Trains are already crazy efficent both fuel and operational people wise - in fact this negates one of railroading great efficencies, slack (that 2 mile freight train already starts one car at a time). Also subtracting, cars are going to need to bunch up anyway at passing sidings to let cars go by opposite direction. Besides, the real cost is railroading is MOE and MOW (including land taxes here) and this solves neither of those issues. Could be interesting for locals and LCL traffic but those haven't been big parts of railroading in decades.
There are a lot of problems with this proposal, and it's also not clear what problem it's solving.<p>Battery life prevents using this for long hauls, but the idea of using these small pods that can easily split up on small industrial spurs doesn't make sense either - most of those non-main-line routes have manually thrown switches. So beyond the much higher unit economics of requiring 2 complex autonomous vehicles (and associated maintenance) per container instead of a basic hunk of steel with wheels, you <i>still</i> need to have a person travel with it to throw switches, or else upgrade every switch on every tiny, poorly maintained spur to be electrically operated.<p>There's also some strange claims by this company in the article, like the ability for these to carry double-stacks. If you look closely at current intermodal rolling stock, you'll notice that the containers are between bogies rather than above them. A double-stack container would sit too high to fit through standard tunnels and bridges if the containers were on top of the wheels. There's no possible way to accomplish this concept (a pod per end of a container) if you need the container to sit lower than the top of the wheels...<p>Maybe there's some potential with this idea, but I'm really not buying it based on what they're saying and showing so far.
The benefit of rail is that you exchange the enormous capex of shaping and planting metal rails for only having to run and maintain a single locomotive that pulls simple boxes with wheels that can move staggering amounts of tonnage efficiently.<p>This system requires both building more infrastructure to leverage the granularity of the cars, more infrastructure to keep a massive fleet of batteries charged, and more maintenance as each freight car now has a drive system.<p>If this already existed someone would pitch leveraging the economies of scale where you'd build a huge car that pulls all the other ones and you only need to keep 1 battery charged... which is what we have right now...
This does not scale economically when regular rail already has a difficult time being profitable.<p>Switzerland has the most dense rail network in the world and is 100% electrified. However even before the pandemic SBB cargo was in the red. To reach our climate goals we need to increase the amount of cargo on rail (currently around 46% of cargo is by rail). There is no way around it but they will need government funding to reach those goals.<p>Such gimmicks have extremely high costs. Each on of those needs maintenance. A regular cargo car is quite dumb and can take a lot of abuse.
This is solving the wrong problem, badly.<p>More on why:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJNvpG5gktM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJNvpG5gktM</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUpST_cQ1hM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUpST_cQ1hM</a>
Bringing the ideas of packet based networking to the world of train based container freight seems interesting.<p>Question is will the gain in time and cost efficiency (by having each container move individually more or less fully automated) be bigger then the loss in energy and cost efficiency (each container needing it's own motor and energy storage sounds to be more expensive then one big locomotive)?
When reading about this proposal the only thing that can justify it is scamming investors out of their money.<p>First of all this internet-packet-routing-like way of transporting goods would work only if almost every town in America had rail passing through it, or at least very near it, which isn't the case. Secondly if such a rail network were to be constructed it would pay off to just have it electrified and use these carts without a battery. Until that day what rail needs is maintenance, expansion and usage, not these silicon valley pipe dreams.
My very rural town has a rail line pass through, and it was once the main means of moving people and goods to neighboring towns. But those services were discontinued decades ago, and now the line only hauls lumber and similar bulk industrial goods.<p>I would love to see passenger and freight service available here again, and I feel that this could be something capable of providing that kind of service. Assuming the existing line owner would allow it. I doubt that happens without a truly epic business plan, which I’m not seeing here.<p>I want to be enthusiastic about this idea, but this will be an uphill battle on multiple fronts (as other commenters here have opined more pointedly).<p>It’s hard to hope for something that seems impossible. I think it a safer bet to expect horses genetically modified with narwhal DNA that produces a tusk on their foreheads.
Autonomous vehicles carrying containers: [1] (Video is sped up). Most of the hardware for this already exists, and is in use at the more advanced ports for moving containers around within the port and sorting them. Major ports today are very automated.<p>The latest fad is "dry ports". This is a bigger version of what used to be called an "intermodal facility", a place where containers are transferred from trains to trucks. The long distance portion of the trip is by rail, and then there's a transfer to trucks for the last ten or hundred miles. That, in practice, is how this problem is solved.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo</a>
I'm wondering whether it might become even more cost-effective if it can run off of third-rail electrification (the form factor makes overhead catenary impractical). That said, the issue about last-mile rails having been removed is very much a big issue. There was once a rail spur in downtown Chicago along Kinzie Avenue to serve printing plants at the Sun-Times and Tribune which is no longer maintained, although I'm not sure if there's a good use case for it even with these sorts of cars (IIRC it originally ran to loading docks off the river in an area that's now luxury condos). I remember a few years back going for a run nearby and watching workers tear up the rails from another rail spur off the Illinois Central¹ tracks.<p>⸻⸻⸻<p>1. Like many a Chicagoan, I have a tendency to refer to things by long-superseded names that no longer apply. I honestly could not tell you the name of the current owner of that right of way.
Connect those things in line by hundreds to simplify management of the shipment and save energy. Put in front one big engine that put the whole thing in motion. Let the physics do the rest.<p>You just reinvented the container train.<p>Meanwhile in silicon valley, hey let's reinvent the less efficient and most complex way of doing that.<p>Also applies to Elon Musk Boring Company that is the dumbest, most dangerous, and less-efficient way of building a subway.
The tech is neat but the reasons this isn't already in use has to do a lot more with railroading company culture (operational familiarity, risk of losing business to a competitor) than with any particular shortcomings of the technology.<p>Right now, no one has to chaperone individual railcars (or bogies!), because trains of many railcars travel as a unit. This also makes track control / impact avoidance easier, regardless of the level of train control deployed on the track.<p>This may see more use in the EU, where EU-wide regulations are mandating all member states to separate ownership of their rail network from ownership of rail operators. Then, an adventurous operator may decide to trial this technology. But nonetheless, this is fairly unlikely, as rail slots are essentially priced by time occupied for the block, so it makes more sense to pack a train's worth of cargo into the reservation you paid for.
Haha, it seems they missed the more obvious solution: build a second story rail (with a middle rail so you can even split up or redirect workloads) and move lighter, smaller goods faster. You can now optimize for transportation of goods more valuable or time sensitive but less bulky, move them faster, and add capacity to your system, all at the same time. All on exactly the same land without interrupting existing rail. And since it's smaller and higher they could expand or reroute over properties where before it would've been too difficult.<p>Low tunnels and bridges would of course be an issue; some you could just go above or around, others maybe not at all. Still, there may be routes where it makes sense.
The article focuses on freight but hey there's people too. In the old days there were interurbans, and an autonomous interurban is easier than an autonomous passenger bus.