Someone commented on Trains Magazine’s article, “if they could hook them together and put a power source at the front, it’d be way more efficient. Then, maybe having two people up front to deal with unforeseen circumstances the computer can’t handle would end up saving money in the long run. Too bad we can’t do anything like that.” 😂😂😂
"Listen to the workers, not the management" YES! I am a train driver and you wouldn't believe how many times i've seen changes that my coworkers and i immediately knew would be a total (and expensive) failure. NEVER has any manager asked any of us what could make things better. Too bad because i and others know exactly where the problems are and we know a bunch of cheap solutions that would work perfectly. But hey we are just workers, what do we know right?
Those people work in management because they were fed (and happily licked up) the lie that you need to be college-educated to be successful or intelligent. I don't know how your employer operates, but if you can, make a bid for promotion. Tell the person interviewing you the problems you see with current management and how you would solve them. Interviewers eat that shit up. Maybe you could affect real change using your direct knowledge of the rail system, who knows. Couldn't hurt to try IMO.
@@tissuepaper9962 Where I work we have a bunch of bright young engineers trying to improve our processes. They are smart, well educated, work hard and mean well, but they don't get out on the plant floor all that often and then are surprised when their ideas don't work out very well in the real world.
and this is what I learned in my apprenticeship in college. Because they put me at the lowest level first, working with normal employees (great people, buddies forever, if I worked there). Studies are mainly theory, and practice takes place in laboratories on specific examples. But reality is unpredictable. Therefore, if after defending my master's degree, I find myself in a design office, I am going to go around and ask ordinary employees first what's wrong and what's right, because it was not me who worked with these machines for the last 10 years, but them.
@@JeffDeWitt That's why when I became a Production Engineer I was ordered by my boss to work the assembly line for two months including the night shift. I've made friendships and gained knowledge that I'd have never gotten anywhere else. To this day I thank my boss for it. It should be mandatory for every manager, engineer etc. just out of school.
These people absolutely need to prove they can come up with ideas on their own, because otherwise they'd be out of their jobs. This is also why they stay in the office for long hours (regardless if they're actually working or not) and spend days in pointless meetings to discuss things that could be resolved in 15 minutes. They're supposed to be rewarded for results, but most of the time the top brass rewards them for effort instead. As long as the management delivers hundreds of pages of nonsensical drivel to the bosses' desks every week, they get a bonus, while you're stuck dealing with the fallout on the ground.
Add in all the hazards of autonomous vehicles and every rail crossing becomes a real life game of frogger. Even if it triggers the cross bars and alerts there are plenty of places with little to no alerts systems I've had to drive across nearly every variant up to and including, roll down your window, floor it, and pray you don't stall. I wonder if these people even understand there are multiple breaking systems on trains, and for a damn good reason.
absolutely true, but is this really an issue when the block is suddenly the length of a single carriage? as Adamant Forge says, it becomes real life frogger, but I'm sure you'll agree computers are somewhat better at these tasks than humans Example: th-cam.com/video/l_KY_EwZEVA/w-d-xo.html
It would have to be set up like a road. Two sets of tracks that each go one direction only. Individual container could slide on and off the tracks like cars merging onto a freeway. They would all have to have overpass and under passes at road crossing to keep that flow going.
CZperso: NOT true in many cases. You should try driving in my town. The train that blocks the road always takes a whopping 20 minutes to crawl through because they load tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many trailers and the damn engine can't pull them faster than 10-15 mph I've counted them. Sometimes they attach 120 trailers. That's just too much and overloads the engine car. Stupid.
Someone should just put some fancy plastic and rgb on trains, call them something futuristic and stupid like "Universal High Speed Carry Pods", and sell them as a "new mode of transportation"
Lemme try. *Cough Multi-mode capable, high fidelity, independently moving interconective metal enclosed carry plenum "Total Reusable Alternative Interface" . Also known as Boxcar TRAIN.
Why don’t we make a very big pod that has room for 60 people, supported with 8 metal wheels, 4 under each end, hook many of them together, and add an even bigger pod in front with an engine and driver seat, and a pair of long metal *bars* for the wheels to roll on? I think i’m onto something!
This sounds like something they started as an automatic trucking solution but when they realized how hard that would be they said "hey, why not just make it on rails? Those already exist. Then we don't need to make it self-driving".
@@BeKindToBirds And even for ports it wouldn't be too useful, because you'd need tracks for them. Systems like these are already in use, but not as trains, but as self-driving (partially?) electric vehicles, like for example at Hamburg port (which is totally automated).
why not just install a system of rollers with a few stationary motors sprinkled in to move crates around ports? Like a huge conveyor belt? Way easier and way cheaper.
@@cleanerben9636 rollers are not easier or cheaper than rails. Talkless of the huge electricity bill, they travel a fraction of the speed of regular trains, plus there's no human to intervene should things go wrong.
Well the founders of parallel systems are former space X control electronics and software engineers, they pretty much fell to the good old "if all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails" mentality.
@@jeanf6295 And I guess the investors think that software engineer is the same as civil engineer because both have the word 'engineer'. And they will proceed to buy it anyway.
I’m a third generation railroader and I lost it when you said “ask… not management.” You were 100% right about every issue you pointed out. I’d also like to mention that Conrail used to have higher speed electric freight throughout Pennsylvania on the old Dorchester line of Pennsylvania Railroad.
Till did some long business trips to USA didn't know how bad your rail infra was. Tbh makes no sense USA rail infra is so bad, it could work so well there.
"Ask the workers, not the management" I completely agree, in a company I worked for (Huge construction, quarry, milling operation) we had an issue where the oil from the engine and hydraulics compartment leaked into the electric compartment. They called a bunch guys who had no idea what to do or even suggested installing a new motor and hydraulics. A few days later they ask our mechanic to have a go. He fixed it in 10 minutes. He drilled a hole under the engine compartment so the oil leaks there and installed a 10 liter canister underneath and we just had to empty the canister once a month.
Well, that's moreso a cheap, slapdash fix that doesn't actually adress the issue (leaks). It just deters necessary maintenance until a more catastrophic failure occurs.
It's impressive that they've managed to combine the problems of multiple forms of current shipping while also introducing their own problems. Truly innovative!
I had a friend who was obsessed with innovation, he wanted to innovate everything around him, with his current knowledge of whichever subject he was fixated on at the moment, so most of his solutions ended up being things that already existed, things that were already discarded due to their flaws or things that wouldn't even work. When I see solutions like this autonomous pod train, I remember him, as these seem to be created by people like him, heavily motivated and with scant knowledge on the subject they are innovating.
Being a "disruptor" has always required a certain degree of arrogance. It requires you to think that somehow, everyone that works in the field you're trying to disrupt is stupider than you are, and haven't thought of better ways to do things. That you somehow have some sort of special insight that people who have been working on the problems in the field for 40+ years haven't thought of. 99% of the time, unless there's some new technology, you're an expert in that hasn't been able to be applied to the field due to a lack of expertise in that field, everything you've thought of has been thought of before, and is a stupid idea which anyone who has a slight amount of experience in the field would know. The fact that these projects can get so far that they're producing fancy CGI graphics and attracting investors is pretty embarrassing.
