The AVT SolaTrek, Advanced Vehicle Transport, Transports You and Your Car…

SolaTrek was presented at University Nevada Las Vegas, UNLV, Transportation Research Center on Monday October 19, 2009. Click here to view a PDF of the announcement and click here to read the newspaper article in the Las Vegas Sun about the presentation.

Las Vegas Sun

Unusual rail proposals not likely to challenge existing plans

By Richard N. Velotta

http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/oct/16/unusual-rail-proposals-not-likely-challenge-existi/

Fri, Oct 16, 2009 (3 a.m.)

We have all heard about those two high-speed rail proposals that promise to whisk passengers between Las Vegas and Southern California in little more than an hour.

But next week Las Vegans will get a look at three concepts that supporters think could be the future of mass transportation.

UNLV’s Transportation Research Center and the Ward 5 Chamber of Commerce have held public meetings to explain DesertXpress, the proposed $4 billion steel-wheels-on-rails system that would link Las Vegas with Victorville, Calif., and the American Magline Group’s $12 billion maglev train between Las Vegas and Anaheim, Calif.

Both have boosters and critics.

DesertXpress backers say the proposal uses tried-and-true technology and that getting the train built is only the first step in linking up with the planned California high-speed rail network that would be built within 50 miles of Victorville at Palmdale. Eventually, supporters say, there would be a link to Los Angeles and Anaheim.

Maglev boosters, meanwhile, say DesertXpress uses 19th-century technology when 21st-century vehicles are available. The higher cost, they say, would be offset by less-expensive maintenance costs.

Backers say maglev, unlike DesertXpress, could negotiate the grades at Cajon Pass at the entry to the Los Angeles Basin and take passengers to destinations they actually want to go to.

But at 6 p.m. on Oct. 19 at UNLV’s Science and Engineering Building, maglev and DesertXpress take a back seat to three high-speed rail proposals that some say are being developed by visionaries while others say they are just nuts.

Presentations are scheduled by California-based Frank Randak, an advocate of AVT SolaTrek, a highway-decluttering maglev hybrid that motorists would be able to board while the train is in motion; Texas-based Robert Pulliam of Tubular Rail that puts the rails on the vehicle and the locomotion in a series of O-rings stretched across the countryside; and America’s Sunlight Bullet Expressway, a subsidiary of a Las Vegas-based operation that would blend rail transportation with electrical transmission lines linking cities with solar-power generation stations.

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