A man is sitting at his desk, looking at photos. He comes across some of his old train photos. Looking back, it is hard to believe machines like trains ever traversed the continent at all. It had been almost a decade since he last saw a revenue train in person. The last railfanning he ever did was going out to see crews remove the rails over Cajon Pass.
The pictures got him thinking about the decline of railroads, how it happened. It began in the 1990s, with service breakdowns resulting from mergers. Slow speeds and unreliable service meant that many once-reliable rail customers were switching to trucks. Carload traffic began to fall and never picked back up. This only continued with the decline of coal-fired power plants. A brief period of growth came when domestic intermodal began taking hold in the early to mid 2010s, but that only lasted so long, and in the year leading up to the caronavirus pandemic, volumes began to drop as railroads adopted PSR. Much like what had happened to carload, volumes and market share never recovered. But this only laying the groundwork for the coming disaster, as despite the fact that trucking was growing, rail was merely stagnating. Rail freight’s outlook moving into the 2040s was grim. Trucking tonnage was set to grow by 4 billion tons, whereas rail was barely set to grow at all. Not dying, but certainly declining.
Death came in the 2030s, after a mediocre decade, the railroads were still solid businesses by the time the 2030s came around, but this changed quickly, which very few people foresaw. Autonomous and partially automated vehicles were finally ready and approved for use on highways. Long the source of derision, especially among railfans who joked that autonomous cars would be 5 years away forever as they had been long delayed from the original lofty promises. But eventually, they did come, and when they did, nobody was laughing. The first thing to go was intermodal, specifically d
As the man drove home on the gravel road that used to be the interstate, he was squashed flat by one of the 1,000’s of wall-to-wall trucks on the highway.
The barriers to driverless trucks will be regulatory and political, not technical.
Trying to merge onto an interstate in between three six-truck platoons is going to be a nightmare. I doubt people are going to be willing to pay for the infrastructure required for large-scale modal conversion, because it will require greater highway spending and the highway trust fund already fails to cover costs.
The inherent energy advantages of rail will always be a competitive advantage; railroads need to fix their reliability, velocity and service problems to best take advantage of them.
Let’s say American companies do pick up the patriotic banner of manufacturing what we need in the US in the US (and Canada). Are there any railroad people with the desire and ability to market location economics that’s favorable to railroad traffic development?
About 10 years ago, our marketting asked for input from current RRers about any industry that was near any of our lines (whether it had a siding or not).
I know many locations were sent in, and I don’t know if they retained that information, but it was collected at one time.
Of course that was a couple CEOs and a few dozen operating policies ago.
The vision seems to be that suddenly platoons of trucks will be running down the freeways we know today. But, if they put all that railroad tonnage on existing roadways, in monter truck platoons, it would tear up the road infrastucture in a short time.
I also don’t see how you run that intense truck traffic on close headway, in multiple lanes; and expect private automobiles to be mixed in with all that heavy trucking. So, I don’t think that cars and trucks can share the same roadway.
This new age of automatic trucking will need its own corridor where large platoons can run fast and close. And this corridor would need an extra strong roadbed to bear all that heavy truck traffic. So, you are almost into something like a fixed guidway or railroad track. Also this “truckway” would have precision control of all traffic. It would end up being something like railroading without flanges.
You could almost call it a self-driving train. When you look at it in those terms, maybe this is the final embodiment of the automatic freight train that is predicted right along with automatic trucking. So if a platoon of independent tractive/carriage units are all operting automatically in precise concert with each other, then maybe this is actually the continuation of the freight train that is predicted to disappear in a few years.
Remember that the Interstates were originally built to handle M60 tanks and the like. Most have been rebuilt - the question is whether that original standard was maintained.
One thing that such automated trucks will allow is having them all run at a consistent speed, which would eliminate the problem of one truck taking several miles to overtake another. Oftimes the difference in speed is well within single digits. The electronic nature of the vehicles would likely make monitoring and enforcement into real-time activies.
