Will it work?
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/disruption-junction-startup-aims-to-replace-locomotives-with-autonomous-railcars
Having every car powered would sure add to maintenance woes.
Would there not be signalling concerns on some rail lines with a single autonomous railcar running?
Since it appears the first version to be for car load type movements, bulk or box car type, they're going to have to reopen a lot of spurs to factories and warehouses. Of course those that were built, as a majority have been, within the last 30 or 40 years, no where near a railroad track are just SOL. Until they develope their intermodal version.
The dispatching and control will also need to be automated. Railroads will probably need to become "open access" infrastructure companies, either in part (separate infrastructure and operating divisions) or in whole (only infrastructure).
Who's going to plug in the vehicles to recharge the batteries? How often and where? Will the shipper be responsible to ensure the thing is fully charged before leaving their facility? What if it needs to be recharged before it reaches it's destination? Whom ever owns the things will have maintenance facilities, but enough and properly sited to take care of them?
Possible? Yes. Practical?
Jeff
greyhounds Will it work? https://www.freightwaves.com/news/disruption-junction-startup-aims-to-replace-locomotives-with-autonomous-railcars Could ten or so containers of pork originate in Waterloo, IA, run autonomously to an NS IM terminal in Chicago, and then add themselves to a regular ole freight train for movement east? I’d like to think so, but I don’t think I’ll live to see it.
Few issues after reading this article.... It says the vast majority of railcars are waiting for locomotives... Incorrect. Out of North Americas 2.1 Million carfleet. 1.65 Million are private cars. Those cars are not waiting for engines to move them. Private carriers have various uses for their cars; SIT(Storage In Transit), storage of product, holding for product.
Also what's the increased tare weight of the autonomus cars with their batteries? How much will this eat into net weight? These independent cars will be designated as trains for track authority. How will that be achieved on a Class 1? Who pays for access fees? Where will these cars transload product at?
While it's an idea. Not sure if it's one that's feasible in its projected role as of now.
SD60MAC9500Few issues after reading this article.... It says the vast majority of railcars are waiting for locomotives... Incorrect. Out of North Americas 2.1 Million carfleet. 1.65 Million are private cars. Those cars are not waiting for engines to move them. Private carriers have various uses for their cars; SIT(Storage In Transit), storage of product, holding for product.
Well, if you consider all the cars that are parked in classification yards getting sorted and waiting to connect to outbound trains, you can "maybe" see what they're trying to pass off, but it's definitely a gross mis-characterization of how railways work and a "bit of a stretch" to say the only reason they're waiting is because they need a locomotive. The idea that autonomous railcars would solve that is just ridiculous.
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
And the corralry - how many locomotives are sitting waiting on the avilability of a crew to operate it?
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Just an attempt at applying the autonomous truck concept to the rails.
What's next? Autonomous barges?
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
tree68 Just an attempt at applying the autonomous truck concept to the rails. What's next? Autonomous barges?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Ken:. Surprise!! I agree with you that it could work if you can overcome the typical "can't be done" obstacles you are so familiar with.
With all the added "trains", would blocks have to be shortened to fit them all? If blocks are shortened, how will that affect trains of normal length? What happens on grades where they don't have enough power to get over them?
These guys do not understand the problem, which is aggregation and disaggregation.
They do offer a solution to the aggregation issue, short, direct, single purpose trains. Their marketing problem is that the solution can be attained with conventional locomotives. There is no technical reason that the IC can' run a day's worth of intermodal traffic from Waterloo to Chicago behind one unit. If these guys can automate their vehicles, the rail carriers can automate their trains.
The problem with their solution is that if widely adopted, the results will be many more train movements. On a single track line increasing the number of movements increases the number of meets by the square of the number of trains per unit of time. Can you spell gridlock? You can prove that to yourself with a piece of paper. Construct a model subdivision, say 200 miles. Assume time on duty not over 12 hours, say not over 10 hours departure to arrival. Space sidings say 30 minutes run time apart, say 20 miles. You have 9 intermediate stations. Now start dispatching trains. At 1 train per day have no meets. At 2 trains with 12 hour staggared start have no meets, but if both start at the same time have one meet. Add trains. Meets will increase as the square of the number of trains.
Even with double track, trains would be so dense that maintenance windows would become impossible, so third main track would probably become the default configuration on many main lines. Hot flash, track, signals and dispatchers aint free!
Mac
This was practical with John Kneiling's integral-train equipment using something like the BR 'wiggly-wire' control system... circa 1967. It becomes much easier with battery-hybrid power and effective CBPTC.
