Electroliner 1935How would an autonomous truck carrying a high value cargo handle a gang that used three vehicles to "hijack" it by surrounding it and then slowing and stopping?
Guard riding in the sleeper has three RPG rounds.
I'm surprised you didn't just say 'one person standing in the middle of the road and holding up a hand'... there was a movie that showed it to be feasible. Cheaper than Uber, too.
He mighta flunked out of reform school, the joovinal delinquent!
Electroliner 1935 I guess that I have a little criminal mind.
I guess that I have a little criminal mind.
Is it all you've ever known?
Did they try to reform you? Did it not work because you're made of cold stone?
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Overmod It may well be that at some point the net cost of autonomous trucks in a fleet may become lower than fully-driven ones with little special equipment. I admit I'd like to see that come about.
How would an autonimous truck carrying a high value cargo handle a gang that used three vehicles to "hijack" it by surounding it and then slowing and stopping? They could then loot it and...
Keep in mind that a somewhat workable alternative is to make a pair of rails that run the length of a well/skeleton consist, and run the moral equivalent of an R-crane with extensible side arms and a quick jacking stabilizer up and down the train to 'where needed'. It then extends the arms and stabilizes where needed, links on spreader-fashion to lift the container up out of locking engagement, then runs the spreader laterally on the arms until it is over the chassis. The traverses of the arrangement can if necessary be run forward and backward in 'fine adjust' while lifted if the chassis is a bit out of tram or unsquare to the train.
Next logical step is to use angled pairs of rollers, so the moving crane is captive in 'roll' to a greater extent, and arrange the lift double-high, so the crane can take containers over the head of singles in wells to reach an alternate drop-off position either on the ground or on scaffold. This also eliminates most of the need to index the consist precisely to either storage locations or different heights or types of underframe; at least theoretically control over the spreader cables makes it possible to skew the container to fit those ridiculous underframes that always look like they're being pulled uphill. At least in theory, you could have multiple cranesets working one train, and with a little Dreamland-style tinkering you could even have 'nesting' sets that could leapfrog each other when operating 'light'.
The 'trailer' version was originally meant to have a separate sideloading lifter (e.g. the kind with large forks or straddle arms; Kneiling told me those would work and I believed in him) that could be folded up and 'stow itself' on a special car (or vacant underframe section) when not in use. This required a relatively enormous counterweight -- which was made in viscous liquid, with a high proportion of lead oxide or other chemically-inert heavy particulate in suspension, stored in modular tanks and pumped quickly in or out of the counterweight and the various balance tanks as needed. (In a modern container solution these tanks could reside as bladders in the hollow well-side beam framing, and of course be on more than one car to fill a given portable lift adequately.) This requires more ground area than a longitudinal scaffold-based solution, but little more than a leveled subgrade with clean gravel is needed for the trick to work in a given station location...
The original model was built primarily around speed - an overnight trip between a facility south of Washington at around 11:00 closing window to two destinations in the Boston area before about 7:30am. You can imagine why there was a benefit in restricting absolute dwell for any number of containers to that required to sideload only one. This was no more than a half decade after the great days of the Super C, so it really hadn't been established yet that people wouldn't pay for container-loads of guaranteed-overnight-every-night delivery.
What changed as speeds became more and more relaxed was more of an emphasis on the availability of 'regional rail' as a middle link in direct intermodal -- with or without retention of the intermediate storage framing. Here the idea was to have something like three-car modules (with one combustion engine, light-truck diesel or turbine as practical, in the center) which could negotiate light service trackage and industrial sidings and leads even with '70s standards of maintenance, and either be unloaded LCL or dropped intermodally on standard frames 'for later'. (I still think there is a market for this sort of thing in a number of industrial areas of non-consistent density, as in northern and central New Jersey, where road access is a difficult and potholed sort of thing...)
There have been a number of interesting vertical-jack solutions for how you keep a container 'loadable' off the ground for truck access -- the 'usual solution' has someone of superhuman skillz backing the underframe between the jacking legs without hitting any part of either the legs or the container, which I have never found attractively risk-free in Jersey weather or circumstances. These do have a certain austere charm in being technically field-portable: think of a long column with an adequately stiff tubular jackscrew inside, which locks to the top and bottom corner castings on the sides. They don't really require motorized or air support for fine adjustment, either. But I don't see that these have ever caught on as anyone's preferred alternative to, say, trailers at a dock or containers that can be sat on wood on the ground, the latter handled by some version of a rack-arm truck like a Dumpster loader and the load dunned in appropriately.