@@abrahamchogd7128 I doubt there is such a thing as something that has already been perfected, that reminded me of the quote from a physicist in 1897: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." And then quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, Higgs' Boson; heck, even exoplanets and gravitational waves were proposed and discovered after that. I consider there is always room for improvement, but I get what you say.
Why is America rediscovering the cargo rail like this? this company proposes a flat bed that is: - bad at being a flatbed, because of 2 separate units. - bad at replacing shunting, as it still proposes yards that change it to trucks - bad at being long distance rail due to batteries - as bad at braking as normal modern trains (you can't slow down more with steel on steel wheels) Meanwhile Switzerland: "let's just electrify even shunting engines with overhead power and make laws to require a sidings near warehouses, and see how people WILL like this"
swiss want to be green. you dont need to electrify everything even getting more cargo on diesel trains instead of trucks will mean less carbon emissions. as for the company they just want their product to broke all the time so they can sell more of it
Monopolists just want to steal and make it as inefficient and ineffective as possible. Then they can suggest another "solution" that is just as crap. Grift it is again and again!!
Correction for you: Roadrailers do still exist. They’re not commonly used by any means, but I have seen them on the mainline between Port Huron & Detroit, MI. I asked someone at CN about the frequency of use. They keep them around because sometimes you need to “do what ya gotta do” to get shipments moved. They’ll use them if they need to. They're a rare sight, but a sight still to be seen every third or fourth blue moon.
I'm glad you said this. Because when he said that in the video I was like "Wait what?! This guy is nuts. I see these all the time in Indiana." Damn near ruined the credibility of this video 😆
Yea I have a video of some of these from just 2019 of these being used in 2019 in sothern Illinois. I had to look it up, turns out they are run by triple crown.
Cannot double stack should be the nail in the coffin. Most USA freight track operates at grade crossings, so double stacking will shorten the train length while also allowing it to carry more.
Plus the containers sit above the bogies instead of close to the ground like a well car does. That will be a major problem when US railways electrify because the overhead wire infrastructure would need to be much higher than for regular electric locomotives pulling well cars.
Parallel Systems: “Check out this doohickey we made that combines the disadvantages of rail and trucking. It will only work on territory equipped with rolling block technology that has never been implemented on a freight railroad. They also cannot drive on roads, so shippers will still use trucks for last mile delivery unless they build their own rail spurs.” Venture Capitalists: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
The late and great John Kneiling ("The Professional Iconoclast" of Trains Magazine years ago) would disagree. His mantra was "the train hauls, the truck delivers". You move as much freight as you can in bulk, then let trucks handle "last mile delivery", unless you can make enough money delivering carloads of freight. No keeping money-losing (to the railroad) branches for 1-2 customers or deliveries of infrequent/LCL load to private-owner sidings. Oddly enough if E-trucks could be used for last-mile, it might work well for the pods and the E-trucks. But the idea as currently marketed is a total failure on so many levels. VC's (at least some of them) can be seen as the equivalent of top management; any pipe dream that MIGHT make them billions draws their attention. They likely have no idea of the overall failure of RoadRailer (research, what's that?), which had the right idea, but the designers and the railroads both managed to make enough mistakes that RR fell out of favor for most users. If you had a dedicate ROW (think the Black Mesa and Lake Powell coal-mine line, or dock to staging yard runs as video suggested), the pods might serve a useful purpose. N.B. I don't know why everybody pushes electrification--it's expensive and difficult to build out, let alone maintain. And if it comes down, how are you going to move trains once the wreckage is cleared off the tracks without internal-combustion locos?? Major storms, power failures, or terrorism could bring your rail networks to a long and expensive halt. (Yes, I know about the Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, Pennsy, and South Shore and South Bend electrified lines; I saw SS&SB's Little Joes years ago in action once or twice.)
@chemik so again, that doesn't mean they are good at it. It just means they are capable of providing it. Infrastructure can, and did, exist without capitalism. If capitalism was good at providing infrastructure, the roads across America wouldn't have to have been state-funded and the telecom companies in America would've spent the billions they were given to improve infrastructure, to actually improve infrastructure. Capitalism's idea of infrastructure failed the state of Texas last year when the energy companies failed to spend their funds on winterization of their infrastructure. Google's drive to provide fiber across America fizzled out and ended with only gigabit competition in a few major cities while parts of America still use dial-up because it isn't profitable enough to have better internet for customers that want it. USPS is the only entity that delivers certain items because it's not profitable enough for the private mail companies to deliver. Such as chicken eggs and stuff like that. Capitalist, privately owned companies, are so good at infrastructure! That's why they fail to achieve basic infrastructure in many vital industries.
These things look awesome.....they remind me of those electronic mail/document carriers they have in hospitals in the 80s and 90s,small boxes that move on electric rails that hang from the ceiling,taking ur mail along preprogrammed routes across buildings and even different floors. Imagine u have a whole network of these across the country and thousands of carts moving autonomously and synchronising with each other perfectly at the same time. Since the units can communicate with each other,they know exactly where each other are,how far apart,how fast they are going and is able to coordinate perfectly,they can travel at regular intervals at a safe distance without tailgating each other too dangerously, they would be able to drivr together like no human beings could possibly coordinate,there would be no traffic jams,no accidents and no downtime..... Along the main railway lines across the country,there would be hundreds even thousands of these container pods moving in regular intervals at maximum efficiency 24/7,the trains could be moving slowly at 50kmh and it would still be fine because the computers could manage the traffic with such high efficiency and density,each individual train could be spaced only 1km apart and still be safe as any accident the computer will immediately alert the rest and come to a halt or adjust......and there could be hundreds even thousands of trains travelling simultaneously on a single line...the volume of cargo ur moving is so insane,and since there's no need for human operators,the manpower cost would be next to zero. Along this main line or "highway" there are multiple exits leading to various states or cities or different destinations,just like a highway there's no need for vehicles to stop to let another vehicle off......sections of the track where there are exits traffic will slow down slightly to let other trains exit safely...... I'm not an expert but maybe some could design a track system?
Imagine if these grifters instead invested all this time and money into getting more regular high speed track laid or even just getting the track you've already got properly electrified.
Grifters? Like the California High Speed Rail System? That kind of $70 billion grift? Merced to Bakersfield will be glorious! Almost like the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, right?
Another point is a huge amount of company sidings were torn up years ago. My mother worked for more than 20 years at a company in an older industrial area. One of those places where they built the offices on the same site as the factory. When she joined them almost every factory either had a dedicated siding or direct access to a shared one. When she retired her company, the big chemical company and the steel foundry (which seemed half the size it used to be and seemed to only smelt scap metal) were the only ones which regularly used their sidings and most of the others had been torn up
Excellent point. This system appears to be developed for low-volume loads to factories and the like. The problem is, if you have a factory that needs one tanker car per week, you probably are already using a truck to deliver it instead of a train.
