Greetings all. Just wondering what future freight trains might appear like in say fifty or sixty years compared to those of today. I personally think that they'll look something like the French TGV bullet train with streamlined rolling stock. I also feel that passenger trains will be quite a bit different than those of today and may travel at twice the speed of todays trains.
Tracklayer
Tracklayer:
Form follows function: Freight cars spend a considerable amount of time being loaded/unloaded. They also carry things, usually packed in rigid rectangular packages. Streamlining would be nice on moderate to long moves at higher speeds. However higher speed demand better maintained trackwork. The TGV, etc. move only on dedicated track, with NO at grade crossings.
As has been unfortunately demonsrated to often, few are willing to pay for all the safety improvements availible today.
I have often been wrong, but I don't expect many major changes in the next 35 years, which is about all I can reasonably expect to see.
Dave
None of us has the ability to foresee the future and in the time span you mention, I won´t be around anymore.
I don´t think freight trains will look much different from today´s. The biggest change happened about 30 years ago with the introduction of the shipping container. Truck design will change, to make them less noisy maybe. There will be less traffic, as people will print a lot of the stuff they buy these days, eliminating the need of shipping the stuff - maybe.
Passengers trains will be a different story. Rail traffic might increase as individual travel is likely to decrease. Trains will continue to go faster, but there are limits to which extent that will be possible. Speeds beyond 450 kph are technically possible, but not viable, at least not in Europe. I am not sure about the US, though. Unless there is a dramatic change in attitude within the next, say, 5 to 10 years, long distance passenger trains will either be extinct or not very much different from today.
Some trains may go faster in the future, but heavy loads going very fast would require retro rockets, not just brakes. Track quality is uneven in some areas and would not support high speed rail, unless a lot of infrastructure upgrade investment is made; ditto for many rail bridges and urban locations.
Streamlining along the lines of TGV and Asian rapid passenger trains is valid for high speed passenger travel, but those hoppers full of beets, gravel, and other weighty bulk products aren't going to care if they get to a particular destination 10 hours faster. The idea of streamlining mitigates against carrying capacity, in that those rounded edges and lower profiles mean less capacity per car, requiring more cars. And as has been already demonstrated, present railroad freight trains get pretty good fuel economy already.
Safety and utility vs speed is an argument that may play a greater role in freight car design than Syd Mead futurist-inspired industrial design, although such "looks" interesting and "cool" to many, including me.
Cedarwoodron
50 years from now the biggest freight train change will be no cabs on the locomotives since the trains will be fully remote controlled by the dispatcher for mainline and on the ground for local deliveries.
50 years from now, Amtrak is gone. Self driving cars will allow folks to travel long distance driving 24 hours a day, sleeping in their cars at night and working or relaxing during the day. Self driving buses will provide cheaper transportation for those who can't afford cars. Rapid rail transit will decline and only exist in urban areas with enough population density to justify the expense of dedicated rails and where auto traffic has grown so heavy that it is too slow a mode of transportation even with self driving cars and buses.
Paul
You will probably see some larger, slightly heavier freight cars as more railroads will be able to handle the heavier axle loadings currently going into service.
I'm a licensed civil design engineer. Doubling the freight train speed is and will be impossible now, 50 years from now, or 100 years from now--in the U.S. The laws of physics will not allow it, and streamlining the cars to reduce drag would not be enough, as wind resistance drag is not the real issue. Weight shift, steel wheel on steel rail friction, superelevation, and curvature are the geometric issues.
The issue in the U.S. is that the rail lines meet certain design speed criteria as is in the current condition. To double the speeds would require complete realignment of the tracks with enormous capital expenditures. These are privately owned companies whose stockholders would go ballistic if you even suggested the same.
Where it makes sense, and where traffic 50 years from now is expected to be there (because that is how long it takes to recoup the capital investment for major engineering and construction expenditures in the rail industry) you will see alignment "improvements": ie curve flattening, perhaps the occasional cutoff route, or grade separation of the railroad from all crossings for safety.
You will not see wholesale railroad realignment--the money to jump through all the environmental hoops and then construct a new high speed railroad with private funds simply does not exist.
For passenger rail, there will be selected high speed corridors in or between population dense areas (like for example Los Angeles to Las Vegas), but even then the financial investment will be absolutely monumental.
You would have to get the Americans out of their cars, which won't happen. You would have to change American culture and the "freedom" to go anywhere anytime in a car.
Europeans have 3 things we do not: 1. less cultural favoritism to the automobile and the "freedoms" it provides 2. much more governmental funding of passenger rail systems and/or rail systems in general. 3. densely populated areas that are more conducive to filling out passenger trains with full payloads.
Additionally there are countries where the costs of gasoline are so high that the price of gasoline, combined with lesser road networks than we have, "encourages" people to ride the trains, which also run to the minute on time (off Amtrak's owned rails, ours simply do not run anywhere close to on time).
John Mock