Why train is in this shape?

I am sitting in a strategic chair in my office. The advantage is, I can see all "shinkansens" entering, sleeping and exiting the Tokyo station from my chair. It is nice view - as approaching the station, they used to be in a very slow speed and my view is from 29th floor - it appears like a python moving on the ground. I have done little investigation about them and found that they are moving on wheels. Thus I started studying about the wheel technology and I was forced to learn that the biggest challenge in implementing a train running on wheels is the gravity and friction. When the gravity pulls the train down, the friction is getting powerful. Either we need to prevent gravity at the gate or kill friction on the track to achieve smooth running.

I was in the mud of wheel and shinkansen articles and realized that the "wheeled" shinkansen technology is stuck at achieving 500 Km/Hr speeds due to gravity and friction. That too after burning a lot of electricity or fossil fuel and contributing to global warming and sound pollution! Many scientists and engineers are still working to identify possible techniques to increase the speed further. (Oh! They ignored me! That is why this article! :-))

Thus, after googling for few minutes, I was able to summarize today's challenges as below:

Speed is limited at 500 Km/Hr

Heat and sound pollutions are a concern

An accident will end up in heavy damage including lot of life.

Needs lengthy platforms in the station caused scalability concerns.

Existing architecture uses a lot of complex mechanical designs making it very complex

Needs a very powerful engine adds up the cost of implementation

I don't know why I am so intelligent to get such simple solutions for these complex issues within seconds! Trust me, it took only few minutes for me to solve all above issues!

Here is my finding - the root cause for all above issues is due to the shape of train. Just change the shape of train and track; all issues are solved for ever!

What shape? What is wrong with existing shape? uh... questions!

Simple, change the shape of every car from 3D rectangle to sphere of same volume! Why sphere shape? Due to lot of advantages of sphere shape:

- High tolerance - even if it hits hard, it retains the shape.
- No Tires - makes design simple and movement flexible
- Low friction - compared to any other shape, the energy required to move a sphere is very less.
- High Mobility - due to its shape, it has an inborn tendency to ignore gravity/friction and keep moving
- Low running cost - as friction is low and mobility is high, we save a lot on the daily energy requirements to start, run and stop a sphere.
- Security – As sphere is having much higher tolerance than any other shape, the cars are resistant to damages caused by collision and accident.
- Scalability - We can stack the cars vertically, one above other - saves length of platform. Bring the sphere one by one to the ground, board the passengers and push to the track!

So what are we going to do? - we are going to replace every car in the train with a sphere. Inside the sphere, there will be a "floating" compartment where the seats are arranged. As it is floating, it doesn't matter whichever way the sphere turns, the passengers will retain the same position. So, now our train looks like a chain of spheres. Keep it in a track, don't connect any engine - just clap the hands and give a mild kick at the back - you will see that it started moving! This is sufficient for implementing a metro rail system - the station master can give a kick at the back of the train and it will reach the next station! No power, no engine, no electricity, no pollution....

For high speed transportation, use the help of an engine. You may have to design a tunnel to hold the spheres in place. Put enough oil as lubricant to make system further smooth. In this setup, I am sure that even by using an auto-riksha engine, we can achieve the speed of more than 1000 Km/Hr - that is more that the speed of an international flight!

So when you are going to implement this concept? ("Don't you agree with me?")