One thing that's funny about their attempt to "rediscover" cargo freight is that it was never undiscovered. The US has one of the most extensive freight systems in the world and to my understanding it's about at capacity.
It's absolutely ridiculous, but they're mostly pitching this to tech bro investors who have never stepped near a railyard in their lives and have no clue how america moves freight.
Yep. The US freight system has honed transporting shit through rails to a fucking tee for almost a hundred years now. While there may still be room for improvement, the current system is pretty damn tight, and its gonna take either some gradual upgrade of existing systems to be a revolution, and NOT a new sexy reinvention and only makes sense to laymen who don't know about the nitty gritty of logistics via rail
@@pointblank2890 indeed, the solution to our woes has been around for a long time; a slow upgrade to better rails and catenary wires is all we need. What we absolutely do *not* need is to buy tons upon tons more lithium from the usual suspects for these bigass batteries.
@@pointblank2890 Yeah, don't know why the fuck they're trying to top an industry that's been going strong since the 1800s. Maybe if they tried to curb pollution caused by trains that might be an admirable goal.
Hey, at least we're getting somewhere! Now they're accepting the superiority of rails, I say give it a few more years and they figure out that putting several of these together behind one very powerful engine will be cheaper and more reliable. On a different note, I think something like this might be useful for fully automated shunting, though it would be extremely expensive. Just use a single powered bogie to shunt one or two cars. This might have also been useful 60 years ago, when more or less all industries still had a rail spur. But not today.
They got so close but failed at the last hurdle... The idea of a semi-autonomous or a remotely controlled local freight solution that could easily link intermodal hubs (including in-land "portals") with factories or warehouses is something that could be viable. But the flaws are that these things can't couple, these things rely on the intermodal container for structural integrity and finally... the fact that these things just seem to solve "problems" like 3 mile long freight trains taking forever to clear level crossings (eternal car brain)... It's not like this concept isn't entirely without merit. But it's a highly flawed concept. One thing I did notice Parallel Systems mentioned was how the US is split up into 5 big class 1 railroads, and that there's fuck all interoperability between them. Often, containers will need to be unloaded from the CSX train to a truck to go to a Union Pacific yard to be loaded again. All for a journey from the east coast to the west coast. The fact that these techbros have picked up on this is good. What isn't good is that they think pods solve this issue.
@legojack "big ass batteries" used to be an early alternative to steam trains and some early diesel trains. Off course, old battery powered "self-propelled carriages" didn't have the best technology for the early 20th century, but they were a fairly viable alternative to railbuses, simply because once you started rolling, you didn't need much more power to keep going due to the low rolling resistance.
This reminds me of how I developed a reputation as an effective problem-solver with my fellow managers, despite being the guy who works in the office and only rarely ventures out into the dock. I generally start by going out and talking to the people who actually work around the problem. Not only do I need to get a better idea of what they're doing, I _also_ need to know if any of our proposed solutions will actually work. It doesn't do us any good if we come up with a "perfect" solution that is too cumbersome to implement, introduces new problems of its own, or doesn't actually resolve the issue... or, as is really common with the gifts from the good idea fairy, all of the above.
7:18 A standard TEU box might as well be tissue paper compared to the most bog standard, beat to all hell, 45 year old flat car. People see a steel box and they think strong, but other than the floor (to an extent) and the four posts, it might as well be paper. Like, the flatcar so much as breathes on the techno bogies and the box will fold like a beer can. JUST LIKE ROAD RAILERS IF YOU TRIED TO SHUNT THEM!
Standard shipping containers are optimised for carrying vertical loads. They can be stacked ten high fully loaded with no issues (which you absolutely can’t do with truck trailers OR a standard box car). A standard flat car is not optimised for container carrying either (as it has an unnecessary flat deck). If you look at a skeleton truck trailer, it is optimised for container transport by eliminating everything except the corner attachment points and a backbone to carry tension and compression loads.
But it doesn't need to be shunted in the traditional way - each car is powered, so you can just take the whole string of cars onto the yard lead and one by one send them into tracks - no need to kick them or anything. The magnetic couplers also don't need to be super strong since each car is powered (like distributed power, only with one loco per car). The main problem with the system I see is that it doesn't integrate at all with the current system (as Alan points out in the video).
@@janmelantu7490 Just make container/truckbed EMUs for when you need a fast train and make small switcher locomotives (possibly battery electric for last mile connection) for other local work.
Cause thats what they do. They _manage_ and thats important. But they dont make their hands dirty, and most of the time dont know how to do the "lower" positions. And often they do stupid decisions cause they are so far away from the common worker. Thats why a flat hirarchy is important, but thats *_really fucking_* difficult with big companies.
One minor improvement to the existing battery train you showed towards the end: fit it with a pantograph and associated equipment, so when the driver enters a section of track with wires, the train can take power from them (and possibly start recharging the batteries at the same time). As for their idea, in addition to the problems you mentioned: very rarely will anyone want one or two containers delivered from X to Y via rail - for long distance travel, it's far more efficient to take dozens / hundreds of containers to a regional depot, then transfer onto truck for the last leg of the journey. Unless they want to design cities from scratch with rails heading into every business needing regular container-sized supplies...
I can imagine something like Costco or Walmart that are typically on the outskirts of town and do large volume of sales benefitting from these if they have rail nearby they could share. Outside of that...eh.
@@randomvideosn0where Point being that most chain establishments have logistics distribution centers which are easily accessible by localized shipping. In a sense of urbanization though, semi's are horrible for highway traffic, so if there's a system in which heavy freight trains can offload to freight yards, and from freigh yards, companies can commission local logistics/metro rail-line services to ship containers to distribution centers, bypassing roads, it'd make for a fast and efficient system, as well as provide revinue for the infrastructure which passenger trains may use too. A big problem in less dense cities is that mass transit simply doesn't meet the density requirements to be economical, so perhaps shipping goods would bridge that gap.
You could also just use an electro-diesel locomotive; often referred to as a dual-mode or bi-mode locomotive. These engines already exist and they're effectively a diesel-electric with a pantograph on top.
Parallel mfs literally went: "let's make a train but in the most mechanically and electronically complex way possible" Step 1: refuse to put the goddamn wires up and make everything 5 metric shittons heavier because of the batteries Step 2: have as many moving parts as humanly possible, and then some, and also throw a fucking computer into everything idk Step 2.5: separate the train cars and have a bunch of bogies instead (refer to step 2, the more parts the better) Step 3: DO NOT COUPLE THE BOGIES DO NOT COUPLE THE BOGIES DO NOT COUPLE THE BOGIES (only complex computer system allowed) Step 4 (GOLDEN RULE): it must be autonomous otherwise it sucks
It's a scam to get some of that sweet venture capital. Don't think too much about it logically, you might hurt your brain lol. Imagine what we could do with that money if we just spent it on catenary wires instead. Think how great our rail system would be if Congress could stop pretending that Amtrak isn't a public service.
