Imagine wanting to go somewhere over-night and wanting to get a good night's sleep in the process. Each cab comes with a double bed than can be folded up to provide seating.

The answer is the Canal Sleeper Cab, CSC, which you can hail at train stations and by the side of canals. you just specify your destination, inspect the predicted travel time, pay for it and climb in. Then it send you, in your secure cab, along rail or via any canals.

In the morning you wake up and leave the cab, which signals that it needs a vallet to be prepared for the next day's travel. People could also be given recommendations on places they could get some breakfast and the like, which could act as a secondary revenue stream.

As canals only allow travel at 5 MPH it should be quite a restfull experience. Railways should provide faster travel and CSCs could be batched so they can carried in groups across signal-controlled stretches to the next rail or canal interface.

More adventurous CSC service providers could offer travel by river, camel or catapult ...
-- Aristotle, Jan 06 2002

Land Yachting http://www.halfbake...ing.html#1004630347
Same idea, different conveyance [phoenix, Oct 21 2004]

surely sleeper trains are baked or have they done away with them?
-- po, Jan 06 2002


They have been largely done away with, I believe, but it was the idea of cruising down a canal at night with automated locks (they would have to be upgraded) quietly working at intervals appealed to me. The railways part to extend the range (as not everyone lives close to the Grand Union Canal) and improve the speed for longer journeys.
-- Aristotle, Jan 06 2002


can the canal boat travel along the train lines? or does a squad of porters manually carry you off one and onto the other without waking you meanwhile singing a melodious barber shop sort of lullaby just in case you rouse a little?
-- po, Jan 06 2002


Now you have suggested cab would *have* to be transfered by those barber shop singing porters, possibly recruted by Aaron, the rejected railway worker from UK's Pop Idol series.

The cabs would have to be like those military amphibious vehicles, of course.
-- Aristotle, Jan 06 2002


5 mph? So you could only go like 60 miles per night. Wouldn't it be better to drive/get a normal train, taking 1 hour, and then go to bed? If you could find a way to carry a bed at high speed in the back of a van, without it rocking and bumping, that might be better.
-- pottedstu, Jan 06 2002



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