Autonomous railways? It is tough to break into the railway bu | Tech for Good
Autonomous railways?
It is tough to break into the railway business. A few giants are sitting on their railroad rights and making minimal investments to maximize profits. They often close smaller railroads, not finding a way to make money out of them, and focus on the most profitable routes with longer trains – often as long as 3 miles (7.8 km).
Long trains are profitable for the train companies, but they're not efficient for anyone else. We have to use semi-trucks to deliver goods to all sorts of places as soon as a long train reaches a depot. Not to mention that parking a 3-mile-long caravan vastly limits where it can go. Furthermore, train cars are often parked for days while they wait for other cars to be loaded and unloaded so that they can move, as this giant caterpillar, to their next destination.
Matt Soule, a former long-time SpaceX engineer, has partnered with former colleagues at Elon Musk's space company to launch Parallel Systems startup, transforming individual freight train cars into autonomous electric vehicles.
Parallel Systems' invention is a modular, motorized set of train wheels. A crane places cargo containers on the wheels that can drive this train car up to 500 miles (1300 km) to anywhere on the track.
Such autonomous car has no limitations traditional long trains have:
Once it is loaded, it can simply drive to its destination;
With shorter lengths, train yards themselves can be re-architected to have smaller footprints and fit more places in our infrastructure;
Parallel's platoons can also split themselves in half and let road vehicles pass through their middle;
They can drive right into a city or even a factory, using previously abandoned rail lines.
You can take a container from a port to a warehouse without putting it on a truck. And that means you can load more weight (Parallel's cars can carry almost three times more than a semi-truck)
The cars recharge in one hour to drive another 500 miles.
The technology sounds too good to be true, and it is not ready for market yet. However, building and managing autonomous electric trains is far simpler than building autonomous EVs for highways. Rails are simpler. Trains stay on a track without a steering wheel. They don't need to worry about responding to random traffic. Unlike roads, where pretty much anyone can drive anywhere, railways are tightly controlled and scheduled. Truthfully, some passenger trains have moved autonomously since the 1960s. Parallel Systems is simply pushing that autonomy to the individual car level.
Article on FastCompany
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