Wow you are so wrong. Current trains are fantastically complicated machines, with many computers, going to electric pods would eliminate literally thousands of parts. Why is putting electricity in a battery more complex than in an overhead line? It's not. Cars that never touch is vastly superior to an engine pulling cars. The pods will be able to diagnose bad bearings sticking brakes or any other mechanical problem that will manifest as an anomaly to the overall efficiency of the pod. The algorithms for transport logistics is the same as any other complex distribution system, they are proven and reliable. These pods would lead to an overall reduction in the need for computers as they are simple and all the same.
While trains aren't really my focus (I am still unsure why youtube recommended this, but it was a good watch) this rings as familiar from other industries too. Let's take the lock industry for example. Over the past few years a pile of tech startups have tried to "disrupt" the lock industry with their flashy *_smart locks._* The problem is that while they have some cool tech to manage access, they completely fail at being an effective lock. We're talking about locks that can be opened with a few taps from a hammer (and I do mean taps), locks that have exposed screws that allow disassembly while still being locked and attached, and locks that can't handle a little water. The fault seems to be that these companies don't actually pick up anyone in the industry they're trying to disrupt to explain to them how things work. I swear, it almost seems like they read a Wikipedia article on their industry and figure that tells them everything they need to know.
So even these lock "disrupters" are not lock people. Same in cycling, "disrupters" pop up several times a year every year since 1900. Its always non cyclists who have no clue and their "invention" make them look like fools. Even Elon Musk had a go with something utterly idiotic (a moped with GPS). The mantra is always the same , the basic bike design hasnt changed since 1890, therefore there "must" be a better way. Still waiting.
@@garyking508 There are generally two types of failure in the "smart" lock field: 1) they forgot they were building a lock 2) put in a failsafe key lock that is terrible/compromised If you want to see some examples of these failures, I can highly recommend the Lock Picking Lawyer here on youtube. Forgot they were building a lock: th-cam.com/video/pTys_WYBOLE/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/mGpMaShltbc/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/WeCGTosv-_c/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/PEaIadLDLIA/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/AIaFleFMPn0/w-d-xo.html Failsafe key that's trash: th-cam.com/video/rg9k12aTR5o/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/s7T3KeVQ2wE/w-d-xo.html I'll stop there, but there's a pile more examples that include "just hit the thing with a hammer until it breaks open". Locks made of plastic. Locks with screws exposed to take them apart. Locks glued together. Locks using latching mechanisms that were out of date 100 years ago. Locks using keyed-alike backup keys that are so common you can get them on ebay. Locks using tubular keys (these are so well exploited that you should never, ever use one). Smart locks are, without a doubt, a mess right now.
I've seen the Lock Picking Lawyer do this a few times with electric locks. The problem is that most of your existing locks can be opened just as quickly. The ones he struggles with are new and novel designs, like U-shaped keyways that make it impossible to get anywhere near the tumblers. Sometimes the new ideas do actually work better.
@@johnroutledge9220 You'll note, if you watch the talk he did at SAINTCON, he specifically aims to show bad locks in his videos. There are good locks and cores out there (Schlage primus, for example) that he won't do a video on because they aren't the problem with the lock industry.
@@ConstantlyDamaged Except the Schlage Primus was patented in the 1980s. It's not fantastically new, but it's not exactly ancient either. So as I said, he struggles with the new and newish designs. But not so much the older designs. And again, sometimes the newer designs are better than the old designs. Going back to the train concept... They're throwing together a bunch of concepts that are (mostly) proven in other industries, and in some rail industries outside of America. Will the total be greater, or simply equal to the sum of its parts? Don't know. This concept is far from proven, and it might be a tech bro bondoogle. But on the other hand, it might be a valid idea, and this video might be a TH-cam Manufactured Outrage Industrial Complex click-bait video. Whining about the young and straw manning the new are both cheap ways of getting a thumbs up. At this point it's hard to tell, especially for those of us outside the industry.
well, if you like misinformation then this is the place for you. He's a complete moron who doesn't know what he's saying he called a train in switzeerland "the future of local american freight"
I'm only up to the stopping distance example snapshot, and I already have an issue with the sales pitch. Stopping distance of a train has nothing to do with motive power. It has everything to do with the weight (length) of the train, and the friction between steel wheels and steel rails. If you have a single locomotive and a single box car, that's gonna stop lickety split. The extra weight of the locomotive will translate into extra downward force (thus friction) on the wheels. You strap thirty more boxcars to that train, and stopping distance goes up a whole lot. Who knew?! There are already duplicate braking systems on each and every car in a train, operated by air pressure from the locomotive, so you're going from 8 sets of brakes per car to 8 sets of brakes per car. Not sure what you're really changing, here...
Think it has to do with how it takes time for the air pressure to change between each car. This could be changed by having smaller compressors on each wagon (Or just some of them) that are controlled remotely. Or a set of small traction motors and lead acid batteries that are controlled remotely. Which would also have the benefit of making it easier for the train to climb hills. :) But both of them would require some light servicing every now and again... So probably not worth it.
Maybe the idea is that they can...reverse the motors on the wheels or something? But I'm not sure that would meaningfully slow the cars more, instead of just making the wheels grind more on the rails and generating more heat.
Oh that's amazing. When I was seeing that, I thought: "Hey, the first marginal benefit of Pods over trains, I can't believe I actually see one", and now you tell me this. :D Thanks!
@@timothymclean The construction of an electric motor and an electric generator is almost identical. The rotor (the thing that spins) and the stator (the thing that makes the rotor spin) are identical between generators and motors. Wether or not it acts like a motor or generator depends on if you are sending appropriate power to it, or you have something can take the power the motor is generating when it spins. And you can have both and just switch between them when necessary.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing! It's hard and dangerous to derail a train, but a couple of autonomous bikes carrying a single shipping container? Won't even make the news.
I work for the railroad and I keep imagining these pods attempting to go down a rotted track, pass a manual switch, somehow throw it and reverse into an industry into the exact spot the customer needs it. The tech required for just that customer, sensors and automatic interlocking etc would be way too expensive for any railroad to adopt. Hilarious vid
Could be a good fun. Bring a couple of beers and watch these things trying to navigate railyard with your buddies from work. Throw some bets, then throw empty beer bottles at them.
Let the car owners pay for the remote controlled switches, dispatcher notification, spotting control systems and costs and maintenance of these powered units.
@@erbewayne6868 Let the customers who wanted those things pay. And then make them pay for the removal of the crap aswell, after it failed hillariously. The only place I could see this work would be at a totally automated port (like Hamburg port), but they're already using (partially?) electric self-driving vehicles, that don't need tracks. I don't know how far along they are with using electric-only vehicles, the last article I could find was from 2018 where they say that they're planning to replace the ones they have with electric vehicles.
Well said! I like playing in a park with my daughter that's next to exactly the kind of low-volume line that this company wants to serve. She gets great views of the daily train waiting impatiently for clearance to enter the factory's line and then watching the crew throw the switch.
@@MrJimheeren Maybe you're not American. Here the freight railroads are privately owned corporations, for-profit. They squeeze every penny of cost out of the operation where possible, including maintenance, on lightly used branches and sidings; that is, the ones they haven't been able to eliminate altogether.
