A very noteworthy event happened not long ago. The company Locomation successfully completed its first round of trials for its truck platooning technology. Technologies and trials such as this should be on the radar of any railfan as they are they are the harbingers of the end of our hobby.
Railroads are facing an existential threat, one which will be nearly impossible to surmount. That threat comes from advanced trucking technologies. These include platooning, autonomy and electrification. Currently, rail competes with road freight with price, being a cheaper, but slower and less reliable option. Even in this role, they perform poorly, having a fairly weak market share, especially in terms of tonnage[1].
So what do railways stand to lose in this coming decade? The short answer is simple: everything. According to the Locomation[2], commercial adoption of platooning can reduce overall costs of trucking by 30%. Currently, intermodal generally has a cost advantage over truckload of about 30%. This is all before decreases on fuel costs from electrification are taken into account. If platooning is adopted, intermodal has no purpose. It is slower and costs the same or even more.
There is the arguement that trucks run on public infrastructure, but that is a non-factor aside from being rhetoric from those who are pro rail. The fact that trucking infrastructure is publicly funded hasn’t stopped freight from shifting to highway in huge numbers. As it is now, the amount of freight transported on roads is so overwhelming that rail would not be capable of taking enough of a mode share to make a difference. This forum’s own Bruce Gillings agrees that roads could handle the freight task currently moved by rail.
There are things that railroads could theoretically do to help mitigate the consequences of road autonomy but in the end, there will still be catastrophic loss of volumes leading to irreparable damage to the industry. At the end of the day, a catastrophe i
I am going to keep this record playing. The completion of this platooning trial is huge news and it will have massive negative implications on railroads.
Platooning is a wonderful thing, and deserves to be mentioned here as ‘news’. And it has implications, some complex, for railroads, which are fair topics for open discussion here.
On the other hand, trolling that the technological improvements will destroy railroading entirely within decades becomes tiring as well as very probably mistaken. It largely destroys any point in posting the material on a forum like this in the first place.
Someone decades ago introduced the idea of the ‘instant cliche’: a new term or concept that almost immediately turns into a reaction of ‘groan… not again!’ as soon as you see key words. The example back then included ‘petrodollars’ – modern ones now include ‘platooning’, ‘autonomous’, snd ‘electric battery drive’.
If I were Paul Hilal I’d have been actively investing in all these key technologies, as particularly in their present nascent state they’re far more useful to rail intermodal than either a threat or a practical ‘financeable’ full replacement for it. But as has been said, it can be difficult to convince the half-blind to see when they’re convinced they have no problems with their vision…
I thoroughly agree with the likelihood of the former with regard to the relatively huge capital requirements and liability coverage of even semiautonomous equipment. While of course it won’t follow the precise example of airline development, you can see the likely ‘shaping forces’ from that.
Of course the second half is nonsense, absent some national law restricting Interstates or any extensive amount of secondary or local roads to high-dollar trucks or users possessing high-dollar insurance coverage … this is possible, but I think highly unlikely to persist even in a perverted democratic system of government. The very large group of independents who finance a truck, team-drive with their spouse until they can’t make the note or the runs (or get slammed by one of the legal CDL scams and can’t drive) and then peddle the truck to the next victim can only be exacerbated when the trucks cost more, require more careful documented maintenance of highly specialized kinds, and incur more running expenses (likely including dramatically increased road-use fees for o/os and smaller fleets, and a wide variety of cheap-electronics-facilitated tolling charges, both for occupancy and time restrictions).
And of course the range of conventionals, who can happily hook to intermodal TOFC for last mile, but not engage in the brave new world of long-distance point-to-point… but these get lost in crayonista planning.
In an earlier one of your threads, I brought up the public inconvenience and hazard of platooning as it interferes with lane traffic. You easily dismissed this by telling me that platooning was largely an outdated concept, and would not play a significant role in this transformation you say is coming. You told me that it was autonomous operation and not platooning that would enable the transformation. You seemed to be saying that platooning was yesterday’s news.
While it may be technically feasible, there still is the question about platooning interfering with other traffic and the highway. One solution is that platooning has to be done on dedicates that are fully supported by direct user fees. This is not going to be cheap.
I’m also of the opinion that fully autonomous vehicles are at least a decade away due to issues with sensors under adverse conditions such as driving through slush.
This is not necessarily a problem even for the old ITS models of platooning in the '40s that used inductive communication and ‘brain boxes’ for intersections and on-ramps. Remember that even pure autonomy is responding to a range of obligate outside data, perhaps the most obvious of which is tracking of entering vehicles controlled by traffic lights (as is already very common in California). Two perfectly workable solutions are: to limit the range of a given ‘platoon’ and the default or active spacing between platoons, to facilitate periodic entry into traffic flow just as is done now ‘passively’ for many freeways, or to coordinate the datastream within a platoon to ‘break’ it and adjust speed to allow entering traffic a safe island to come up to speed and merge across the ‘platoon’ lane. The latter capability has to exist by default for platooning to be legal in any current State anyway (as unrestricted merge to the right is mandatory) so adaptation to entering traffic is not particularly difficult. I suspect that any platoon will ‘have’ to respond to a right turn signal from the immediate left lane by dropping speed, perhaps precipitously, and then using appropriate following distance (depending on whether the ‘merging’ vehicle is autonomous or not, and the present negotiated ‘safe braking distance’ of least-capable vehicle in the following platooned consist) until the turning vehicle has fully exited the platooned lane.
