
The Longest Conveyor Belt - NewHatMatt
http://www.conveyorbeltguide.com/LongestBelt.html
======
gk1
From the homepage:

> "On 15th September 2013, the ConveyorBeltGuide has been online for 10
> years."

Wow, that is some serious dedication. Assuming there are no ulterior motives--
and I don't see evidence of any--it's wonderful to see someone so dedicated to
sharing such intricate knowledge with anyone who's interested. And it's not
abandoned, either; the disclaimer page notes that all videos on the site have
been updated to HTML 5.

~~~
1_player
That's what I miss the most from pre-Web 2.0 Internet, the Geocities era:
there were a lot of small and manually curated sites (as opposed to news
aggregators and SEO spam sites) on any kind of topic.

Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but the
vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real depth
and passion in it.

~~~
greyfade
> Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but
> the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real
> depth and passion in it.

Mostly because the Wikipedians won't even allow it (whether due to a lack of
references or because it's not "relevant-" or "notable-enough") in the first
place.

~~~
1_player
And for a good reason: your grandfather's recollection of WWII, for example,
has no place in an encyclopedia, but it's surely more interesting and possibly
instructive than reading about it from a history book. I'm saddened we're
losing this.

~~~
girvo
It doesn't have a place in an encyclopedia, for sure, but I posit that
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It was supposed to be, and ostensibly
started as one, but the amount of content that gets placed into it (and then
removed by the mods...) shows that a sizable amount of Wikipedia users use it
as a "knowledge repository" instead, which I think is subtly different.

I mean, I wish we could collate the entire set of human knowledge into one
place, however Wikipedia says that it doesn't want to be that place. The thing
is, when you've already got 100,000 word treatises on Sailor Moon due to some
Admin/Mod having that as his/her pet topic, it smacks of elitism, favoritism
and hypocrisy.

~~~
drblast
Wikipedia is rather disappointing, particularly on engineering and math
topics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conveyor_belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conveyor_belt)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-
Man_(2012_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-
Man_\(2012_film\))

~~~
dublinben
What more is there to say about conveyor belts?

It shouldn't be surprising that a major motion picture would have a detailed
page written.

------
erjiang
I shouldn't be surprised, but the second was already mapped in
OpenStreetMap,[0] and I've now added the first.[1]

Unfortunately, the default renderer doesn't know how to draw a line of
"man_made=conveyor_belt"...

[0]
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/202757736](http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/202757736)

[1]
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/278131952](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/278131952)

------
bhhaskin
Imagine being lost in the middle of nowhere. Then all of a sudden, conveyor
belt.

~~~
baddox
I'd probably hop on. It has to go somewhere, after all. Unless it's the
world's largest circular conveyor belt.

~~~
beachstartup
i would try to follow it, but i would definitely not hop on. especially if
it's carrying rocks. nothing good happens to rocks on a conveyor belt.

~~~
ertdfgcb
Something tells me a 35 km conveyor belt is moving slowly enough to give you
plenty of time to hop off before the big crushing thing.

~~~
prawn
Likely true for those longer ones but the site notes a 54 km/h conveyor belt
in Germany. That could be a bit risky...

~~~
marssaxman
Oh, my. Suddenly I want to go find one of these things and hitch a ride on it.

------
Schwolop
This reminds me of one Rio Tinto executive's dismissal of their $70M dollar
purchase of a set of autonomous Komatsu haul trucks as "a very expensive
reconfigurable conveyor belt".

~~~
patdennis
For those of you who, like me, didn't know that autonomous mining trucks
existed, here's a video of them in action

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHtMNFZLMWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHtMNFZLMWE)

~~~
robmcm
For those who have YouTube blocked at work:
[http://www.komatsu.com.au/AboutKomatsu/Technology/Pages/AHS....](http://www.komatsu.com.au/AboutKomatsu/Technology/Pages/AHS.aspx)

------
bigd
I always wonder what would have happened if humanity had invested in conveyor
belts instead of cars and roads for the last 100 years. I can't shake away the
sensation that it could have been a better call.

