"Each tube could carry between 400 and 600 letters and traveled at 30-35 miles per hour. In its full glory, the pneumatic tubes covered a 27-mile route, connecting 23 post offices. This network stretched up Manhattan’s east and west sides, from Bowling Green and Wall Street, all the way north to Manhattanville and East Harlem. Anecdotal stories indicate that the system may have extended into the Bronx, with sandwich subs reportedly being delivered via pneumatic tubes from a renown subway shop in the Bronx to downtown postal stations."
So some friends and I have a running joke/thing. Anytime someone goes to SF they are obligated to FedEx a standard tube filled with El Farolito carnitas super burritos back. A tube fits 5 IIRC and it works great. (This happens so infrequently I do not worry about it impacting my carbon footprint enough to the point I am judged in the afterlife.) It's not the same thing as a pneumatic tube, but it's the closest we could manage without talking to VCs. And SF-Manhattan is close enough to Alameda-Weehawken for me. Pro tip: no sour cream, add on remote end if desired and at all costs avoid getting your tube stuck in the mail room over a weekend.
An old friend of mine who visits SF periodically has certified that a mission burrito will make it through TSA, and always buys one at the last moment before boarding a plane, to enjoy during his readjustment to east coast life.
It's certainly playing with fire, but I've never heard of anyone getting sick after eating a 24 hour old burrito stored at room temperature. This is assuming that it's a not a super burrito (no cheese, no sour cream, no avocado)
If you ship them right before the nightly cut-off for delivery the next morning they've always been fine. I assume the cargo hold is cold, so that would help as well.
What I never understood: once you freeze the burritos, isn't the freshness advantage essentially moot? You might as well just ship them in trucks to the frozen-foods aisles of NYC grocery stores.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to begin.
> "Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away!"
Newark Airport is in a solid southwest heading from Weehawken. Final approach is either from the north, south, or a western heading over Jersey City to Runway 29, still south and slightly west of Weehawken. A tunnel looking east would see skyscrapers in Manhattan. Possibly air traffic from Laguardia, but it's unlikely, especially with pump infrastructure in the way.
> To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps.
Yet a few paragraphs later, they say "Mail would frequently arrive singed or deformed from the intense heat and pressure." What is it? Vacuum or pressure?
> Furthermore, advances in electrical engineering meant that containers would no longer have to be propelled by compressed gas. The burritos already came conveniently wrapped in aluminum foil - it would be trivial to accelerate them with powerful magnets.
The power required by these magnets to induce the Lenz effect in a burrito wrapper, let alone propel it, is too high for large-scale applications.
> At the tunnel exit, a final puff of air slows the burritos to a stop and they are placed in insulated bags. These are whisked to a fleet of waiting trucks, which pass through the Holland Tunnel (this time at a more stately thirty-five miles per hour) and then onward to restaurants and cafeterias throughout the five boroughs.
Why not the Lincoln Tunnel? It's actually in Weehawken! The traffic through Hoboken and Jersey City to the Holland is insane. Why didn't they just build the tunnel to Manhattan? It's a mile away!
This remains my favorite essay by Maciej, and a reason why I'm never completely sure how truthful he is in his other stories.
I've rarely laughed as hard as when this was read to me at my birthday one summer night after a few drinks. The sentence about the burritos "[tracing] graceful arcs into the East River, glowing like faint red sparks in the night" will stay in my heart for a long time.
http://www.c1espresso.co.nz/#!pneumatic/caqp
We have the technology!