Paul_D_North_Jr Learned a lot of things I didn't even know to look for. Too bad we can't have these discussions with video or at least screen-sharing.
Learned a lot of things I didn't even know to look for. Too bad we can't have these discussions with video or at least screen-sharing.
We could, just download Zoom. Then the Chinese spies can watch and learn too!
Thanks much for that thorough and informative critique, Overmod. Learned a lot of things I didn't even know to look for. Too bad we can't have these discussions with video or at least screen-sharing. I can see the merits of a portal crane. Not quite as mobile or simple of a system as Kneiling would have liked, but I can see now that viewed as a system they are simpler and more effective than the sideloaders (can I say Rube Goldberg?). On possible problem with them is requiring a running surface that is very stable, at a reasonable grade (don't think it has to be dead level - should be able to work on any reasonable railroad grade), and reasonably level or a constant lateral slope. That said, it looks like it wouldn't be too expensive to set up a terminal with a parallel road and storage area beyond, rather than the monster portal cranes that are in vogue at the major IM terminals.
- PDN.
https://hammarlift.com/why-sideloader/
The Hammarlift is kind of like the Walker Mower of intermodal transfer devices: weirdly complex, hell to adapt or maintain, expensive as hell too (and you need two of them, plus equipment to coordinate them, to lift a single container), lots of nonstandard stuff to learn about using. It is hard to imagine having enough of these to service a train of any particular length, or accepting the tare-weight penalty of carrying them around on other than a yard underframe (which defeats the primary purpose of quick parallel sideloading right at square one!)
You will note that it is capable of lifting a container onto one that is already ground-parked. There is little additional lift involved in a container in a bottom well, so at least theoretically you could access double-stacks that way. The sling-chain method makes a certain amount of longitudinal alignment a bit less critical for unloading; I'm less certain about how well the required careful loading on twistlocks or passive fittings might be if the necessary speed is involved.
Needless to say, most accidents that could occur with these things are like crane accidents; you'll get tipovers, hydraulic blowouts or freezes, broken or disconnected slings -- and anything that breaks is effectively a showstopper, perhaps not permitting even recovery equipment easy access. In my opinion the risk of personal injury is just ridiculous; look at all the tight scissor joints and potential motion, and the setup to actually move containers that might not have even loading.
https://www.steelbro.com/products/ - this is really much the same as the Hammarlift, except now built halfway around the world from North America instead of just being ridiculously far. Again the thing has to be provided on the chassis and toted around, again it involves a dedicated source of power sufficient to run large hydraulics, again it requires careful deployment to use and then again to stow, again you have the need for careful pad leveling and stability against lateral shifting or rotation, again there is not even the hope of automatic lock-on for lifting and you have hand-manipulated chains, not even particularly robust-looking chains, taking all the lifting force (and God help you if you leave them in salt atmosphere for a few years, or strain them without noticing...)
Good way to make a small fortune in intermodal, providing you have a very large one to start with. If you were taking high-value commodities to places deep in the desert, or in oilfields, or whatever, this would be a potentially valuable way to place them ... if you can arrange to drive the chassis right up next to where you intend to place the container. Very precisely. And then drive it out again.
https://www.swinglift.co.nz/products/
Here at least you have something welded to your trailer underframe that is capable of bridging over... well, at least certain kinds of underframe. Provided you have pads, foundation, etc. etc. etc. for the now vastly higher load on the far end of what has become a portal frame. With the added stability they can now fairly safely accommodate a double-stack lift, and at least in principle load one 'up there' as well as pop it. The immediate catch is that as long as even one of these things is working, the train probably can't move; if there is any railing or brake wheel or whatever projecting above the well siderails it will catch, and probably significantly damage that portal frame (which does not look at all strong in lateral deflection). I suspect that even a little lateral damage might prevent the frame from hydraulically lifting, in which case you now have a very expensive train-retention system that will be difficult to 'release' effectively. I would no more consider this for a container-train operation I was going to have to pay for than I would take the People's Temple up on a refreshing drink.
Beyond that, all the capital costs, non-parallel operation, underframe-specific heavy equipment, etc. are present just as for the 'other' solutions.