~~~
gizmo686
In Asimov's I Robot books, Earth has a public transport system based on
conveyor belts. A 'highway' would have many lanes running next to each other,
gradually getting faster as you moved towards the inner lanes.

When I first read that book, I thought it seemed like a lot of wasted space
because of the amount of parallel lanes you would need to achieve highway
speeds. Then I started driving and noticed how wide our highways already are.

~~~
mturmon
Hmm, are you sure you aren't thinking of the short story "The Roads Must Roll"
by Heinlein
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll))?
The setup you're describing sounds just like the one in that story.

I don't recall the same setup in the I, Robot stories (but it's been a long
time).

~~~
gizmo686
I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the fact that within five seconds of
reading this comment, Google took me from "Issac Asimov Conveyor belt road" to
[1], and a ^F for "Asimov" later I had "The concept of a megalopolis based on
high-speed walkways is common in science fiction. The first works set in such
a location are "A Story of the Days To Come" (1897) and When The Sleeper Wakes
(1899) (also republished as The Sleeper Awakes) written by H. G. Wells, which
take place in a future London. Thirty years later, the silent film Metropolis
(1927) depicted several scenes showing moving sidewalks and escalators between
skyscrapers at high levels. Later, the short story "The Roads Must Roll"
(1940), written by Robert A. Heinlein, depicts the risk of a transportation
strike in a society based on similar-speed sidewalks. The novel is part of the
Future History saga, and takes place in 1976. Isaac Asimov, in the novel The
Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequels in the Robot series, uses similar
enormous underground cities with a similar sidewalk system. The period
described is about the year 3000." [1]

We might not have conveyor belts for roads, but we are defiantly living in the
future.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway)

~~~
mturmon
Hmm, funny, I also googled with similar terms, but did not find the Asimov
story (which I read when I was a kid). I'm sure you're right, of course --
just amused at my leaky memory.

To your comment, yes, that is pretty amazing, to have my (our) intelligence
augmented in this way. Because just writing it down, and reading it once, is
not sufficient to remember it.

It took us a long time to understand the power of writing, and it could be
that eventual understanding of the power of search will also have vast
implications.

------
AceJohnny2
The coordinates listed for the single longest conveyer belt are a little bit
off. Here's the start: [https://goo.gl/maps/X2jg8](https://goo.gl/maps/X2jg8)

And here's the end: [https://goo.gl/maps/n0wvJ](https://goo.gl/maps/n0wvJ)

(is there a way to get coordinates out of the new Maps?)

And while I'm at it, a direct link for the longest combined conveyer belt:
[https://goo.gl/maps/3kz4s](https://goo.gl/maps/3kz4s)

Pity, no streetview :p

~~~
maxmcd
Looks like a decimal version of the lat/lng are available in the urls of the
links once clicked.

------
gboudrias
Not much to add because the article doesn't say much, but I do love these
feats of engineering. Those are pretty much 10 times as long as I thought they
would be. Amazing.

~~~
alelefant
The colors speak for themselves. ;)

It is amazing how long that is. My only experience with a belt was working at
Walgreens on warehouse truck days. Even our 60 foot belt continually had
product falling off of it. I wonder what kind of oversight is done to make
sure the items stay on it.

~~~
guelo
None, that's why you can see the phosphate spillage from space.

~~~
YokoZar
Still, it seems a little counterintuitive that it's not worth putting up an
edge or something.

~~~
kijin
If they poured crushed rock directly onto the belt, not much would be left
after only a few kilometers, what with all the curves, slopes, and vibration.
The belt will also be damaged beyond repair if you keep rubbing rock against
it.

So they probably put the rock in boxes and put the boxes on the conveyor belt.
The tiny guardrails on either side should be enough to keep the boxes on the
belt. Small pieces might spill over if the boxes aren't covered, but most of
the cargo will arrive intact.

~~~
tlb
How would you get the boxes back to the beginning?

~~~
saganus
Well, you put another conveyor belt going in the other direction of course.

Then you will have the TWO longest conveyor belts in the world.

Ka-ching!