@@davidty2006 thats a shortlines branch probably. Save costs they use the hell out of the industrial track until its unusable. Mainlines are maintained to allow usually 75mph (somewhere just above 100kph iirc)
I kindof freeaking love the train traveling down the overgrown local rail line at 3:31. It's so surreal and I wish there was a way to replicate that on miniature trains XD
Can you imagine your local RR crossing closing traffic every 5 min so a single car or a loosely spread out group of "train" cars can pass? Trains are the way they are because they work.
But wouldn't they also reopen much faster, since the trains are a lot shorter and can be broken apart? It'd be closer to a red light at a normal traffic light, and people are already used to waiting for a few tens of seconds when they get a red light...
if autonomous cars can communicate with these autonomous bogies then nobody would have to stop, the computers could calculate the speeds and distances to not intersect, someone may have to slow down slightly but no stopping would be required
@@jasonwilde197 No, I'm saying that instead of having to wait 15 min for a train crossing, you wait for 30 seconds. For that matter, taking trucks off the roads means even fewer red lights/traffic.
@@rickrickston3202 I agree, and multiple-5-seconds red lights works best in my city, Jakarta, to alleviate traffic compared to long 120 seconds red light
Its actually better.. You can eliminate the overhead cranes. Replace them with a cheaper system that would consist of some kind of roadrailer that would facilitate the transition.
I think one of the big things with the tech grift is that their whole thing is predicated on the idea that existing things need to be radically disrupted in a way that allows you to sell product. like they're starting with that premise and then looking for a good target, so it's always going to be a bit flimsy
So it makes you wonder: Is capitalism about filling unmet needs in the marketplace, or is it about filling your bank account through any possible means? Remember the dot-com bust, which followed the tulip craze? Maybe we can just replace physical goods with NFTs, so transportation becomes moot.
Some issues I saw right away at the start of the video: 1) What is the range on a single charge? 2) What happens when one of the little pods goes dead battery while the other still has charge? 3) How are they charged? 4) Where are they charged? 5) How long does it take to charge one completely? 6) What is the life expectancy of the battery? 7) When a pod goes flat battery, how can the two pods and cargo container be cleared from the track before another container, or a full train, needs that piece of track?
@@MonkeyJedi99 the answer to all of those is not applicable because it doesn't exist. it's just pretty graphics, I doubt they even thought about this stuff let alone tried to put together a prototype, it's straight to the flashy 3D animated presentation
@@Graknorke @MonkeyJedi99 And as we all know, if you can 3d it, it must be true, so therefore, 1) the range is* infinite, 2) the batteries never die, 3) they aren't, 4) they never need charging ever, 5) negative infinity infinities, 6) forever, 7) the batteries never go flat. Boom, get dest0y3d :O
The weirdest part to me is that if you're individually driving these things, each one has to deal with wind resistance. It's like the opposite of car pooling lmao.
the idea is sound if they can combine as one big train for longer track and each business that accept the freight have their own small stations to accept the car, the truckers would be angry tho.
@@LMYS5697 How? And with what? I'm genuinely curious, what is the replacement for trucks making the final delivery to grocery stores, retail stores, etc.? Without a replacement i don't see how anyone could try to price them out of the market. I'd love to see what bright idea they had in the 70s.
@@DrZygote214 what I meant is wages have continued to stagnate for truckers, since the seventies. The career has a pretty bad turnover rate. It's also one of the most dangerous jobs in America with something like 25-28 OTJ fatalities per 100,000 workers. Most freight transport is dangerous work, in significant part because freight companies simply don't care about the people moving the freight. This is as true of truckers as it is railroad engineers.
The thing I find hilarious all these “innovations” fail to understand is that there’s a limited supply of lithium that’s able to be produced each year. Meaning these “things” will just eat up the supply.
And care to guess what country has the biggest supply of lithium??? Ready...............Afghanistan!! And care to guess who's in bed with them??...........China!!
Well there’s no reason at all to put batteries on trains anyways (aside from very small emergency power supplies), as you can easily electrify rail with either overhead cables (generally preferred when possible for safety reasons) or a third rail.
@@JohnnyAmerique Still though it would make diesel locomotives practical and environmentally friendly for how much it would cost to get some of these things running around. Not to mention where is the power for them going to come from. Definitely not a renewable resource
You really want to impress me, techbros, design a system to get a container from a boat to a train to a local rail/tram freight to dropping the whole container off at the end consumer without ever touching a fucking truck.
Something like that used to exist. One example I can think of is Suffern New York. There are old railroad tracks that go between the buildings in the town center. I believe they use to do drop offs for stores in their backs. A similar system was supposed to be set up where the old American brake shoe company was in Mahwah NJ just down the road. Developers who bought the land had to promise to set that infrastructure up but eventually wormed their way out and threw up some retail and storage units. I don't know if there's a name for that type of infrastructure but wish we still had it.
"Don't talk to the management" earned you my subscription right here and there XD Also. Yes. THANK YOU. Please do look at the Swiss, German and Austrian way of cargo-railroading and how it is being integrated into shipyards (Best examples there being Hamburg, because, of course it is, and also Vienna, while it might not be right next to the open sea, the Danube and its canals ARE still very important ship ways, to this day. And it can be made even better, and even pulled off across Europe (and maybe even combine with Asia?) if we'd put our minds to it. Autonomous "pod" railroading at best works in rather small-scale things, like in the lower levels of a hospital where such autonomous mini freighters bring food and fresh cloth and whatever needed to the appropriate lifts so that the stations can call their stock up to their floor where they need it and they also collect the dirty cloths to bring it to the laundry room, or MAYBE something like that old ass London Underground postal railway. Something like an Amaz0n warehouse could work perfectly well with such autonomous systems, yeah. But regular long-distance cargo rail? LMAO, don't make me laugh XDDDD
Keeping those things at exactly the right distance from each other while loading would be an incredible challenge, let alone the rest of the crap they claim they're going to do.
Ultrasonic or infrared sensors or simply mechanical switches or magnetic sensors that tell the system if they are still close to another waggon or not. It would be cheap and simple
@@electric7487 These sensors and the controllers only cost a small fraction of a waggon, it's super cheap these days and very simple to program. A 12 year old can do that, just like they can do it with LEGO Mindstorms robots.
@@razorblade7108 Some people fail to realise that building a serious piece of equipment is not as simple as building a Lego set. All these sensors represent unneeded complexity, additional failure points, and maintenance hassles. Plus, they would make an already non-standard design even more specialised and harder to integrate into existing infrastructure. Remember, *_don't fix what ain't broke._*
Hi Alan, if you want to know more about the development and testing of RoadRailers I would be glad to discuss. I was the Director of R&D at Wabash National back when they acquired the product rights from Thrall Car.
Another issue- anything really expensive needs to have high utilization rates to get acceptable productivity. These units would likely spend a lot of time doing nothing-not good! Also, almost all of their idle time would be in locations where they cannot even use the time to recharge their batteries. This is just one more reason why they are not feasible. But your idea of a battery yard switcher sounds good. If an often used section of track could be electrified, it could be constantly topping off the charge.
