>>1811471>>1811481Hear me out: Would a train work better or worse, half-submerged?
Let's assume that the locomotive(s) are suitably above water -or- waterproofed (air intakes, intermediate driveshaft to the electric motors, etc).
Put a stem bulb & bow on the the front, like what cargo ships have.
The buoyancy could be favorable, right? Like a 60K lbs car now 'weighs' 40K lbs. Pretty straightforward to retrofit cars with a water ballast tank, and optimize for buoyancy vs 'required rail friction' on a per-car basis.
And existing routes/lines don't have tight curves, so you could put some kind of 'fairing' on the trailing edge of each car, to hide the inter-car gap. Figure out some compromise between what's most efficient & what current infra supports. Put a lever on the fairing, two settings 'inner' or 'outer', depending on how the consist is pieced together. Make the lever/supports steel and the fairings suitably flexy plastic.
Also, since lots of lines are right next to rivers, you could have a sort of leat-style system, with a maintained water level on the tracks, pump the excess out into the neighboring feature. Or 'in' if levels dip.
And you could use the surrounding water as a secondary coolant for the engine, brake system, etc via an isolated intake & heat exchanger.
All of that stuff is backwards-compatible. So portions that are inside cities, etc could just be 'run dry' if necessary.
Cons?
I'm told things are slippery when wet, but isn't that why we have steel on steel? I'm no physicist, I assume there's some film of water that can never be "squeezed out" from between the wheel & rail. Potential issue.
Yeah... rust. That's probably the killer, or some kind of galvanic corrosion on the lower portion.
If anyone has Joe Biden's number, do post it. I think I can sell grandpa one hell of an idea.
And keep an eye out for my future Medium post: "Global warming is inevitable, why we should flood America's railways NOW."
