Totally overlooks track time as a shared resource for any rail movements.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Any time I see a word like 'disruptive', or 'game-changing', or 'breakthrough' in a report about new technology, my BS detectors go to high range and stay there until disarmed with careful research.
EuclidSay you have this independent railcar system perfected regarding the railcars, their power, and control. All you need is railroad track to run the cars on. How do you acquire that track?
You build a Interstate track structure that permits the passing of slower shipments by faster shipment at any point the faster shipments come upon the slower shipments and of course this must be operative in either direction for the shipments.
BaltACD Euclid Say you have this independent railcar system perfected regarding the railcars, their power, and control. All you need is railroad track to run the cars on. How do you acquire that track? You build a Interstate track structure that permits the passing of slower shipments by faster shipment at any point the faster shipments come upon the slower shipments and of course this must be operative in either direction for the shipments.
Euclid Say you have this independent railcar system perfected regarding the railcars, their power, and control. All you need is railroad track to run the cars on. How do you acquire that track?
Okay, I understand that. But I meant my basic question was:
How does the developer of this new system featured above intend to aquire the track? Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall him explaining his plan for trackage. The two others in the video also fail to ask that question. Using the private railroad trackage seems to be a foregone conclusion.
I suppose the conclusion includes the premise that every railroad should have the capacity for one more lone railcar. But if the system intends to take the business away from trucking, it is going to need a lot of track time. Does the railroad industry have that amount of unused track time to spare?
Is the plan that the private railroads will sell track time for this new single autonomous railcar system because the railroads will profit from that? What is the thinking on this detail by the developer and the railroad industry??? How can it be left out of the pitch???
Not this again.....
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Overmod Euclid Say you have this independent railcar system perfected regarding the railcars, their power, and control. All you need is railroad track to run the cars on. How do you acquire that track? You overlay CBTC on the existing PTC infrastructure.
You overlay CBTC on the existing PTC infrastructure.
I would opine -
If there's value there, it's probably in the "last mile."
I didn't watch the whole video, but got the gist of it. One point made was that the system was compatible with existing railroad technology.
Existing railroad technology would handle the long distance part, while the autonomous railcars would handle getting the load to the specific load/unload point. This would require essentially dedicated track - think an industrial park.
Just my ...
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...
Aren't we just rehashing a discussion we had last year?
Jeff
jeffhergertAren't we just rehashing a discussion we had last year?
OvermodAnd in years past. The difference is that there are now three companies in the 'space' (and some recent discussions on yard and terminal optimization suited to some of the operating paradigms).
Wake me if we ever get past the "tech bros giving interviews with tech bro blogs" phase and one of these "revolutionary companies" actually does something substantial besides paint a railcar or two.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.
Since track by its very nature is a 'constrained' enviornment. Who/what is directing all these 'autonomous' car load/empties so that we don't have calamitous collisions?
If the railroad industry is the customer, it would be very interesting to hear their perspective on this. If the railroads embrace this as a part of their business model, and buy the equipment for it, it seems like a very workable concept.
BaltACDSince track by its very nature is a 'constrained' enviornment. Who/what is directing all these 'autonomous' car load/empties so that we don't have calamitous collisions?
Done properly, each individual car acts as though it has a RCO operator controlling its acceleration and braking. Cameras, sensor fusion, and some non-fake AI/ES have been more than capable of safe routine operation for decades; one notes that integrating some of the Castor FM-TV used by the Navy before 1945 would have added 'oversight' capability to the original automatic subway shuttle tried lo! these many years ago... with lots and lots and lots of passengers and not just some loose-car and LTL freight dunned in.
The operating model is only incidentally operating 'freight train' service with platooned electric vehicles rather than locomotive hauling with one crew -- whether that one crew is two men, one man, one man in a telepresence suite somewhere, or robots imitating men. It is areas involving last-mile distribution, completely analogous to truck last-mile except keeping the move on rail as late and as long as possible -- one more-or-less immediate use would be in place of the Adtranz CargoSpeed or whatever it was called equipment for use on all that track in central New Jersey that would use two or three 'rakes' of equipment to switch all those older facilities with rail close by but increasingly limited access to congested local roadways.
If you have sufficient volume, you can increase track occupancy by platooning the cars with closed couplers and independent brakes. If you need more volume still, you can platoon coupled, doing whatever the Federal government decides you have to do to be "safe" -- look for all sorts of lobbying and the usual political thrash; we've been over this enough in past threads for it to have ad nauseam characteristics. But very little that couldn't be done with the equivalent of FREDs now extended to be FFEDs too.
The thing I keep waiting for these would-be Edisons to figure out is how to motor and brake a cost-effective three-piece truck so that it is safe in this proposed service, yet fully compatible with one-pipe interchange and the various running speeds and wacky excuses for maintenance that go with it. I would mention here again that I'm still a bit traumatized by the SPV-2000 'experience' -- much of the design philosophy of which is still evidently alive and well with these brave new operating theories. At least Parallel has given up on that idiot separate power-bogie idea... let's hope they hold to their resolve.
To me, the elephant-in-the-room issue isn't operating autonomous cars effectively, particularly as PTC comes to be costed-down. The problem is safe switching of automonous vehicles including to all those last-mile places. And it is neither easy nor particularly assurable. My opinion is that you'll see both pervasive electrification and adoption of ECP before you have any reasonable method of tackling it for the 'general system'.
