This will be the final decade of railroading. At least, I think so, and there is a lot of evidence to back me up.
There is only one reason that a shipper would ever use rail, and that is to save money. Railroads have a laundry list of disadvantages compared to trucks, more than I want to get into here, but I will name a few key ones. These are service (railroads are a nightmare for customers and we all know this) and speed (rail is eye-wateringly slow, taking orders of magnitude longer than road delivery). These disadvantages are deal breakers for the vast majority of businesses. The reality is that if a shipper can afford to shift to trucks, they will. The advantages are just too much to ignore. But of course, not every industry can afford to, but this will not be the case for much longer.
New trends in the trucking industry like automation and electrification are on track to massively slash the costs of trucking and completely wipe out any price advantage rail once had. Electrification will cut maintenance and fuel costs (while also eliminating the environmental arguement for using rail), and automation will eliminate most labour costs, while also greatly decrease transit times and increase asset utilization, meaning few trucks can do the same amount of work. People will often say that these things are a long way off, but they will be here in just a few short years. Trucks like the Tesla Semi which are set to bring about these changes are launching this year.
So what will this mean for the railroad industry. In no uncertain terms, death. In theory, rail could do some things to respond, but they won’t happen. Electrification is a possibility, but it will never happen as it requires too much of an initial investment. Automation is also a possibility, and many will point to Rio Tinto in Australia as an example. The problem is, while there are level crossings and most other things that make it comparable to mainline railroading, it is in a sparsely populated region. Th
I think you dismiss railroad automation too easily, and that you exaggerate the successful revolution to driverless trucks. The latter is just a concept that springs from the concept of driverless cars. Good marketing includes exaggeration and nobody does it better than Elon Musk. So, I think the driverless truck bandwagon has merely jumped onto the driverless car bandwagon, and both are presented as utopian solutions.
On the other hand, I believe that driverless trains are in the very near future. The central beauty of that concept is that the railroads own their corridors; whereas driverless cars and trucks must share a nationalized corridor.
You dismiss railroad automation because of the grade crossing problem. I have heard that argument 1000 times. You just can’t have driverless trains passing over public grade crossings. Why is that?
You say the stopping distance of trains is too large for allowing them to run crewless across grade crossings. Yet, what on earth does the crew have to do with mitigating the dangers of a long stopping distance? You might say that it is the engineer’s job to spot a developing conflict at a grade crossing in a way that automation cannot accomplish. I would submit that automation can include grade crossing conflict development sensors that would be vastly more capable and reliable than the skill of the engineer in spotting the potential grade crossing conflicts. Rio Tinto uses sensors for that purpose. They don’t just rely on the fact that they are in remote areas seeing sparse road vehicle traffic.
You must not have much practical experience in engineering, or the trucking industry. There have been some particularly good threads here in the past few years on the topic, and although the [expletives deleted] community-search tool remains broken, you might want to see if you can find some of them.
Until autonomous trucking solves the issue of prompt recharge, the idea that existing infrastructure can handle the overall supply of current and the access to ‘megacharging’ facilities is ridiculous. Capital costs of this one factor alone handily wipe out any putative savings from “electrification” well out into this tech cycle; we won’t get into battery maintenance, accident recovery, or all the myriad other factors that go with obligate BEV for class 8 vehicles.
The great advantages of autonomous operation are in solving the driver-shortage and operations issues, and in allowing nominally shorter headway, platooning, and ‘railroad-like’ GPS enablement of predictive operations to save fuel or minimize operating ‘wear and tear’ enroute. The great problem is in financing all the necessary technology, infrastructure, practically-vetted GIS, cost-effective differential HA, and a variety of other things that are practically needed for operating large fleets of trucks on ordinary roads. You sure won’t find your cell-phone carrier allowing easy monthly payments and two-year upgrades on all that!