The whole initial point of sideloading is to be able to lift and place containers quickly without a bunch of specialized Mickey Mouse manipulation any failure during which brings your day to a non-mobile close. None of these systems even attempt to do what a simple portable portal crane with spreader would do almost in its sleep, perhaps two-high. (See the British postwar tech film about the A4 to see the sort of crane that would be the 'default' for this, requiring little more setup than a couple of rails or some Letroporter-style rubber-tired wheels to run the length of a standing train. Not much more, at least in principle, to go the three-high that would be necessary to take containers over the tops of double stacked containers to get to parking positions at other stations along the consist.
I see non-portable straddle cranes being driven around at fair speed much of the time here; they are perfectly happy staging on the ground, onto underframes, or indeed between adjacent cuts of cars all with what appear to be at least semiautomatic alignment, lockon, and fine adjustment on drop. There have been some pretty good arm-and-beam systems to permit these to handle van trailers, too, although of course some siderail or floor 'enhancement' is really required to prevent Letroporter Syndrome from inducing trailer apoptosis at too early an age. I see very little in these proprietary complex beam lift systems that even replaces use of a Trackmobile to align vans at a ramp, or uses a drop section of track to incline the 'end' car of a train to be closer to the ground for loading/unloading in the same sort of way that was common in Civil War times.
The whole world will be autonomous - with no need for people to perform work. It will be HUGE!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
There will always be crashes, but until we have substantial tort reform there will always be a double standard when robot operation is in place, trying to establish there would have been no accident, or not as significant an amount of damage, pain, and suffering, had a human driver been there to react more ... well, humanly.
The 'short term' fix for this -- which I really, really don't like -- is the equivalent of a Price-Anderson act (or Amtrak liability cap) for autonomous-vehicle operators who can demonstrate up-to-the-minute maintenance and regulations compliance, etc. The idea being to establish to insurance underwriters that they need not impose ridiculous tariffs to cover hypothetical risks of only well-controlled possibility...
Of course the insurance will creep up anyway, and there will be all sorts of terms and conditions and attempts not to pay or minimize coverage when, not if, something actually happens. And I watched nearly firsthand as Consolidated Freightways died in less than a week when its insurance coverage was unexpectedly terminated...
The 'squads of actuaries' won't have adequate data to determine fair measures of 'autonomous risk' until there is considerable operating experience -- I expect them to overcompensate, perhaps massively, for various forms of 'perceived risk' until then. And of course a far more dangerous set of conditions, the risks as the equipment ages and complacency 'or worse' about required maintenance procedures and service expenses sets in as "familiarity breeds comtempt".
I won't go into what happens when cut-rate or 'fly-by-night' operators start trying to run these technologies, no matter how splendidly the equipment is made or how effectively it functions when new. I'd like to think that owner-operators would do better, but I know far too many 'over their heads' already just with regular truck payments, not counting weird bad cess with their pollution-control or complicated engine-management systems. (Note that I assume that many if not most of theses owner-drivers would essentially live in their sleepers as needed to minimize expenses...)
What I'm hoping is that, in the intermediate long run, the overall savings from not having to find, qualify, train, and retain large numbers of new drivers is sufficient, and the industry can expand without being limited by effective driver shortages, CDL-related gotcha shenanigans, and much of the other Mickey Mouse tack-ons in the general-carrier OTR trucking industry. There may also be a place for self-driving hazardous-material trucks that have materials and safety specialists rather than obligate full-time drivers on board -- specialists who can be rested and alert any time they are expected to supervise loading or unloading, or react to emergencies.
And of course not all trucks will be autonomous, and I presume things can be set up so that autonomous fleets can co-exist with properly operated fleet and O/O trips. It may well be that at some point the net cost of autonomous trucks in a fleet may become lower than fully-driven ones with little special equipment. I admit I'd like to see that come about.
Would it be correct, OM, to assume that just as there are truck crashes today (and have been since forever), there will be truck crashes in the future, driver or no driver? It'll take squads of actuaries to figure out the odds and/or insurance premiums, but eventually they will.
Carnegie Mellon was the first institution, in my experience, to 'get' how to integrate GIS data into autonomous guidance. One of the things that was 'counterintuitive' for older systems programmers was the need to load and analyze GB of data quickly to extract much of the 'predictive' guidance relative to accurate differential GPS tracking -- another was the use of 'haptic space' modeling for the vehicle so it can 'react' correctly if it skids or is hit while running autonomously.