"Another issue- anything really expensive needs to have high utilization rates to get acceptable productivity. These units would likely spend a lot of time doing nothing-not good!" that sounds like car-based infrastructure
I think you hit the nail on the head the main problem with these startups is they need to talk to real people and identify actual problems and not just pitch something they thought of with no research or experience
So what I'm hearing is "Tech bros have invented the *most* complicated way to convert intermodal rail cars into electric multiple units, a technology that has been used in passenger trains since the _1890s."_ Sounds like something they'd do. I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea of making intermodal freight beds self-propelled so your traction effort scales immediately to the length of your train, but I _cannot_ wrap my head around why they chose to make _each bogey_ its own vehicle.
Here's some guesses as to why each bogey is its own vehicle (playing the devil's advocate here, I also think it'd make more sense for the entire bed to be one rigid piece at a first glance): - Reduces weight - Lower costs in prototyping (i.e. they'll eventually join them, reusing a lot of tech/software) - Less space taken up when unloaded - Ease of manufacturing (maybe it's suddenly harder to make things that are train car length compared to independent bogey size?) - Slightly better economies of scale (yeah i don't think this reason makes too much sense) - Improved interchangeability (if one bogey breaks, it can be replaced with another bogey, whereas if two bogeys were connected as one bed unit, you'd have to replace the entire unit)
@@rickrickston3202 Not a bad list of points but I think the only one that makes sense is 'Less space taken up when unloaded'. I bet the tech bros would also make claims that the system is 'inherently more adaptable to different freight configurations by letting the units dynamically support freight loads of variable sizes' or suchlike, as if the current intermodal infrastructure couldn't.
@@Vespuchian Being pedantic here, but you know how there's non-standard intermodal container sizes (48ft, 53ft)? I guess independent bogeys would allow you to adapt to those sizes without needing to buy new intermodal train cars. Anyways, Parallel Systems probably thinks they can avoid having the container itself carry significant tension/compression loads since both ends are independently propelled, but if they run into any problems with other forces (e.g. one person has raised liquid slosh as an issue in another discussion), they'll probably just weld an I beam or two between the two bogeys. I suppose it's one less step = slightly cheaper if they can dodge needing to buy and weld that I-beam. Although, they could save the cost of two magnetic bumper/couplers by doing so... Overall I think it's unlikely but not entirely impossible for the trade to work out in favour of separate bogeys.
@@rickrickston3202 Oh, I'm well aware of the different sized containers, Parallel Systems seems to think that having a single sized rail car that's large enough to carry all of them is terribly wasteful.
Imagine all the maintenance on all of those autonomous boggies.What you have effectively done is replaced one locomotive, or two if doubled headed, with 40 locomotives!I use to work on the railways and when it's not infrastructure most problems are engine related problems so the less complicated engines you have the better.
Why scale up the power source for maximum efficiency, using mains power even as an option, when we can try and make every single unit have to have the onboard power and machinery to overcome friction and propel itself? We all know that one locomotive can only pull one container at a time, right?
@chemik But what if they are not more reliable? And what if they aren't better/more convenient? And what if they require more infrastructure eg charging? Current trains can last for decades and don't require battery maintenance (eg charging and replacement). They may be noisy, but thats the cost of industry.
@chemik The problem is that that container to be transported is using the same tracks as every other container to be transported, so its not like a drone that can fly direct to you, more or less without impacting the route of another drone. That's going to make them impractical on existing infrastructure. Noise is a negative externality, and we should look at reducing it where practical, but I don't think it should be the primary concern. Ultimately they should be located far from population centres as much as possible, and people moving in close by need to understand they are moving near train tracks.
Exactly. And when the batteries are fully charged, they pose an extreme fire risk, no matter the chemistry. If they manage to make a battery with the same energy density as gasoline or Diesel fuel, then once that battery is fully charged it becomes a GIANT POTENTIAL BOMB sitting on the rails.
Used to occasionally haul Schneider rail trailers when I drove big trucks 30 years ago. The frames weren't anywhere as near as strong as a native boxcar, and all of the added hardware and bulking up of the frame meant you couldn't carry as much freight as a regular van or container trailer because of the total vehicle weight restrictions. They stopped using them on rails and used them in the general freight pool but they weren't popular because of the extra weight involved.
That was what I was thinking too. They had to be as strong as a railcar but as light as a truck trailer, so they ended up having to strike a compromise between the two. The resulting carriage was the worst of both worlds: way overbuilt for a truck trailer, but too flimsy for a railcar.
I'd say the first step in solving a problem for a major industry is knowing how the industry currently works, what challenges it currently faces, and what it's done about them so far. Or you know, anything at all about the industry you're trying to fix.
My solution would be to put one (or multiple) "tractors" (I'd call them locomotives) up front that are electrified with overhead wires and pantographs. I think I'm on to something.
Something that a lot of these -scams- ideas have in common is that they're big, grand and require significant upfront investing. Some examples: 1. Install solar panels next to roads? No! The roads _are_ the solar panels! 2. Use the existing rail-car form factor? Nope, that's for losers! We'll rethink _everything!_ 3. Make an electric car? No, Hydrogen! Won't work unless you build so much refueling infrastructure that it rivals what exists for ICE engines 4. Store energy as methane? No, use Hydrogen for that slight efficiency boost! Doesn't matter that it's incompatible with natural gas infrastructure!
Anyone who has ever modified their car has learned that cars have been evolving for a long time. You can get something, but invariably you're giving up a lot more, overall, than you gained. Beware of anyone who shows up with a slick computer rendering of a, *gulp*, "revolutionary", new method, device, or machine for a well-established industry.
I work in an industrial park were only 1 business gets freight cars delivered to them. Every time it happens the road outside my job is closed because the train has to do the equivalent of parallel parking on a side line after kicking the last 3 cars. I could see something like this working well for this kind of situation. Let me be clear. I am talking about a full size car not these little carts. Something that couples to the train, but has an effective power assist for the final couple thousand feet. So 1 man could hop off the back of the train, cut the cars loose, move them back, switch the line over, and hand them off physically to some at the company before flipping the track back. The closest thing I could describe to this would be die plate movers.
I could see that you might want a boxcar or other wagon with a small simple battery and motor, with the capability for remote control. Because that might make switching yard/last mile operations slightly easier?
Perhaps even the batteries as a part of a larger power system, so that if there is a locomotive involved, they may not even have to run off their own batteries. Potentially an intermodal container freight EMU or EDMU, that sounds fun.
@@ironlynx9512 issue with that is the charging, EMU can access power from overhead wires, these battery cargo things do nhave the container overhead. Probably best to keep the cargo segment cheap and have a single dedicated electric locomotive, it's not like cargo train benefit from faster acceleration like passenger anyway
@@herlescraft Having a single powered boxcar/container car, that has both overhead electrification and battery capability, would be better than a heavy 1500kw locomotive. you only need a couple hundred kw of power to move a short train at slow speeds, which is what local freight is about.