And then there are the consequences of the first, and then the second, and then more, high-profile accidents regarding multiton autonomous trucks – and the probable demise of the company or companies responsible on paper for them. Look for all-time high insurance premium c
Thought provoking concept but missing reality on several levels. Railroads will change, but they’re not going away in our lifetime. Bulk commodities like coal, grain, ethanol, chemicals, rock, etc. that are price sensitive but not time sensitive will continue to move in unit trains.
Wild numbers: a 110-car unit train would need to be replaced by approximately 450 semi-trucks. Figuring 80 feet per truck with 80 feet between them, you have a line of trucks about 13-1/2 miles long. Which state has an overabundance of highways that they are willing to have worn out by so much more truck traffic?
How much would it cost to purchase 450 semi-trucks and trailers? Quick look online puts it between $63 million and $79 million.
Multiply the above numbers times the number of unit trains hauled annually and the whole premise falls apart.
Railroads are far more efficient then highways. The exception being short distance (first mile / last mile). Unless someone invents a economical teleporter (ala Star Trek) railroads are not going away anytime soon.
Highways are mostly at capacity right now. They would need far more capitol for expantion then railways would. And that’s if they could even find the real estate.
One of the things Kneiling was promoting was a cheap intermodal terminal consisting of a siding with road running along the side along with the Stedmann side-transfer device.
There have been all manners of intermodal Golden Bullets from Iron Highway to RoadRailer. Don Oltmann has been skeptical of the side-transfer intermodal truck chassis (the railroad spine car – doesn’t work with double-stack – is passive) although I haven’t been able to press Don on specifics.
I agree, if there is a place to try out an autonomous system, it would be in the fenced-off intermodal yard. It is in the intermodal interface where you incur cost and slow down the door-to-door time. This is true where you ask motorists to park their car and then take a train.
This dude just joined the forum today and this is his second post. He joined just to drop this diatribe on us? I would like to know more about his interests in the subject.
All this self-driving or platooning of trucks leads me to this question: “who’s going to use it?” When I travel I-80 in western Iowa most of the trucks I see belong to small carriers and owner/operators leased to carriers large and small. I do see larger fleet carriers, but often they aren’t close together. I think those techies (like Elon Musk) now how to make the equipment, although I don’t think it’s at the level they claim, but don’t know how the industry works. And the general public also don’t know how that, or any industry really works. They, the public, depend on “journalists” who think they know how everything works to inform them. And think everything they see on the TV or internet are how things are.
Now I could see some use by the LTL/package carriers who have regular routes between sorting terminals. That might impact the railroads. Even with a crew on board the trains, the productivity that rail can provide still could might beat a driverless truck. The road carrier will have to decide which is better, using rail or investing and maintaining autonomous equipment for all highway movement. IF the railroads can provide the service level the trucker wants, rail will be OK. That big IF is the real thing facing the railroads in these PSR, shareholder value over all else times.
This reason of grade crossing safety is widely used by those who oppose automatic trains. They are mostly the fans, the labor unions, and operating employees who’s jobs are threatened by the automation. I too would guess that the OP is promoting trucking over rail, and appears to be aruging that rail will not be able to automate, whereas automatic, platooning trucks will the lead to the ultimate triumph of trucks over trains.
He seems to have missed the obvious improvement, which I made in the mid-Seventies, of providing an intermediate stage of modified adjustable scaffolding and directional rolls permitting gang-loading and unloading at any particular stop. The trucks would then ‘address’ the individual dock locations with appropriate asynchronicity without holding up the train…
I was relatively ‘green’ at the time; just as I trusted Kneiling with how to spell the le Tourneau loader’s name, I trusted him on Stedman. He didn’t do right in either case. (But he knew which end of the Arm had the armaments…) The ‘Steadman ratcheting side-loader’ was billed as a sufficient side-transfer device for the truck-loading ‘side’, and I took it as gospel that the thing worked … after all I’d read it in Trains, The Magazine of Railroading, and they’d surely fact-check anything they published…
The interesting thing, looking back in reference, is that my whole system even in the mid-Seventies was ISO series 1 container-centric. Even then I assumed ocean shipping would provide the bulk of the actual container construction, and would keep the standardization within bounds and not allow ‘creeping proprietariness’, and allow relative standardization of the equipment required together with, um, a reasonable guarantee of resale value should any particular operator go belly-up (you can tell who’d been reading that book On Time! with its accounts about why F units might be approved for near-moribund railroads based on fungibility…)
Amusingly, I assumed that the underframes involved would be FuelFoiler-style skeletal, although not fully ‘spine’ simplified. I noticed yesterday that one of the m
A lot of good points from this discussion, but I certainly think we can all agree that _IF_rail survives, the majority of its market share will be lost.
