Autonomous rail cars?

"Thoughts?"

"Oh, dear..."

Thoughts?

"Oh, yeah, THAT'S gonna end well."

"Two chances of this working, and Slim's left town."

"You think Tesla crashes are good? HOLD MAH BEER!" 

Mitch

I don't know, sometimes "Here, hold my beer" ideas do work.

With PTC finding greater system usage, and growing GPS and 5G technology, this may have potential. Slap some solar panels on the roof of a box car, add batteries and electric motors and a box car could move itself from A-B. A single car would not need huge traction motors to move, like big loco's do.
Large coal plants or intermodal terminals could be good testing sites. Fully autonomous warehouses already exist. Forklifts move about the facility and pick stock with little human interaction.

I'm simplifying this down to O scale layout terms but I could see this working.

That is until the railroad unions get wind of it.

There's a characteristic of railroad technology and its implementation that makes this interesting, and it has to do with the rails.

1.) Automobiles -- Autonomous cars must navigate streets, driveways and parking lots; crossing over other roads, driveways, and sidewalks; over existing pavement that goes nearly everywhere, continuously avoiding other vehicles, people and animals.  Billions of obstacles could be in the way, too many of which could find their way in front of, a moving self-driving car during its journey.

2.) Aircraft -- If we extend autonomy to aircraft then the situation is vastly different.  Once a plane is off the ground, and out of the vicinity of the airport, it's situation becomes much simpler than that of the car.  There are far fewer obstacles up in the air.  There are few restrictions on the path to take.  Yes, there are occasionally other planes, skyscrapers, antennas, and mountains, and birds, but these are not potentially in the billions, and not continuously at every point.  There are no roads, driveways, sidewalks, or people to wander in the way.  As has been the case from day one, the two hard parts are take-off and landing.

3.) Rail -- Railroads are in the middle, in between these two.  Because rail vehicles can only follow tracks that are carefully laid for the most part to avoid encountering roads, driveways, sidewalks, trucks stuck on the tracks, or people walking on them, autonomy is an easier task.  Not simple, but easier.  And you can't deny that it already exists in public transportation, with millions of miles of accumulated history and experience already in hand.  Yes, it currently runs on mostly separated right-of-way which keeps obstacles from finding their way onto the track, but it is already in service.   The biggest problem, as it always has been, is being able to stop fast enough to avoid things on the tracks, or problems with the tracks.  Individually-powered railcars would be good at this.

Just some thoughts.

Mike

@Mellow Hudson Mike posted:

3.) Rail -- Railroads are in the middle, in between these two.  Because rail vehicles can only follow tracks that are carefully laid for the most part to avoid encountering roads, driveways, sidewalks, trucks stuck on the tracks, or people walking on them, autonomy is an easier task.  Not simple, but easier.  And you can't deny that it already exists in public transportation, with millions of miles of accumulated history and experience already in hand.  Yes, it currently runs on mostly separated right-of-way which keeps obstacles from finding their way onto the track, but it is already in service.   The biggest problem, as it always has been, is being able to stop fast enough to avoid things on the tracks, or problems with the tracks.  Individually-powered railcars would be good at this.

Lot of airports already have fully autonomous rail systems between terminals and parking lots.  Captive dedicated systems but they do exist.

We keep finding ways to take jobs from humans, all in the name of saving costs.  Here's the thing, if humans don't have jobs in order to earn money, it doesn't matter how much we cut the cost of the product if no one can afford to buy it.  This isn't just true with the railroads moving product from point to point but in self check stands, cutting products (like paper) out of the work cycle so that the jobs that provide those products are lost, etc.  We want everything quicker, cheaper and with "free shipping."  Nothing is free - there's a cost somewhere.  In this case it's jobs.

Just my opinion but I'm sticking to it.

I think for freight rail the economy is fuel savings by pulling all the cars with one set of locomotives, getting the cost savings compared to running each car individually.

For passenger rail, in addition to the airport systems, there are numerous LRT (light rail) systems out there that are fully autonomous so the technology is there already.

And this is definitely easier than autonomous vehicles in a less controlled environment like a highway or the skies.

UPDATE
After reading the article, I see this is for short haul for less than 1K miles.  That does seem economically feasible.