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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.

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Man Builds His Own Subway

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  • Remind anyone of The Nite Owl, from Watchmen?

  • Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 )

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      You sure about that? What about the environmental cost of growing more food for the biker to do his biking?

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Em Emalb ( 452530 )

        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!

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2010 @11:17AM (#32419732)

      "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.

    • 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,

    • 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

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by CubicleView ( 910143 )
        Not sure I'm on the same page, but I understood that we're refering to the "greeness" of a bike vs a train... I would have thought that taking a person out of the equation would be a net benifit to the environment. So it's just another category where bikes are more green than trains.
      • by Macrat ( 638047 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by vlm ( 69642 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by russotto ( 537200 )

      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.

      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)

    by dzerkel ( 89036 )

    ...given the type of construction used and the state of the tools in the tunnel.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      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.

  • You say it like that's a BAD thing.
    • Indeed, if you eliminated the obsessive, borderline persistant people from slashdot, you'd end up with maybe a hundred.
      • with a hundred owls you mean? Everyone knows that in the future instead of rats the problem is owl infestation.

      • by vlm ( 69642 )

        you'd end up with maybe a hundred.

        ... a hundred really freaking boring people.

      • 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 -_-'

    • 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 also found it hard to believe this one [ameritech.net], too, but at least the Chicago system has a well-documented history. Here there is just a couple photos which clearly indicate very different tunnels, neither of which seems adequate for trains larger than G scale or so; also look at the comments in TFA.
  • Damn you kids! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zill ( 1690130 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2010 @11:10AM (#32419614)
    Get off my subway station!
  • . . . in hearing about my missile silo.
  • This guy will at least survive the upcoming nuclear apocalypse, I guess. Should there be any.

    • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      I don't think any of those patchwork tunnels would survive a mild earthquake, much less a nuclear blast.
      • 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).

      •     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. :)

  • some people single-handedly try to build subways others put weapons on robots. It's all good.

  • in soviet russia train builds you!

  • by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2010 @12:08PM (#32420476)

    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]

  • Leonid Mulyanchik has been into it for years since before the Berlin Wall fell, since before the first Macintosh

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      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

      • "It should make people realize that they are capable of very bad behavior, and need to remember that and guard against going along with it, just because other people are telling them to."

        The Stanford prison experiment [wikipedia.org] - "Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early".
  • Meh. (Score:3, Informative)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2010 @12:37PM (#32420930)

    Lots of these running under the Gaza-Egyptian border.

  • Kudos to this guy for pulling off what many would call an impossible feat. I'm surprised gizmodo had anything good to say, considering they're such trolls I'm amazed anyone frequents their terrible site.

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