[Edit: Typo]

------
ilamont
_One can easily detect it by the phosphate spillage south of it._

As a teenager I worked at the end of a delivery conveyor belt for a
supermarket. This was an unusual setup for a supermarket (but maybe for
industrial or factory settings it's nothing special). The supermarket is
located over a major highway. It's the Star Market over the Mass Pike/I90
outside of Boston (1). Customers had to take an escalator to the second floor,
and after shopping and paying, 2-3 paper grocery bags were loaded into a small
numbered cart. The customers were given plastic cards with the corresponding
numbers.

The carts were swung onto the top level of a double-decker conveyer belt. It
went down to the first floor (street level) and into a long, basement like
room with a conveyer belt and a road paralleling it. Customers would drive
their cars into this long room, pop the trunk, and hand me their cards. I
would match up the bags, and place them in the trunk. The empty carts were
placed on the bottom level of the conveyer belt, to be brought back to the
Muzak-filled main level of the supermarket.

The room was filled with fumes and noise from the waiting cars and the
interstate tunnel that was next to it. The incessant rattling and squeaking of
thousands of metal rollers on the conveyer belts was irritating, although we
got used to it (one thing I just realized -- upstairs where the customers were
it was an actual belt, which was quiet, but down where we were it was those
damn rollers, which were like 1950s-era metal roller skate wheels). We were
paid $3.65/hour (minimum wage at the time). But the things that worried us
from day to day was the cry of "mix" (human error, wrong bags placed in wrong
car) or a spill.

Here's what happened with the spills. As the carts came from the 2f to 1f,
they went through a series of turns, including at least one 90 degree turn and
a full 180 at the bottom of a decline. This spot was where most of the spills
took place. It was apparently unavoidable, owing to the layout of the store,
the location of the slopes on the belt, the road and loading area, and the
needs of the customers to get their cars loaded quickly. The nature of
groceries (heavy/light loads, multiple packaging sizes, etc.) and the
technology used at the time made it hard to find an easy fix to the problem.
Watermelons rolling around the bottom of the carts were the worst.

I don't have any profound observations about this, other than spillage is a
consideration for people who design and manage conveyer belts, and that the
cost can be made manageable for both small and large systems. And these belts
can be designed to last years or decades. The belt that we used in that market
was in use for more than 20 years by the time I started working there in the
1980s, and it (or a similar system, using the same route) is still in use
today, some 50 years after it was installed.

1\.
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shaw's+Supermarket/@42.350...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shaw's+Supermarket/@42.350556,-71.208765,19z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89e38291eaade731:0xab836219f578ebad)

~~~
lostlogin
For anyone interested, Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt
Kid" describes a setup like this too. It's a very funny book as well if anyone
is after a good read.

~~~
aqzman
>It's a very funny book as well if anyone is after a good read.

I think that can be said for all of Bill Bryson's books.

------
Theodores
A lot of fun can be had with conveyor belts. Unexpectedly turning one on
whilst someone is standing on one is always funny, whether in an industrial
'dangerous' situation or in some made-for-TV scenario.

Incredibly there is good money to be made in conveyor belts designed
specifically for film and television:

[http://www.canningconveyor.co.uk/videos/c/4/tumbleator-
video...](http://www.canningconveyor.co.uk/videos/c/4/tumbleator-videos)

In the UK people of a certain age can remember the conveyor belt of 'The
Generation Game', which always had a 'cuddly toy' on it, e.g.:
[http://youtu.be/pa4KoACYzyU?t=4m45s](http://youtu.be/pa4KoACYzyU?t=4m45s)

------
yitchelle
This belt crosses an international border. It would be interesting to see if
there are any border security controls on a conveyor belt of its contents in
both directions.

Anyone have any info on this?

------
elwell
the phosphate trail the wind blew on the ground:
[http://goo.gl/maps/j9wnh](http://goo.gl/maps/j9wnh)

------
seany
For the bay area locals there's a decent length conveyor system in the Santa
Cruz mountains that runs into the cement plant in Davenport. It's hard to
gauge the size of it with out trespassing, but you drive over it if you are on
Bonny Dune Rd.

~~~
TylerE
2 miles, more or less, at least that's what I get eyeballing it:
[http://goo.gl/maps/QQKqa](http://goo.gl/maps/QQKqa)

