Are One-Car Trains in Our Future?

Parallel Systems moves a single container without a locomotive.

Two powered trucks, good batteries, and a computer.

Now that we have PTC, the next big thing may not be autonomous locomotives.

by Charles A. Turek

December 15, 2023--Over the past few years, U.S. Class I railroads have developed a philosophy of moving longer trains using one engine crew and the technology of mid-train and rear end locomotives all controlled by a single operator. In some cases, the average train length has become double what it was a decade ago. The business logic to this is easy to see. Running one train to haul the same number of cars or containers once hauled by two or more saves money and time.

Mid train distributed power on Union Pacific manifest freight

Money is saved by cutting crew costs (salaries and benefits) at least by half. The jury is still out on whether fuel costs and locomotive maintenance are saved at all. Time is saved by not dispatching separate trains between two points.

But wait! The logic on time saving (and perhaps on fuel saving) breaks down when the sidings and yard tracks are not long enough to handle the long train. Saw-bys eat time. It also takes time to double a train out of the originating yard and again into the destination yard. Additional locomotive fuel is used by the idling locomotives, and crew costs may not even be saved it a crew falls on the hours-of-service laws for one or more train doing the doubling.

It is, perhaps, a conundrum to be solved in railroad boardrooms and in the offices of the big investment companies.

Meanwhile, enter Parallel Systems and its innovative single powered (railroad wheel) trucks. Two of these under Positive Train Control and remote operation can transport a single marine or domestic container from origin to destination without a standard train crew; for that matter, without a standard train. Given the right number of wheelsets you can make up a train of any length, without a locomotive. The PTC separates the individual trains, while the remote operator can be a computer programmed to get each container from and to its designated endpoints.

Ideally, you could take a terminal full of containers, load them onto the Parallel Systems wheels, line them up on any number of tracks, and run your computer system to send each individual to its destination without blocking and without switching. No making up of trains, breaking them down, or sending them along with local switching moves to customer sidings.

Another single-car concept

How this would mesh with other traffic in standard trains is, as yet, unclear; and at what speeds an individual container can travel has not been determined. However, Parallel Systems touts a safety factor of ten times for shorter stopping distances in case an emergency stop is needed. While seeking additional funding, Parallel Systems is also bemoaning the difficulty in testing the concept on the U.S. rail network because of its private ownership.

From a practical standpoint, this writer can see several points of concern, starting with this testing requirement. First, operating autonomous containers on what is, in the U.S. at least, a public conveyance exposes the general population to the same hazards as exist with current railroad equipment. Educating the public to these hazards has been an ongoing project and will remain so.

The second concern is other traffic. It has become a given that you can't mix high-speed passenger rail with regular rail. The high-speed traffic has to slow down and use standard access to stations and terminals after exiting the dedicated high-speed routes. By the same token, it seems that there would be no way to mix single-car traffic with either standard traffic or high-speed rail. Certainly, the transition to the single-car concept would not be instantaneous, just as the transition from steam to diesel-electric locomotion was not. The design and implementation of Positive Train Control took a decade, and the transition from long trains to many, many short ones could take even longer even with the exponential advance of computerization.

Freight and passenger must co-exist.

A third concern is passenger rail. The Parallel Systems concept is clearly designed only for freight. The U.S. has very few miles of rail devoted to passenger traffic only. Even the holy Northeast Corridor--Amtrak's money pit--allows some fright traffic if only at night. A system would have to be designed to accomodate both modes, or passenger cars would have to be retrofitted with the Parallel Systems network.

Another concern would be energy use. We tout freight rail's enormous saving in energy by taking a hundred containers off the road, where they are hauled by a hundred motors, and moving them in long trains hauled by three to six motors. It is counter intuitive to think that taking those hundred and moving them with two hundred motorized wheelsets will do anything to save energy.

Can solar panels power whole railroads?

And what about the source of that energy? One supposes that the power grid may be greener in a decade when the Parallel Systems concept comes fully on line. Each of thousands of wheelsets will have its own battery and will have to be charged from the grid, which, if green politics has its way, will also be charging thousands of electric vehicles and thousands more electronic devices. Can the grid be brought up to this task in a decade? Two? Ever?

Questions. Questions.

Can we expect there to be a revolution in batteries that will negate this writer's concerns? Or will the owners of today's lithium mines be the world oligarchs of tomorrow? If dedicated tracks have to be used to create a more efficient delivery systems, will the cost in new infrastructure negate the savings projected?

As with any new technology, there are more questions than answers. We think this one is worth considering, but with the potential for a long and arduous introduction into commercial use, it may just be too far off to be in anyone's future.

©2023 - Charles A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

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