I’m not asking about automation and it’s implications. Platooning doesn’t have to require AV’s. Platooning could happen now, yet it doesn’t as there’s no cost or speed benefit. Approx 90% of fleets have less than 20 PU’s, and the vast majority of these are OTR fleets… UPS, FedEx, JB HUNT, Schneider, etc. will not be investing in platooning either as the cost to benefit ratio rejects the operation of platooning… AV’s will not take off until battery tech has a breakthrough allowing 500-700 MI range at best with reduced tare weight.
Consolidation will happen that’s a given, but not within the next 10-20 years… One thing you forget to put into perspective is funding shortfalls in USHIS infrastructure. We are billions behind in upgrading the USHIS. Once we catch up in 2050 or later perhaps things will change then…
It doesn’t matter how good autonomous/platooning trucks are if they aren’t legal.
The first thing I learned when I was trained as a driver was that nowhere near the vast majority of my time would be on interstates or other limited access highways.
Most of the largest carriers from 20-30 years ago are either gone or a much smaller size.
I’m still waiting for the “flying cars” that were supposed to be the norm by 1970.
How much energy does it take to move a ton of freight on a rubber tired vehicle system on a highway vs. the energy required to move that same ton of freight on a steel wheeled vehicle on steel rail?
You must not have spent very much time driving in the West, at least in the late 1970s or early 1990s. I have experienced many instances of ‘convoys’ conducting close drafting, with far less than a typical car length between; in fact (with a little judicious ‘clearing’ and permission illegally arranged over the CB) I have run in them. They are only borderline legal, and objectively unsafe as hell, but very real fuel conservation results from the reduction of head-end resistance even absent considerations that ‘vacuum drafting’ as NASCAR practices it has elements of a net zero-sum game.
I was able to record an actual odometer ‘mileage’ of over 520 in one extended drafting session (westbound into and partially across the Mojave on I-10) in a basically-stock 1988 Lincoln Town Car, as I recall in the roughly-82mph speed range that matches the torque-curve peak of a 302 in the OD of an A4OD. This of course was far beyond what the car could develop at any more efficient speed with its normal air-resistance characteristics, and involved ‘locking in’ to a low-pressure vortex behind a particular trailer; interestingly the car would hold position on cruise because the resistance both ‘in front’ and ‘behind’ the still-air sweet spot caused slight speed lock-in outside the response band of the Lincoln cruise control.
Of course I lost the truck when he pulled off at a truck stop, like an idiot seeing my little green computer showing I had 38 or so miles remaining. Unsurprisingly this number dropped like a rock; I think it went to 14 and then to zero in about three more miles, and I turned around in the median rather than find out what reserve I actually had…
So there are multiple layers to this answer. The first is that trucking’s energy consumption is shrinking substantially. Electrification will continue this trend. It may not match rail, but it only has to come close enough that the increase in energy consumption is outweighed by the downsides of using rail. This isn’t far off.
The next point is that rail isn’t as energy efficient as you think given that rail mileage between two points is often significantly longer than highway mileage. It is fine if rail is more energy efficient, but if more work is reqiured go accomplish the same task, then how much more efficient is it actually.
The third part is that energy is not the only determining factor in the cost of transport. Other factors including maintenance, overhead and labour all count towards total cost. Once trucking slashes its labour cost with automation and reduces its energy cost with platooning and electrification, trucking suddenly finds itself with a massive advantage.
I’m not sure self-driving trucks are as close to reality as we think.
The technology is there. Americans’ attitudes have a ways to go. Including me. Admittedly, I’m old, but I don’t know if I or anyone I know wants to be in front of a semi with no driver.
Another question I have concerns hacking. Even our most secure systems have weaknesses that are open to hackers and enemy countries. (I have the same concern for driverless trains.)
Right now we can’t even stop a spammer from using a fake phone number. What about valuable cargo in a semi moving through sparsely populated areas?
The problem here is that battery electrification doesn’t ‘improve efficiency’ so much as it substitutes ‘electricity fairy’ cost power for overtaxed fossil fuel. Expect one of the first government actions to be a British-style road tax on charger MWh comparable to the fossil taxes. Then expect the actual cost of power delivered by Megachargers to rise to cover the stranded cost of the added distribution architecture to serve them and likely the wheeling and storage costs for the power.
Second, you sagely note that
But not so sagely, perhaps conveniently, you do not mention maintenance on all that active autonomous architecture, replacement of cells or perhaps enormous strings on a regular basis, cost of retrieving vehicles with a wider range of failure or commanded shutdown … there are many places for the fancy tech to break or malfunction, often ‘unattended’ … and many of the consequences are less, and controls far less complex, for an autonomous rail consist than for the 240-odd autonomous trucks that replace it. Now it’s possible that big class 8 Tesla-built trucks will not suffer extreme maintenance issues, but several people with extremely good experience in actual trucking practice have at least suggested this won’t be likely, and as pointed out one forced recovery of a stranded rig somewhere in Idaho eats up the marginal profit fro