As someone who's ridden like 100,000+ miles of freight trains i can certainly attest to the inefficiency of the sector...One glaring issue to me is the difference between western Europe and the Balkans, the same train is expected to run at 70+mph across all of Western Europe, then be pulled by a diesel switching engine at 20mph on un-welded tracks for 3 days to cross Eastern Europe. Maybe start with fixing the ancient equipment before putting robot containers on the lines LOL
This is one of those things that if you don't think about too hard, it makes complete sense. But the more you ask questions and explore, the less it makes sense. Definitely an idea thought up on a coffee break or when high. Would be super cool, except reality and costs are completely different than pie-in-the-sky ideas.
@@davidty2006 nothing, but I could see an automated one of these being cheaper for a steel mill or foundry to replace an older unit with than say an older Diesel-electric switcher they would probably want to convert to remote control anyway. It's niche, but I could see it filling it
@@greynolds17 yeah like a track mobile but probably lower maintenance and cheaper to run at least in the short term. No tires, no fuel, no oil, no turbos, idk about hydraulics. Trackmobiles sometimes seem like all the worst maintenance aspects of a truck doubled in size lol
Excellent analysis. I always wondered how Triple Crown and the like could weather the long haul or be efficient at all. Hadn't heard anything prior to this about APTs. Thanks!
2:48 Here in India we have double stack trains running with standard container flatcars, no well cars needed, so if the height restrictions allowed, you could have them be double stacked. Make this an actual container car/boxcar with underslung batteries or such, with normal couplers, and you could probably make this work for short local freight without requiring a locomotive, with or without the autonomous system, which is cost saving. 8:30 IMO battery locomotives are a fantastic complement to electrified railways. Electrify your mainlines, and have normal electric locomotives charge up the batteries on those mainlines (and for regen), and then you can run via battery locomotives, which will also power those normal electric locomotives on the branch lines where there isn't enough traffic to electrify.
The reason they can stack two containers on a flat cat is because Indian gauge is considerably boarder than standard gauge or Russian gauge, so center of gravity is not much of an issue compare to others. And I believe freight EMU trains, likes what you've described, can't be as economical as having a locomotive pulling your train, let alone trying to attach a battery on it.
@@trungpham5022 Indian gauge is only 24cm wider than standard gauge. Also youve completely misunderstood me. I'm talking about having a batter *locomotive* not a freight EMU where every axle is powered. Read my comment again. EDIT: i see where the confusion comes from. For the powered boxcar/container car, it would just be that 1 car that is powered, not all the others it's pulling, since you only need a couple hundred kw for local freight, instead of the several thousand kw of a locomotive.
@@madmanthan21 24cm is quite a lot. Sport cars and race cars just several cm can make quite a difference on cornering. And powered cars, I think the problem is already included in the video. First is cost, second is theft. Local means these cars will spend many time in their costumer's yard or industry tracks, loading, unloading, or just temporary store their for a while. Many of these places is "open to public", no wall, no fence, and no lights, no camera, no guarding system, everyone can put their hands on them without being spotted. Clearly you can't put guard on these cars due to cost, so current best solution is make these cars have noting can or worth to be theft, which is the way cars be since day one of railroading until today.
@@pqhkr2002 Locomotives spend quite a lot of time in yards with no guards, and i haven't heard of anybody stealing parts from those. I have heard of people stealing diesel from locomotives, but actual parts? no.
@@madmanthan21 I actually didn't heard such case either, but I believe theft is still a thing, somewhere else in the world. And not only theft, naughty kids can also be a threat.
So weird that trains are trying to go battery, while electric trucks are experimenting with overhead wire recharging. Maybe we can just finally meet in the middle.
Another thing that poses a problem with the Grift idea is the fact that the freight has to be transported from the rail yard to the store i.e. Walmart, Target, Lowe's, Sam's Club, Cosco, etc. After a seventeen year truck driving career, I know that getting the freight to the store means that big trucks have to make the deliveries. If any vehicle on the road is hated more than a semi tractor trailer inside a city, I don't know what it would be. Getting less than all of a load to a store means there is the likelihood of theft. Yes, I know there is theft of rail freight now, but the theft I am referring to means everything within a container would be stolen which would mean higher prices and angrier customers. The Grift idea needs to be dumped in file 13; trash!
Indeed. Elon Musk did that with cars. He tried to revolutionize car manufacturing by automating the whole thing. ... It didn't work. One failure and the entire line comes to a halt. Car manufacturers tried this in the 90s. They met with the same results. So instead, the process is run in parallel and asynchronously. If one part of the assembly line stops, the rest of it can continue until whatever that one machine did is the only thing missing.
The occasional rail car with a small built in motor could greatly streamline shunting at rail yards and ports. Otherwise, I don’t see much use for rail pods, or anything else remotely like them.
I think this could work really well inside railyards. They can autonomously carry a container and use a parralel track to give it to a longer train. This is one of the only good uses, apart from times where cargo is just one or two containers down some branch line (like on the trans-siberian).
YOU’RE NOT THINKING BIG ENOUGH!!! We need to apply this to shipping too! No more bulky container ships, just add some pontoons and a propeller to the back of a forty foot container. Toss them in the ocean, and next stop, Wilhelmshaven! Air freight? You want air freight? Just add a wing pack and a jet engine on top. Mix in some AI. Ready for take off!
I like your idea and it seems more practical than the individual pods shuffling themselves around. I thought the idea of local delivery was to expedite moving containers out of the shipping ports to other locals. If I understand it, right now the problem is lots of trailers sitting at the port. I could see how an autonomous switch engine could shuffle rail cars to switch yards or truck offload sites. EV optional.
Sounds like the system of my old workplace... They used to hold management meetings to improve productivity. 6 machine operators, 3 managers and the team leads went into the meetings for 2 hours per day for 90 days. Coffee and food were provided and by the end of it all... they decided that meetings would be held outside of normal production hours. Productivity fell by 32% in those 90 days. It is really strange, like the meeting stopped most of the machines for 2 hours or so. After 90 days the production manager stopped the productivity meetings and cancelled them indefinitely. Productivity returned to normal levels.
Actually, this concept (except for the batteries) was developed 20 years ago by Siemens in Germany. It was called CargoMover. It's not that stupid, but expensive. By then, (and still now) it was too dependant on continuous high-speed data connection, fully automated traffic control and all-remote controlled switches. Not available then and still lacking today, hence it still has some technological barriers, but that hardly makes it a Grift. Rail operators and authorities spend millions trying to find a way to reduce switching costs in order to make rail transportation more competitive for smaller and shorter shipments. A train like that can switch itself with no need for human intervention or a yard. Nowadays, the US rail system gets a much higher market share than European rail, and also emits less CO2 per tkm. Since batteries won't give too much range in rail service, the old diesel concept from the Germans still makes sense. Or maybe a series-hybrid, for better battery use. Anyway, when cars are self-propelled, they don't have to be designed for high tractive forces. That's one of the reasons why Japanese passenger trains are lighter.
I can see the appeal of having each container traveling autonomous on the railway lines, and I think that is a process easier to automate than road traffic since it shouldn't be any unauthorized traffic on the railway lines. But in practice the requirements on the infrastructure to get that to work will probably restrict this to a busy harbor if even that. And in that case it is better to feed the power via a power-rail bellow instead of batteries.
