Freight is the circulatory system of the industrial economy. Now imagine there's a way to more than 2x the carrying capacity of railroads in the US, moving more good 4x cheaper than trucking, and decongest the highways This is what @glidtech is building 🧵

Trucks dominate the US freight system. Roads are ubiquitous, publicly maintained, and trucks require a minimal of specialized loading/unloading. There are 160,000 miles of National Highway System in the US, but congestion burns $100bn a year in delays Highways are maxxed out

Meanwhile railroad transportation is 3-4x cheaper than trucking - you can move one ton of cargo 473 miles with one gallon of fuel, versus ~150 miles by truck Yet distribution centers are an average of 40km from rail connections, relegating rail to long distance hauling

There's 160,000 miles of railroads in the US, the same linear distance as national highways. A single-track rail line can handle 15,000 tons per hour, versus 30,000 tons/hour for highway. Trucks can pack close together, pass each other, pull over - trains can't. except...

The capacity for train-based freight scales super-linearly with additional lines, because the biggest bottleneck in rail line capacity is the coordination between trains. With every additional track per line you get more than 2x improvement in capacity, more like 2.5-3x

This is the big win with a rail car that can temporarily traverse off-rail to let other freight pass. Every single rail line effectively becomes a double-rail line. A vehicle that can move from a railroad to a highway for the last push to a distribution center...

Couple this with the fact that @glidtech is producing road-to-rail cars that are fully autonomous, makes for a massive win for the US industrial base. - cheaper freight than ever before - doubles effective capacity of existing rail - removes congestion from highways hell yeah