Part of the point, then and now, is that the autonomous cars aggregate into 'trains' to occupy the main and then separate (whether on the fly or in a yard) for last mile and then 'as necessary' probably with human attention last-mile. The idea of lots of little 'rail trucks' running around separately is a bit better than the original Pennsylvania State railroad in the 1830s, with electronics replacing the half-way posts... but it was unworkable for any particular scale of PRT in the mid-'70s and not much has changed since then.
The British slip coach
https://youtu.be/7NEwrjQtrKo
BaltACDThe British slip coach https://youtu.be/7NEwrjQtrKo
When I was very small I thought the New York Central ran MU trains to Harmon where a locomotive would attach on the fly to speed the trip to Chicago...
I like the general line of thinking. Just stand trackside along today's supposedly busy mainlines. At Berea or Rochelle, for example, where two vital double track mains cross or run alongside one another, you can sit for 2-3 or more hours sometimes without a train in sight! Of course there are plenty of less-busy rail lines that see far fewer trains per day, and in some cases where train counts are in single numbers per week. That's when the idea starts to make sense. Why shouldn't these rails be as truck-busy as the nearby Interstates!
- Ed Kyle
Ed KyleI like the general line of thinking. Just stand trackside along today's supposedly busy mainlines. At Berea or Rochelle, for example, where two vital double track mains cross or run alongside one another, you can sit for 2-3 or more hours sometimes without a train in sight! Of course there are plenty of less-busy rail lines that see far fewer trains per day, and in some cases where train counts are in single numbers per week. That's when the idea starts to make sense. Why shouldn't these rails be as truck-busy as the nearby Interstates! - Ed Kyle
Most of the daylight time when you are not seeing train action at Main Line railroad what you are actually seeing is MofW working somewhere outside your location. Daylight Dispatchers generally work in concert with MofW for those people to get all the duties they are required to accomplish - the weekly and more frequent routine inspections on to large gang operations such as tie & surfacing, curve patching (transposing and/or installing new rail) as well as rail gangs installing new rail. Additionally bridge gangs are working on bridges and need protection from trains.
The Big Picture is much more expansive than a rail fan can see from their own location.
Deshler gets, on average, 50 trains a day, more or less. That's an average of about two an hour.
As mentioned, sometimes you'll see a couple of hours pass with zero traffic on either line.
And there are times when Deshler is like a parking lot - three trains at South Deshler, trains waiting west of town (or east), and trains dragging through eastbound because the NorthWest Ohio intermodal facility is clogged.
I see a similar phenomenon at Utica when I'm there, although sometimes that's the "halo" around Amtrak.
PNWRMNMThese guys do not understand the problem, which is aggregation and disaggregation. They do offer a solution to the aggregation issue, short, direct, single purpose trains. Their marketing problem is that the solution can be attained with conventional locomotives. There is no technical reason that the IC can' run a day's worth of intermodal traffic from Waterloo to Chicago behind one unit. If these guys can automate their vehicles, the rail carriers can automate their trains. The problem with their solution is that if widely adopted, the results will be many more train movements. On a single track line increasing the number of movements increases the number of meets by the square of the number of trains per unit of time. Can you spell gridlock?
Well, they can't take the railroad to gridlock. And there must be MofW time.
But many rail lines have some unused capacity and this just might be a way to use that capacity profitably. Let's go with Waterloo, IA - Chicago interchange. And do not forget to add in Cedar Rapids - Chicago interchange.
The big Kahuna in Waterloo would be Tyson pork. I don't see one train per day meeting the market need. A telling complaint that I've heard more than once is that if a shipper is 20 minutes late to an IM terminal it will cost 24 hours delay because they'll have to wait for the next day's train. Not good.
With this equipment it MAY be possible to run inexpensive short intermodal trains east after each Tyson production shift. And possibly such trains could hold for a load that was going to be a few minutes late to the terminal.
The target market in Cedar Rapids would be breakfast cereal from Quaker and General Mills. These IM trains could "Convoy" right after the Waterloo trains.
East and south of Chicago the equipment could move in regular train service.
This would add four trains per day to a line that could certainly use some more traffic. (I'm counting the "Convoy" as one train.)
It may or may not work. But it seems to deserve thoughtful consideration.
Would the autonomous cars be unloaded in Chicago and sent back or would they be used to the destination? I'm thinking that would be a huge capital expense for something that is just used as a regular car for most of its journey.
Ken,
Yes, that line has available capacity, so congestion caused by many short trains would not be an issue in that case.
My main point is that if the railroad decided to provide the service they could do so now with existing equipment. The problem is either that the economics do not work with two man crews OR the marketing guys can't conceive of handling the traffic OR they can not sell the finance guys on making the investment in trailers or containers necessary to enter the business.
