Railways

The company that broke a Guinness World Record this year with its all-hydrogen train has just announced another world first. Stadler Rail has developed a fleet of train cars that can run on either hydrogen or battery power for branch rail services.

The steering wheel-less Klv-20 VW Microbus doesn't hail from an autonomous future, but from the railroad past. It is all original T1 bus up high, all train car down low – a very different way to take a Volkswagen van trip.

Country folk tend to like the independence offered by their cars, so how do you get them to use public transit? The Monocab system may be the answer, as it utilizes individual on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.

In preparation for a permanent human colony on the Moon, DARPA has awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman to develop a highly ambitious lunar railway concept. It's part of the agency's 10-year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study.

Hired to create a home office, Olson Kundig joked that it should be put on railroad tracks. After talking it through, the idea became a solid plan for a train-like studio that rolls down the rails to keep work and home life separate.

If you want to maximize the number of trains that can operate on one line simultaneously, it's crucial that you know the exact location of each train at all times. A new system is designed to help, by analyzing the magnetic properties of the rails.

The West Japan Rail Company has released video of its new humanoid heavy equipment robot. Mounted on the end of a crane, this gundam-style robot torso mimics the arm and head motions of a human pilot, who sees through the robot's eyes via VR goggles.

Work is underway on three new Zaha Hadid Architects-designed metro stations in Ukraine. The project will showcase the firm's futuristic curving style, and will acknowledge the area's history with a series of recycled steel entrance pavilions.

A California startup co-founded by three former SpaceX engineers has emerged from stealth with a plan to build autonomous electric vehicles to haul freight by rail, and has raised a sizable pot of cash to move things forward.

Why bother transferring between a bus and a train, if you could just stay in one vehicle that travels on both roads and tracks? That's the thinking behind a new dual-mode vehicle (DMV), which is slated to begin operations in Japan on December 25.

When battery packs in EVs reach the end of their useful lives, they can still retain enough charge for other applications. Nissan is replacing lead acid batteries in emergency power supplies at railroad crossings in Japan with second-life Leaf cells.