamming together two discrete concepts (diesel trains and impure subway air) in such a way that a sloppy reader may infer causation, or to blame you for being a sloppy reader ("similarly" != "therefore") and failing to spend five seconds googling to confirm your healthy scepticism instead of spending it posting "Seriously?".
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For what it's worth, when I think of British Rail, I think 'the combination of London Underground and National Rail that permits me to go pretty much anywhere without hiring a taxi.'
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I could tell you that it's the journey, not the destination that matters. I could tell you that after some time you'd be an expert at electronics and would gain so many different valuable skills.
But what would you need skills like that for? It's not in your job description.
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I could tell you that all of those skills could be acquired in a fraction of the time by checking out a couple good books on electronics from you local library. I could tell you that all of your points are rationalizations to explain away obsessive compulsive behaviors with delusions of grandeur.
But, what would you need reality for. You seem to prefer self delusion.
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I could tell you that it's the journey, not the destination that matters. I could tell you that after some time you'd be an expert at electronics and would gain so many different valuable skills.
You can tell me what you like; that fact is I already have those skills- and I would yet gain nothing from building my own internet. I think my time would be better spent building something new. Which I in fact am doing.
But what would you need skills like that for? It's not in your job description.
1) You have no idea what my job description is. 2) I do in fact do all these things, and a few more. See above.
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...I'm building my own internet. Yeah. Using whatever I can find, spare copper, terminals, old POS systems, switches, whatever. I don't care that there already is one, and that it will be years behind in technology, I'm just going to do it.
Its not the internet without pr0n. And Goatse. Just saying you got your work cut out for you.
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Please, even on old hardware you shouldn't have a problem hosting pr0n, Goatse, and still have plenty of space/bandwidth to host Rick Astley and Tubgirl.
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Fred Dibnah (Score:2)
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