The old 'automatic highway' model GM was working on from the late 1940s is too fragile -- it is actually too fragile for railroads, which is a situation far more deterministic and capable of being rule-based automated. All the assumptions in recent work are that there will be no essential route automation, and fast cameras and sensor/data fusion at what may be TB/s processed will be used to determine all the 'outside' parameters directly. What that implies is much better route marking, with careful maintenance of the markers, reflectors, striping, etc. Intervehicle communication at a variety of EM frequencies is what will be standardized, and I expect to see a set or API of 'common' standards at some point before autonomous operation becomes fully tolerable.
I expect there to be communications channels for emergency contact and metadata, similar to what OnStar and other proprietary services now offer. There has been discussion, on and off, about 'push' data (including overriding control data) specifically including traffic updates, on-the-fly route 'optimization' and external-consulted redirection and guidance programming, emergency vehicle avoidance, and certain kinds of enhanced protection (grade crossings being a particularly desirable "field of endeavor" but there has been fairly fierce pushback against much of this -- perhaps rightly so, in many cases, and of course with the various risks of vehicle or subsystem 'cracking' (our current term of art for 'maliciously intended hacking') always a risk. Those who are older may remember the Nixon provision in EBS that would 'automatically turn on FM radios when an emergency signal was received'. Many saw in that the seeds of Chinese-style perpetual propaganda when 'whoever had the keys' decided it was Time For An Emergency Message. You will note we don't have it, and don't even have a hook in receiver or SDR design to incorporate it. Same for the idea that police organizations periodically trot out, of the general 'lock the doors and disable the transmission' sort of improvement on LoJack location for stolen vehicles. It was bad enough for GM to have cars 'turn themselves off' with too many keys pulling down in the ignition; imagine the fun when the wrong car 'turns itself off' with the wrong person inside under the wrong circumstances. Or when the wrong sort of police, or people who have stolen 'police' technology, stop victims on the road...
The problem down the line with driverless cars is that they are susceptible to a kind of bullying: anywhere there is aggressive driving or the threat of road rage, either they will 'fail safe' or either tacitly or expressly have to engage some kind of emergency avoidance mode that 'neighbors' will have little time to anticipate. Either way a deterministic external system's latency will almost certainly be inadequate for good response; it will be worse if, instead of reprogramming local parameters, the system expects to continue its 'response' over the network or 'in the cloud' perhaps multiplexed across a given limited bandwidth to multiple users. Arthur Clarke used a somewhat extreme form of this problem as a rather good plot device... I thought it was almost ridiculously unlikely for a spacecraft designer to make that kind of simple error until the Metric Mars Mistake.
The problem with driverless trucks is as simple as 'accidents happen'. And when they do, from thrown recaps through brake fires to sabotage from passing vehicles, all that momentum and all that inertia remain in the vehicle to be transferred to whatever it may subsequently contact. There are enough problems with human drivers. Avoiding many kinds of potential common-mode failure can be done, up to an increasingly expensive point ... but no system can really cover all the possible complex modes, and fairly sophisticated multiple onboard AI/ES systems become necessary before much beyond the simplest automatic on-highway moves would become common-sense failsafe.
How did driverless autos do in Pittsburgh? There was a notable experiment there recently with driverless cars.
As someone recently wrote, when car owners get comfortable with driverless cars, they'll get comfortable with driverless trucks.
charlie hebdo Ulrich: Could you explain what infrastructure is needed on highways to implement autonomous vehicles? Seems like the Tesla is already Level 2, not quite fully autonomous.
Ulrich: Could you explain what infrastructure is needed on highways to implement autonomous vehicles? Seems like the Tesla is already Level 2, not quite fully autonomous.
Roadside technology that is interactive with vehicles.. How will a driverless truck navigate complex interchanges or situations like traffic, detours, accidents, construction, blindside backing, snow covered roads, fueling, etc? Short of having a brain of its own, it will need to be guided along its way. That's where the complexity and costs comes in.. Look at how complex and difficult PTC was and is.. and trains run on rails and have their own dedicated right of way...AND PTC doesn't even eliminate the need for crews.. doing the same for trucks would require similar infrastructure enhancements.. times a factor of 10 probably.
SD70DudeHow do these autopilot systems fare when roads are dirty or snowy, or even when painted lines are worn to the point of being hard to see?
What lines?