The industry has a very long wait for autonomous trains. These guys will go broke waiting for it.
Mac McCulloch
One thing to remember - railroads get paid for the revenue tons they handle, not the number of trains it takes to move that tonnage between origin customer and destination customer.
BaltACD One thing to remember - railroads get paid for the revenue tons they handle, not the number of trains it takes to move that tonnage between origin customer and destination customer.
Indeed. And railroad management thinking of revenue tons as their product is the reason why half of all surface-mode revenue tons go by truck. On a productivity per ton by any measure, trains cannot be beat. Or at least by the highway mode. Tons, however, overlooks the service component as to whether those tons are delivered in a timely manner. With each ton not smashed into a number of tonlets.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
BaltACDOne thing to remember - railroads get paid for the revenue tons they handle, not the number of trains it takes to move that tonnage between origin customer and destination customer. A
Why the distinction? If they were not paid by the renenue tons (or any other measure of quantity), how else would they be paid? Who ever stated that railroads get paid for the number of trains it takes to to move tonnage?
Considering that railroads get paid by the number of revenue tons they haul, wouldn't the same be true of UPS or any other form freight transport?
BackshopWould the autonomous cars be unloaded in Chicago and sent back or would they be used to the destination?
There are numerous areas this approach had promise, one I saw being in central New Jersey where many small palletizable loads could be kept off the road system.
As noted, capital costs combined with the issues around container underframes have killed most of the attractiveness for small dedicated modular rail. While there are potential advantages for 'BEV autonomous' vehicles, they are dangerously overlapped with BEV autonomous trucks as feeders to the kind of block stack equipment American Fuel Harvesters runs on the Aberdeen and Rockfish... with autonomous DPU-capable locomotives standardized to function being the motive power instead of proprietary gimcrackery.
Does a supermarket collect money for every ton of food to be scanned past their checkout lanes?
Some food tons are priced much higher than other food tons. Concentrating on gross ton-miles/train hour is what ran the railroad industry off the rails, according to former Trains Magazine editor David P Morgan.
greyhounds"For example, empire builder James J. Hill said in an interview with Frank L. McVey at the turn of the twentieth century ‘that railroad income is based on ton miles and the expense of operation on train miles. The object is to get the highest rate [operating revenue] on the ton-mile and the smallest rate [operating expense] on the train mile. In this statement is concentrated the theory of railroad management of the present day.’”
It does make economic sense... if you can get your customers to accept 'slower but cheaper' and you can, in fact, inexpensively deliver JIT on that timed schedule. That model goes in the can, with regrettable quickness and 'positive action', if conditions are, well, like the conditions at East Coast ports in the runup to American entry into WWI, now with the shipping-driven difficulty in the other direction. As greyhounds will have noted in his thesis, most of the difficulty stemmed from regulation preventing even the appearance of collusion (e.g. the pooling arrangements for car handling proposed in the months before the USRA 'takeover')
It's a bit amusing to see the breakdown of container handling in the far-less-regulated world of... well, post-USRA 2.0... although far less amusing to see a situation only remediable with carrots being addressed primarily with ever-less-relevant sticks.
What 'government' needs to prioritize is secure landing storage both within port facilities and within strategic 'turn' distance for dedicated shuttle equipment, combined with subsidized production of a 'Railbox'-style set of high-speed road-capable (and imho sideload able) container underframes or chassis. If there are sticks, apply them to 'underperforming' longshoremen and other port handlers, to expedite movement BOTH of loads and equipment in and out of the physical area where intermodal ship/shore transfer has to take place. Then be sure the off-site 'ports' where bulk shuttling becomes intermodal land transport are staffed by comparable longshoremen's unions... as an extension of 'ports inland' instead of some low-dollar version of 'inland ports'.
These not incidentally represent the first best use of either wired or battery electrification or zero-carbon motorization, as I doubt they involve more than nominal track mileage...
Ed Kyle I like the general line of thinking. Just stand trackside along today's supposedly busy mainlines. At Berea or Rochelle, for example, where two vital double track mains cross or run alongside one another, you can sit for 2-3 or more hours sometimes without a train in sight! Of course there are plenty of less-busy rail lines that see far fewer trains per day, and in some cases where train counts are in single numbers per week. That's when the idea starts to make sense. Why shouldn't these rails be as truck-busy as the nearby Interstates! - Ed Kyle
Sometimes you can sit for an hour or two and not see anything BECAUSE the line is busy and bottlenecked/clogged.
The be able to be handle a lot more short trains, capacity has to be built into the infrastructure. Running fewer longer trains, not more shorter trains, is the railroad's goal, which is totally opposed to the autonomous promoter's goal.
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