The Pankian Metaphor 3063

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006 08:36:48 -0600, Anne & Lynn Wheeler

Good transport system is essencial for defence.. Of Course if the enemy is that close, trouble is trouble. Examples, in 1914, the Germans had 8 tracks of railway running to the front in East Prussia (remember that?), the Russians had one.. That war was continued on after Tannenberg, with the Germans not advancing far into Russia, but grinding down the Russian army close to the German frontier.

In 1941, the Germans advanced deeply quickly, Russians close to their sources of supplies. When the Russian tank columns reached the main German autobahn system in 1945, they were able to advance rapidly..

True, but the road system is very adaptable. An atomic attack on a rail nexus would stall things a bit, trucks could use minor routes to bypbutt black spots..

Major cost in shipping is loading-unloading.. not such a problem now with containerization, but still the major cost. For long term projects, can be minimised, but with most modern industries, a truck can be loaded with your factory's produce here, drive there and be unloaded, even in subloads. Trains require that your product is loaded onto truck, brought to the loading yards, loaded onto train, unloaded onto truck, then unloaded into, say, Walmart. Politics comes in, most think that (train == good) and (truck == bad).. In a large country such as the US, the relative efficencies would be different. Once, when I was young, I could walk to the station, get train, get bus at other end, reach spare-parts supplier, and do the reverse the process. Some time ago, last time I did that, the spare parts place was 7 miles away from the train station the other end, so I drove there. Distributors are moving further and further from the cities, there are two major supermarket distribution centres within 7 miles from here, about 30 miles from the center of the nearest city.

-- greymaus Just Another Grumpy Old Man