While state and county roads do have at least a center line (not all county roads have edge lines), a good many (if not most) town roads do not. Then there's the dirt/gravel roads.
And yes, those lines do disappear in the winter, covered by sand, if not snow/ice, or simply worn off.
A relatively common problem up on Tug Hill is drivers following their GPS and driving onto a snowmobile trail. You'd think they'd pick up on their mistake, but no, some of them get in pretty deep.
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...
Hopefully this is the final decade...of railroads answering to Wall Street. With stock prices dropping and a looming recession the time and price are right to take what's left private and allow the networks to grow and adapt with the proper (long term) investment.
As for railroads going away altogether, to paraphrase Spock, “We've been dead before.”
Editor Emeritus, This Week at Amtrak
Much of the autonomous vehicle testing so far seems to have taken place in the southwestern U.S, or during summer conditions.
How do these autopilot systems fare when roads are dirty or snowy, or even when painted lines are worn to the point of being hard to see?
Driverless trucks are still a long way off although "autopilot" where the driver may let the truck drive on its own under ideal conditions will likely happen very soon. But just the same.. the truck will need a "driver" for the duration of its journey. Furthermore, trucks need to be fueled and loads need to be secured... these functions are currently performed by drivers, and they're not paid extra for it... somehow the new technology will need to replace the driver in that capacity as well and at a price that approximates "free". And lets not forget that all of this driverless technology comes at a huge cost that includes implementing the technology as well as upgrading infrastructure along hundreds of thousands of miles of roadway... that won't be cheap, and the cost of all that will likely offset any savings of not having drivers for the forseeable future. Think PTC and how expensive that was/is to implement.. driverless trucks will be that plus plus plus..
Bruce D GillingsMy point with double bulk haulers is that, with axle loadings being a part of the equation (as well as overall length and load factored in) the total weights on trucks goes up a lot. One driver can pull somewhere near twice as much with double bulks.
Keep in mind that much current 'autonomous' technology has a far better, safer, and more immediately 'implementable' use than for expensive intelligent unattended vehicles. It can make practical the full use of modern high-horsepower truck engines and transmissions by making the equivalent of Australian road trains practical for many services ... specifically bulk transportation of commodities between central locations on main roads or Interstates.
Much of the combination weight restriction follows the original law in Missouri (which killed the evolution of the Pickwick Nite Coach service and some of the ATSF megabus development) in restricting effective tire load on the road and overall braking safety. A load distributed over multiple trailers need impose little more shock or load than that of a single trailer, and much potential difficulty with bridge loading is at least common with 'platooning' models to make autonomous trucking 'efficient enough' operating on short headway to realize much of the operating advantage. The same selective braking and limited-excursion steering that makes backing a combination through complex routes under computer control can be adapted to facilitate intelligent lanekeeping, with all the 'command' guidance, braking, and accident avoidance being taken from or through the cab, initially through a now-economical driver team overseeing the front end. Much potential collision or blind-side interference is easily addressed -- and automatically compensated for, in many cases -- by control circuitry little more expensive than that currently incorporated for the purpose in modern automobiles. Braking of course is implemented on all the vehicles, just as with trains, so effective braking distance even for long combinations would be comparable to singles, and with full lanekeeping ABS on all wheels.
There is a certain advantage in using combined hybrid power for accelerating and for 'snapping' on certain grades -- and implicitly for external assist power on key grade, both for climbing and braking/energy recovery. There is also very high advantage in reducing the number of separate vehicles, each with slow response, limited top speed but unrestricted downhill freewheeling, and exaggerated safe following distance, running on a given stretch of highway.
Personally I look forward to a quid pro quo, with longer OTR combinations permitted where demonstrable better safety and equipment assurance inspections are provided, and with imposition of 'truck no-passing' regulations on sensible upgrades or unless completed in a certain time... they platoon predictively with an analogue of adaptive cruise where not permitted, with an active system of fines and charges to the owners of anything reduced in speed where truck-only lanes are not an option.
There are certainly expanded opportunities for a number of types of bulk traffic in this far more plausible world, but not least as regional feeders for more effective bulk railroad traffic. That model also provides the upcoming generation of millenial drivers with much more opportunity to 'work from home' (or reasonable approximation thereof) instead of team-driving with the equivalent of an RV in an extended sleeper for a required lifestyle.