While completely separate roadways for the trucks would probably be a great goal, on the practical side, it’s not really feasible. That’s a lot of real estate, and if the problems that have confronted high speed rail (in terms of real estate) are any indication, would see a lot of pushback.
I would opine that for much of the system that the addition of an HOV-style lane, and/or an express lane in built up areas, would probably serve the purpose.
From personal observations and no scientific acknowledgement - today’s Interstates are barely surviving the 80K trucks, let alone the weight of M60 tanks.
Y’all are dancing around the ‘vision of the future’ that ttrraaffiicc’s scenario implies, but none of you seems to have tumbled to it quite yet.
Think back to the dawn of the railroad age … how the original Pennsylvania state railroad system was supposed to work. The operating model with the posts, and ‘laying on the leather’? And here are all these presumed heavily-built railroad ‘guideways’ – most of them incapable of being rebuilt into primitive roads-needing-shoulders-and-excess-width, but with inherent grade and curve geometry at least as good as highway spec – supposedly going idle for want of ‘centralizable’ traffic?
As Euclid points out, the first best use of those rights-of-way would be for, well, let’s call it TRT, for ‘truck rapid transit’ as a backformation from BRT. Take the best of the rights of way, deck them renewably for road wheels, and provide distributed or point electrical support. Then run them interactively, for autonomous vehicles of applicable spec and inspection only, with fleeting and directional running just as for trains.
But there’s more. Even adapting the ‘sleds’ Musk wanted to use for Hyperloop gives you the ability to run trucks on steel rails at… well, the highest speeds justified by overall profitability in sectors of the ground transportation industry. (Trucks that need not be expensively instrumented, or kept in perfect order, or given costly and potentially disastrous full electric drive, be it added). The sleds themselves can be easily platooned and run across the ‘iron ocean’ to any point they are needed or wanted, and of course can easily enter or leave a given stream of platooning vehicles with computer-negotiated ease. (Think of it as 'modular pig
Cars are not very popular with the younger age. Between working from home and living closer to work, car traffic is down dramatically from the 20’s. Thus, cars were allowed to be banned from the interstates, where they were too much of a hazard for the truck platoons.
With the cars gone, the thru trucks now use the inside lane. The outer lane is used for merging and local traffic. Once up to speed, the platoons can move over into the slot created for them by central dispatch. All interstate traffic is controlled by central dispatch, with feedback so they can handle exceptions.
The latest innovation, starting to show up, is the addition of steel rails as guides in an express lane. Near interchanges, the top is flush with the pavement. Here they provide guidance, but the load is still carried by rubber. Past the interchange the rails start to rise so as to carry the load. This allows the guided truck to move from pavement to rail without slowing down.
To use this express lane, trucks and trailers have an additional pair of wheels on each axle. They have steel tires on rims similar to those for rubber. Like rubber, the steel tires have to be changed with wear. They don’t add a lot of weight, unlike the heavy wheels which had been used by railroad cars.
Further, the use of this express lane is limited to trucks whose computers allow central to determine that they are properly maintained. All others are limited to pavement only.
A lot of good discussion here. I think the biggest theme here is that rail freight just doesn’t work these days. It is fundamentally flawed, and the technology is essentially obsolete. The industry is going to die, the only question is what will replace it?
I happen to think there is a happy future for properly implemented and run standard-gauge – just not with financiers trying to wreck it. There are a number of historical examples (UP/CP post-1872 is one) where inherent profitability is subverted, destroyed, or lost for what may be a protracted time. There are other examples where highly-promising technological developments are frustrated or lost due to financial or political circumstances – light single-coach steam ‘railcars’ in the panic of 1857 and then the Civil War years being a particularly striking documented example.
But there is a similar cautionary tale for the ‘happy world’ of electric trucks in history: the story of what happened to the Pickwick Nite Coach, shaping up to be a disruptive technology to any small-volume Pullman traffic in the early 1930s. It is not a very large step from one of the double-deck Nite Coaches to a full articulated vehicle of considerable size, as indeed the Santa Fe tried a year or two before WWII.
