In transportation, bigger, longer and faster in many cases means better. Since economies ofscale in transporting goods and people can mean fewer trips, less fuel consumed, better equipmentutilization and lower labor costs, logistics providers have occasionally utilized transportationequipment with enormous capacities to gain the benefits of transportation scale economies.And with the continuing demand for shipping speed, some companies are designing ever-fastersystems to satisfy demand. Several examples of this are provided here.MOTOR CARRIERSIn Australia and several other countries, large tractor units pull three, four and even more selftrackingtrailers along long stretches of open road between cities in unpopulated areas with norail service. These long tractor/trailer combinations are also known as road trains. In Australia,road trains can legally be up to 180 ft. in length (although in some areas of the AustralianOutback they are even longer), barreling along at speeds of up to 65 mph. In 2006, the recordwas set in Clifton, Queensland, Australia, for road train length when a Mack Titan tractor pulled112 semi-trailers measuring 4836 feet, weighing 2,900,000 pounds, for 328 feet. Pictures of roadtrains can be seen at www.roadtrains.com and a number of great videos exist on YouTube.com.9RAIL CARRIERSIf you want high-speed, on-time train service, the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train is the only way togo. Started in 1964, the bullet train was an instant success, traveling 125 mph from Tokyo to Osaka
and carrying one billion passengers by 1976. Shinkansen trains now can travel up to 200 mph
between a number of Japanese cities and are kept extremely close to published arrival times—in
2003, the Shinkansen’s average arrival time for 160,000 trips was within six seconds of scheduled
arrival time! Now that’s customer service! The Shinkansen trains are only used for passenger service
and run on tracks parallel to the freight train tracks. The high speeds are extremely tough on rail
tracks, however, which gobble up about one-third of all maintenance costs. Pictures of these bullet
trains can be found at www.railway-technology.com/projects/shinkansen.10
AIR CARRIERS
The new Airbus A380 jetliner and the old Spruce Goose may be big, but they are nowhere near
the biggest—that title belongs to the Antonov An-225 commercial jet freighter. It was built in
1988 for the Soviet space program to airlift rocket boosters and their space shuttle. When the
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