My point with double bulk haulers is that, with axle loadings being a part of the equation (as well as overall length and load factored in) the total weights on trucks goes up a lot. One driver can pull somewhere near twice as much with double bulks. I vacation in Montana every summer and see double bottom dumps hauling construction materials. Same in Nevada. I also believe dairy farmers can move much heavier loads in tankers in Wisconsin (don't know the trailer configuration relative to axles) Will search for numbers later this evening.
That 110 car unit train is only 11K net tons of product. Aren't the current regulations limiting trucks to 80K POUNDS maximum weight on the road? If you figure 10K pounds for the trailer that leaves 35 Tons per trailer of load. So a single 100 car unit train hauls what 314+ trucks would haul over the highway.
[quote user="Bruce D Gillings"]
Murphy Siding Thought provoking concept but missing reality on several levels. Railroads will change, but they’re not going away in our lifetime. Bulk commodities like coal, grain, ethanol, chemicals, rock, etc. that are price sensitive but not time sensitive will continue to move in unit trains. Wild numbers: a 110-car unit train would need to be replaced by approximately 450 semi-trucks. Figuring 80 feet per truck with 80 feet between them, you have a line of trucks about 13-1/2 miles long. Which state has an overabundance of highways that they are willing to have worn out by so much more truck traffic? How much would it cost to purchase 450 semi-trucks and trailers? Quick look online puts it between $63 million and $79 million. Multiply the above numbers times the number of unit trains hauled annually and the whole premise falls apart.
Thought provoking concept but missing reality on several levels. Railroads will change, but they’re not going away in our lifetime. Bulk commodities like coal, grain, ethanol, chemicals, rock, etc. that are price sensitive but not time sensitive will continue to move in unit trains. Wild numbers: a 110-car unit train would need to be replaced by approximately 450 semi-trucks. Figuring 80 feet per truck with 80 feet between them, you have a line of trucks about 13-1/2 miles long. Which state has an overabundance of highways that they are willing to have worn out by so much more truck traffic? How much would it cost to purchase 450 semi-trucks and trailers? Quick look online puts it between $63 million and $79 million. Multiply the above numbers times the number of unit trains hauled annually and the whole premise falls apart.
Bruce D Gillings Regarding Murphey Siding's post: Incorrect. Utah, Montana, Nevada and I’m sure other states allow double-length bulk haulers. These include open-top bulk (low value) but now more and more pneumatic bulk (higher value). These are roughly double the payload of conventional single-length bulk haulers. Weight restrictions are based on pounds per axle, not on overall gross weight. I’ve tried to paste links to them but can only get a few to work. See: https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=yfp-t&p=freightliner+bottom-dump+double+semi&_guc_consent_skip=1586127734#id=1&vid=295bed464c58b9075710feec419040eb&action=click There are currently limits on where these trucks can run in some states: in others, they can run on most primary roads, highways and interstates. Per one of my clients, shippers are pushing the feds and states to allow them everywhere. It WILL happen: it is just a matter of time, because there is too much money at stake. That changes the economics of bulk trucking by a large amount. Give it a decade at most. The other factor you are missing is turns. A bulk truck will move from origin to destination in far less time than a unit train (best times) or loose car railroading (worst times). The number of loads the truck can haul in a given time frame will vary from between two to ten times what a railcar will carry, based on round trips per month/year. So the investment factor for a truck relative to a railcar vis-à-vis equivalent loads is not just a factor of payload, but payload times turns per month/year. On the UP Coast Line in CA, the TankTrain UP was running San Ardo heavy crude between the loadout at Wunpost to the unloading facility at Sepulveda and Alameda in Carson. For a lot of reasons it was replaced by trucks running over highway 46 to a pipeline connection in Bakersfield. At the end of the day it is moving by truck/pipeline, not rail. My point is not that this will replace all rail moves: rather that a LOT of bulk moves can easily AND economically be made by truck (that is, economically to the shipper, not Joe Driver who pays a disproportionate share of the highway damage the trucks do). And until something is done to change how trucks pay for infrastructure so that their true road damage impact (even factoring in for constant axle loading) becomes a part of their rates, or railroads are given full or nearly-full tax credits for infrastructure investment as some form of leveling the playing field (both of which are probably very, very, very unlikely), conversion of bulk to truck in many lanes is likely to accelerate. There may always be a need for major bulk arteries where multiple unit trains per day just make sense. But more and more of the bulk non-unit train sidings will continue to disappear. ttrraaffiicc’s basic premise should not be dismissed. Railroading as we know it is in a very precarious position. The cash cow of coal is fading away. And beyond that market share continues to shrink (dismissing the shock of Covid-19). BNSF continues to stay focused on the longest of hauls in intermodal: a great profit strategy but ignoring the medium-haul markets that were until the last year or two considered to be the next frontier for intermodal conversion. Others, like UP out West, can’t figure out how to make intermodal work in most lanes, and so are opting for ever-lengthening schedules (while touting on-time service metrics….). Terminal investments at UP are getting cut, to a strategy of maximizing what they own regardless of location. The railroads are in a circle-the-wagons strategy combined with a head-in-the-sand perspective on logistics changes. Meanwhile, a new generation of managers see the next generation of trucks as a key to reducing their supply chain costs even more, NOT railroads. As I’ve said ad nauseum, lower rail rates (where they still exist in non-bulk moves) often do not reflect supply chain costs. And THAT is what matters.
