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[quote user="jeaton"] You might want to contrast that railroad [Rio Tinto] with the 7 US Class 1's.  95,000 route miles, 161,000 track miles of which 65,000 track miles carry over 20 million tons per year with a fleet of 23,000 locomotives.   Scale up the Rio Tinto project and I'll bet the price tag for the US railroads would be in the ten's of $Billions.   <div style="clear:both;"></div> [/quote] Well if the price goes up to tens of billions, wouldn't the money saved by the efficiency increase also go up accordingly? Here is my question:  Why did Rio Tinto spend $317 million to automate?  I assume there must be a return on the investment.  What is that return? Assuming that there is a return on the investment by saving crew costs, why wouldn't the automation investment be scaleable to the larger systems of railroads such as in the U.S. ?
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