I don’t think there will be any technological improvements to rolling stock if the improvements are such that they require all cars to have them in order to be operationally compatible. This includes improvements such as ECP brakes, changes in couplers, and automatic parking brakes.
I only cite the need for getting away from loose car railroading because it is a fundamental necessity to unblock many technological improvements. That is not because the improvements cannot work with loose car railroading, but rather because the standardization of loose car operation requires a full changeover to new equipment all at once in order to maintain compatibility.
The standardization has frozen the technological practice for better or for worse. The problem is the minute you change one car to a new system that is incompatible with the existing standard, the converted car cannot be used until the rest are converted. That is because every car in the standard system is expected to be compatible with all other cars in the standard system.
So, it is not the cost of the new equipment that is the main issue. It is the cost of the logistics and operating delays caused by the disruption of changing all of the nationally standardized cars to a new standard. To keep the cost of that disruption down, the work of conversion has to be done very fast.
There are many who agree with you, however there is still a lot of loose care railroading. I think the rule of thumb is one railroad car translates to three trucks. The trucking industry is having problems with current capacity - putting three hundred more trucks on the road per 100 car manifestfreight is probsbly a logistical impossibility.
And, when you get down to it, even contrainer traffic is a form of loose car reailroading.
For the railroads - Intermodal with both trailers and containers has become the loose car railroad network of the 40’s and 50’s - replacing the 36 foot and 40 foot box cars of that era. Many of the commodities that were loose cars in those long gone era’s no longer exist in the 21st Century - coal for home heating, autos in boxcars, grain in box cars and a whole host of others.
Some of what were loose car commodities in the era gone are now ‘bulk’ commodity unit train type commodities in the 21st Century - grain in trainload lots of 100 ton capacity covered hoppers, vehicles in multi-level auto racks are two that spring to mind.
While I say that loose car railroading is a fundamental obstruction to technological upgrades of rolling stock standard components; I should clarify that I also think that replacing loose car operations with dedicated trainsets is just as improbable as the rolling stock upgrades. Adding automatic parking brakes is equally improbable, except for the likelihood of having them forced onto the industry by government mandate.
As I mentioned, the conversion to autonomous trains is the most likely improvement that I see. For trains, just the operating function alone is a walk in the woods compared to autonomous trucks or private automobiles. The big challenge that autonomous operation poses for railroads is in the programing that can process and correctly respond to all of the operating requirements as a train moves over each division. I am referring to the train control provided by the dispatcher such as meeting other trains, crossing over, etc. Even if this was all programed in prior to running the train, it will all be subject to changes over the progress of the run. Much of these changes cannot be anticipated, so the computer will have to play a giant chess game as the train moves over the road.
The only thing that is wanted is the autonomus money machine. All it does is create money without the need for capital expenditure or maintenance expenditures.
An autonomous money making machine would be very popular except it would create massive inflation. But in any case, autonomous trains, while they may lower operating costs, they are hardly something that can done without capital expenditure or maintenance.
Not when the ultra elite are the ones that possess the autonomous moneymaking machine - they don’t buy the products that create inflation among the masses - they only buy politicians which have been out of the price range for us mere wage earners for centuries.