Now this is has turned into a fascinating thread - too bad it doesn’t have an appropriate title.
The modular self-propelled train (think what we now call a “block” of cars, only with its own power, like a DPU) could work just fine with intermodal now.
Not sure I’m following all your comments on the technology of truck-based unloaders, particularly that they can’t handle double-stacks? (if I understand that one correctly, which I might not have) Care to offer any comments on these:
https://hammarlift.com/why-sideloader/ - mostly about singles, but at the bottom right looks like it can be equipped for handling 2 high - not sure if it will go high enough for the top box up on a rail car, though
The technical issues with ‘double stacking’ do not directly concern the feasibility of sidewise loading with devices like Letroporters – I will take this up in a moment.
Sideloading of the kind Steadman designed for is explicitly lateral transfer using the underframes as support. Obviously this is no more practical for containers in the bottoms of well cars than circus loading is for trailers on FuelFoilers; there is the additional consideration that underlifts for containers in wells have severe access problems, and even a straddle lift would require careful vertical lift (net of any asymmetrical or shifted load in the container) for more than 3-4’ before any tilting or lateral movement/shifting is possible without damage.
Sideloading of ‘upper stack’ containers first requires some kind of retraction of the twistlocking at the four corners, or lifting of the upper container free of castings that engage the twistlock pockets at the corners ‘far enough to remove them’ (itself an interesting operation for a yard crew). Then the sideloading has to be done to an elevated platform, with a long lever arm forcing suspension deflection, subgrade shifting, etc. on the transfer vehicle. It is unlikely that most types of ‘sideloadable’ trailer underframe will be adequately strong to tolerate being elevated and leveled to permit this.
I did look into whether scaffold-based solutions could be made to allow ‘upper-level’ side transfer. The structural difficulty is that the ‘scaffolding’ can’t be more than about ‘one container’ wide and for loading either the truck runway must be elevated in spots or the scaffolding has to drop vertically to correct height; these greatly increase the cost and complexity of the installation and make careful knowledge and skill in operation more and more necessary. (The sidelocking of scaffolding is to the twistlocks in the ‘lower’ container in the stack, and longitudi
Incorrect. Utah, Montana, Nevada and I’m sure other states allow double-length bulk haulers. These include open-top bulk (low value) but now more and more pneumatic bulk (higher value). These are roughly double the payload of conventional single-length bulk haulers. Weight restrictions are based on pounds per axle, not on overall gross weight. I’ve tried to paste links to them but can only get a few to work.
See: https://video.search.yahoo.com/searc
I would opine that the biggest threat to the railroads will continue to be the vultures whose only desire is to loot the treasury.
They have little interest in growing traffic, or growing capacity. More traffic means more labor and maintenance expenses, and growing capacity involves capital outlays - all money they’d rather have in their pockets.
If railroads are going to survive, they need to shed the opportunistic investors and increase the number of investors who are interested in long term growth and profitability. It won’t be easy.
Management (especially boards) will have to be found and employed that makes it plain that long term growth is the goal and thus hopefully discourage opportunistic investing.
Bruce brings up an interesting point. In terms of tonnage, trucks move over 5x what rail moves. Pipelines move double the tonnage of rail. Railroads are completely irrelevant to the US economy. Even bulk moves can mostly be handled by trucks for a lower total supply chain costs. Road haulage doesn’t even need to go autonomous to kill rail. Rail is already in the grave and the truckers are ready to start burying it.