How many class one carriers are involved in these autonomous car ideas? Last time I checked the railroads aren't a "public steel highway." We don't have open access at this time.
UP was working on autonomous trucks, you would think they would be interested in autonomous rail vehicles. (Besides crewless conventional trains.)
I went to their website. It shows and describes the vehicle. It even shows it coupling up to another railcar, I assume for the conventional train operation they say it can support. It doesn't show the air hoses being connected. They mention first/last mile, but don't say how this would work. You know, the parts about being switched into and out of customer's facilities. It does show a rail door opening and the car moving out of the building on it's own.
They always show the easy part of the process, automating the over the road moves. They don't show how the total process would work.
Oh, one other thing. Off the main track and controlled sidings, PTC doesn't work. Those tracks aren't part of the PTC system. They will have to come up with a way to detect other autonomous vehicles operating in the first/last mile industrial settings.
He says there is excess capacity on all of the railroads, so that will not be a problem. So, Intramotev will market to the railroads, equipment for them to extend their transportation service to the traffic that now must utilize trucking. If the investment is worth the cost to the railroads, I don’t see any reason why this won’t be successful.
The people that want to put tons of electronics, sensors, and all that tech in railcars: it's obvious they never see how railcars get handled both on the road, in the yard, and by private industry.
There's a reason they are as crude as they are.
About the only application I can see having any success in the short term - industries won't have to buy a trackmobile to spot cars over a pit or rack?
Euclid He says there is excess capacity on all of the railroads, so that will not be a problem.
He says there is excess capacity on all of the railroads, so that will not be a problem.
EuclidIn watching the video for the second time, I find at 20:22, one of the interviewers asks the CEO, “So who are the customers?” He answers with the clarification that they will be selling the equipment to the railroad industry. So it does not rely on open access with private companies renting track time from the railroads. He lists a range of railroad operators including Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3, and also industrial railroads such as used with steel making, and mining. They are already selling equipment to the industrial railroads, and will gradually work toward Class 1 railroads. He says there is excess capacity on all of the railroads, so that will not be a problem. So, Intramotev will market to the railroads, equipment for them to extend their transportation service to the traffic that now must utilize trucking. If the investment is worth the cost to the railroads, I don’t see any reason why this won’t be successful.
His statement reminds me of an official looking at a 100 mile single track segment of railroad with 5 sidings and 7 trains in each direction and saying that line segment has 'excess capcity' - because every foot of the line is not occupied by a train - it is grid locked with too many trains for the sidings.
We have a customer that is like that. Their corporation sees they have (for example) 2000' of track space, so they think they can handle 2000' of cars at any one time. Never mind that the cars need to be emptied or loaded (they only have one pit to unload/load one car at a time) and you need space to move them around to do that.
It’s the same with track capacity. Maybe there is enough or maybe not. But the CEO says that penetrating the Class 1 railroad market will be the last frontier, so it might be quite a while before that happens. Meanwhile a lot of pieces have to fall into place, and there will be time for that. Some railroad management may not want to go after this business model. They might just say it is not what they do, especially if they believe it will interfere with what they do with the multi-mile-long trains. But generally, I sense that the Class 1s are unusually interested in autonomous operation with standard equipment. So they might be especially attracted to this Intramotev concept just to get the autonomous ball rolling.
This isn't the first company to propose this, and it won't be the last. Like I said before - these concepts never seem to get anywhere. I doubt this will be any different.
We've been having these discussions a couple times every year for the past decade+ here.
For systems with excess capacity the big railroads sure have an awful lot of congestion.....
Call me when the autonomous railcars learn how to sweep snow out of switch points, and line the manual switches and derails that are found at nearly every carload customer spur.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
zugmann About the only application I can see having any success in the short term - industries won't have to buy a trackmobile to spot cars over a pit or rack?
Some of our customers have big electric winches for that. Others use a loader, a forklift or even a pickup truck as their 'yard engine'. One or two sites even used those old car moving pry bars until quite recently, and they still might when no one is looking.
Euclid But the CEO says that penetrating the Class 1 railroad market will be the last frontier, so it might be quite a while before that happens.
But the CEO says that penetrating the Class 1 railroad market will be the last frontier, so it might be quite a while before that happens.
That makes absolutely no sense. If you don't involve the Class 1 railroads, where are these autonomous railcars going to travel? Are they going to go from one side of the steel mill to the other? Five miles down the shortline from the gravel pit to the transload facility?
Actually, that sounds rather like a good proof of concept.
As has been pointed out, the logical place for this is "last mile" applications. Industrial parks being a case in point. However, that will require that the shipper/receiver pairs have sufficient dedicated cars to cover those loading, unloading, and in transit.
The Class 1's role would be getting the car from the originating staging point to the delivery staging point, where the autonomous part can be used. And return.
A significant majority of railcars in use have no reason to be capable of autonomous operation. They operate in bulk business from end to end. And cars not in dedicated service will be floating around the system with the autonomous equipment just going along for the ride.
The idea that an autonomous car is going to travel from Chicago to Los Angeles all by itself is a bit far-fetched...
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