Regarding Murphey Siding's post:
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
ttrraaffiicc Bruce brings up an interesting point. In terms of tonnage, trucks move over 5x what rail moves. Pipelines move double the tonnage of rail. Railroads are completely irrelevant to the US economy. Even bulk moves can mostly be handled by trucks for a lower total supply chain costs. Road haulage doesn't even need to go autonomous to kill rail. Rail is already in the grave and the truckers are ready to start burying it.
Bruce brings up an interesting point. In terms of tonnage, trucks move over 5x what rail moves. Pipelines move double the tonnage of rail. Railroads are completely irrelevant to the US economy. Even bulk moves can mostly be handled by trucks for a lower total supply chain costs. Road haulage doesn't even need to go autonomous to kill rail. Rail is already in the grave and the truckers are ready to start burying it.
Maybe it's different in other areas? I live in a rural state where trains haul lots of grain, ethanol and aggregate. None of that goes by trucks long distance. If that traffic "can mostly be handled by trucks for a lower total supply chain costs", why isn't it?
If it is true that PSR is the coronavirus of the railroad industry, how will they possibly survive? How do you stop the vulture capitalists when you have management in on it? Surviving the decade would be lucky.
Quoting Overmod: "No; what it assumes is that the manager has a good grasp of actual sound principles by which rational things are accomplished, and is willing and able to learn the relevant things he or she must know about the nuts and bolts. " And, he is willing to learn from those who know how much the nuts must be tightened on the bolts.
Johnny
Overmod tree68 It has been said, however, that a good manager can manage anything, even with little knowledge of the nuts and bolts. That does assume that those being managed do have said knowledge. No; what it assumes is that the manager has a good grasp of actual sound principles by which rational things are accomplished, and is willing and able to learn the relevant things he or she must know about the nuts and bolts. The latter is the place where the Stanford grads usually come to grief. If you come in already knowing the answer, or the methodologies you intend to implement on the benighted, you'll never figure out what you don't know, and what you can't know, in order to figure out what ought to be done and how to conduct and implement the myriad 'midcourse corrections' you'll almost certainly need.
tree68 It has been said, however, that a good manager can manage anything, even with little knowledge of the nuts and bolts. That does assume that those being managed do have said knowledge.
No; what it assumes is that the manager has a good grasp of actual sound principles by which rational things are accomplished, and is willing and able to learn the relevant things he or she must know about the nuts and bolts.
The latter is the place where the Stanford grads usually come to grief. If you come in already knowing the answer, or the methodologies you intend to implement on the benighted, you'll never figure out what you don't know, and what you can't know, in order to figure out what ought to be done and how to conduct and implement the myriad 'midcourse corrections' you'll almost certainly need.
The present day theory of management is driving oversized square pegs through undersized round holes - without questioning why things are not meshing with the clockwork precision of a Swiss watch. They don't believe the common sense answer even when it is presented to them.
tree68It has been said, however, that a good manager can manage anything, even with little knowledge of the nuts and bolts. That does assume that those being managed do have said knowledge.
Note that this is a very different discussion, with very different parameters, than the discussion of what a good leader can or should do in a similar position.
(It is also a very different discussion from what a good, or adequately Agile, administrator would do. Some people make the very unfortunate mistake of assuming that administrators are managers. Some enterprises and organizations actually survive when that mistake is made.)
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