These did not fail predominantly because of regulation (e.g. the Motor Carrier act of 1935) or government restriction of perceived competition. The big principal thing was Missouri enacting strict combination size and weight limits specifically to cut down road-damage and safety concerns for large vehicles.
Long before there is any particular pervasive change in capital-intensive (and maintenance-integrity-critical) autonomous trucking – let alone electric trucking with its high barrier to entry in services – look for there to be a backlash over road deterioration, perceived lack of safety once malconsidered platooning and other techniques become established, and finding ways to get trucks to contribute their ‘fair share’ to the communities they run through as ‘historical’ means of financing things become less and
I think the theme is not that railroading is technologically obsolete, but that the present operating paradigm is obsolete. Railroading has traditionally considered itself to be in the business of running trains rather than serving customers who need things moved from A to B. This insistance on running trains has increasingly left them with only the traffic that has to move in trains.
Harrison’s methodology is really about “how do we run the trains at the lowest cost while charging the most the market will bear”. Better serving the evolving logistics community will require understanding that what is the lowest cost to the railroad is not to their customers, and adapting to the needs of the customers is the only way to grow.
I think platooned and automated trucks are going to run into issues with the ‘social license to operate’, where their public drawbacks are socially considered to outweigh their private benefits. Look at road train legislation in Australia for an example where really long trucks are permitted, but only in sparsely populated areas. Even if automated trucks are better behaved, I don’t see the public giving the trucking industry carte blanche to run long platoons on busy public highways.
The same social license to operate goes towards the railroads, too. If they keep discouraging traffic types, crowing about how much they can gouge captive customers, and insisting on their right to block grade crossings for however long they feel like, they’re going to feel the public backlash. And I wouldn’t count on the STB always being as friendly to railroads as it is now.
So, in my view, there will always be a social demand for railroading to haul volumes of goods that people don’t want to contend with on the highways. So far, the railroads haven’t been good about picking up their end of the bargain, which is to fill this need. The less successful they are at it, the more their negative externalities will find a sympathetic public. B
Weight of M60A3 tank (heaviest) was 54.6 short tons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M60_tank ), which is 109.2K - about 1.35 of the 80K trucks. However, since the M60 had to run on earth, the soil bearing pressure had to be pretty low - way less than a truck tire. It’s length was 30.5 ft. - so say about 20’ long ground bearing surface for the tracks. Figure about 2’ width for the tracks gives about 80 sq. ft. total bearing surface,f or about 1.35 KSF. I figure a truck tire is about 4.5 KSF, so the M60 would have only about 30% of that amount. So while the M60 may need stronger bridges than trucks, the ground pressure being that much lower would be a lot easier on the concrete or asphalt - assuming it has the rubber inserts for running the tracks on roads. If not, all bets are off.
Anyway, tanks are never run long distances on their tracks - they’re always loaded on trucks (or trains). So we’re back to a heavy truck load scenario.
A theme not discussed here, but brought up by you, and this is a good one. Railroads are essentially irrelevant to most shippers. Unless they have no other choice, nobody will touch rail, and what reason would they have to use rail when trucks, for the most part, can get the job done just plain better? Just look at the total tonnage moved by each mode. Trucking dominates over rail, and it isn’t even close. Rail trails far behind road and it will never catch up. Even pipelines move more tonnage than rail. What’s worse is that truck tonnage is set to increase by a huge amount in coming decades, but rail is set to shrink. You mention that current methods of running railroads are obsolete, but that is not going to change either. The way things are is the way things will always be, and there aren’t any hopes of this changing. Rail is on a declining trajectory, and nothing they can do will stop that.
It is often mentioned that if railroads weren’t providing service, the highways would be destroyed, but that doesn’t seem true at all. In terms of tonnage, there would be less than a 10% increase of total tonnage moved on highways. Railroads just don’t move sigificant volumes of freight anymore.
I don’t think the public will have much say in this. Ultimately, what benefits the trucking industry generally benefits the public, and the trucking lobby is very strong.
It is also worth mentioning that everyone in this thread focuses on platooning, but that is only one issue. Platooning is essentially a dead concept. Autonomous and teleoperated trucks are the ways forward for tru