They always talk about the "no emissions" of things like this. There's always emissions somewhere, and the environmental cost for the battery material is horrendous. There are too many ways this can go bad - how's the autonomous pod going to stop when some idiot crosses the tracks? If it is good a detecting and stopping, the cargo thieves will jump on that tactic in a heartbeat.
The biggest problem is they are looking at automated logistics from a component perspective instead of at a systems level right. They want to automate the train (which has been done already) but have forgotten about all the other manual systems.
Talking and listening to workers instead of managers is a great idea. Unfortunately, in most American businesses senior management usually thinks the best way to address a problem is to add an additional layer of middle management. And then, to offset the cost of the additional managers, cut back on front line workers.
@7:05 While they are at it, apparently they are going to casually invent floating containers that can be loaded from a truck onto a train without the help of any cranes and while on the move
Retired SoCalif freight conductor. Resembles the 'Trailer Train' idea. They 'Made It Work' for a short time but finally scrapped it in Los Angeles 20 years ago.
What i learned from videos like this and one videogame is that the effective way to freighting is large engine + the freight. The engine may also be the cockpit
The fact that you added Sell Out when you got to Road Railers, *chef kiss* fantastic. One of the reasons they never took off, or at least according to my brother. Carrying capacity. The reinforcements needed to bolster the trailer frame lowered the carrying capacity. So instead of being able to haul 40,000 lbs. You're now down to 20,000-30,000. Something like a 1/3 to half of what a normal 53 ft trailer can carry.
The instant i saw the concept i found an obvious improvement to it: just merge every 2 pods into normal wagons and use a third rail for power instead of having batteries. I can't see any reason to have two separate carriers for each container, and if you just use normal wagons that you make independent then you keep most of the interoperability with standard systems.
Battery-electric isn't *that* stupid for shunting - freight yards are dangerous places anyway, and the infrastructure for electrifying all of a freight yard is non-trivial (third rails and catenaries get quite complicated when you add points and junctions into the mix); speeds are generally low so drag losses will be small, and shunting naturally involves a lot of slowing down and stopping so there's plenty of scope for regenerating power back into the battery. They also already exist and are replacing diesel-electric and diesel-hydraulic shunters; autonomous ones haven't shown up yet but a freight yard with autonomous shunting seems like a very sensible and relatively doable operation compared to autonomous mainline operations.
Every company has this problem. People working with tools have no say in what tools are being used. After 20y of mechanical work at numerous company's (i do factory maintenance stops mostly, so usually only there for a couple months max) ive seen it every where. Managers thinking they know best, forgetting decennia of floor work teach more then 4y in school...
So often people get new ideas how to fix something that works perfectly fine with something that is expensive and do not work in real life for many reasons...
These schemes aren’t actually trying to create a useful product and have no interest in the industry. These schemes are trying to get money out of investors and as such are marketed to people that don’t understand the industry. Keep that in mind: the customer for a tech bro company isn’t a user, it’s an INVESTOR.
In a very large UK company I once worked for this would smell like some graduate trainees' final project that a bigwig fell for. It would be loathed by the employees and ridiculed. Yet it would be forced into existence.
Ok, "local freight" might work, if by local they mean, "around the factory" i COULD see these things zipping around between factory warehouses, zipping over to a storage area of empty containers, picking up an empty, bringing it up to a loading area, loading it, zipping it over to a local freight yard a few miles away where its unloaded, zipping over to pick up more empty containers, and bring them back to the base warehouse. This would work for a company that is running 24/7 and moving shipping containers from storage to factory, factory to transfer point. This would allow more automation, reduce risks for driver and such, and lower costs, as you aren't paying for drivers 24/7. That said... anything past that.. nope.
Batteries on board seems dumb, on an electrified line this idea would be a lot more apealing for on site transfers. It seems like there wouldn't be many times where they would be more efficient than traditional freight movers which can lift as well as transport containers meaning they can be used for changing modes of transport as well as moving short distances.
@@SineN0mine3 yep but most load/unload movers tend to be fixed. Those that aren't, again, to unload and move across a plant then come back for the next... that can take a lot of time. Simply put, the ONLY use for this is automation over short distances, which reduces manpower, so rather then having 4 movable loaders, you have 1 static, and these things. The ONLY reason to go with batteries, is "safety" in as much as a "hot rail line" can be a hazard to workers. that said, having a "hot" section" where access is limited for quick charges on the run, would work.
An important aspect that a lot of projects don’t count is that in Europe we have nearly every important line electrified and one of the biggest change that the pod made was to change From disel to electricity but the aereal cables are a great solution to that problem, another think that electric train like we have in Europe are great is that they don’t need batteries so less expensive than batteries ones, smaller and even less heavy
There is no such thing as europe. For example, brexit, lol. And even if you were to insist otherwise, youre still trying to advertise yourself as equals to America, which will never work because, well, you sound needy
1:13 Oh cool! * Four destroyed shipping containers (that smash directly into the cabin of the train behind, naturally) * That much less room to stop for the guy behind * Eight -- count them, _eight_ -- lithium fires (because what powers the batteries?) I'm just talking realistically, but already this seems like a bad idea
@9:02 I was hoping you would suggest if they have to be fancy to do existing container double stacks with electrification. Beauty is you could basically do a skateboard design and have the battery pack in the structure, and perhaps even port that same architecture over to box cars, etc. At least that way you’re moving twice the freight and could easily set it up for couplers. The problem is they’re reinventing the wheel.
Someone commented on Trains Magazine’s article, “if they could hook them together and put a power source at the front, it’d be way more efficient. Then, maybe having two people up front to deal with unforeseen circumstances the computer can’t handle would end up saving money in the long run. Too bad we can’t do anything like that.” 😂😂😂
Because of Big Car mafia ?
😂😂😂 this can't be true
Never been done in the history of ever and is still not being done at all.
I keep thinking, we should just rename normal trains to "PodChains", then all the tech bros would go wild for it.
@@monad_tcp They're being ironic, they described how a train already works hahaha
"Listen to the workers, not the management" YES! I am a train driver and you wouldn't believe how many times i've seen changes that my coworkers and i immediately knew would be a total (and expensive) failure. NEVER has any manager asked any of us what could make things better. Too bad because i and others know exactly where the problems are and we know a bunch of cheap solutions that would work perfectly. But hey we are just workers, what do we know right?
Those people work in management because they were fed (and happily licked up) the lie that you need to be college-educated to be successful or intelligent.
I don't know how your employer operates, but if you can, make a bid for promotion. Tell the person interviewing you the problems you see with current management and how you would solve them. Interviewers eat that shit up. Maybe you could affect real change using your direct knowledge of the rail system, who knows. Couldn't hurt to try IMO.
@@tissuepaper9962 Where I work we have a bunch of bright young engineers trying to improve our processes. They are smart, well educated, work hard and mean well, but they don't get out on the plant floor all that often and then are surprised when their ideas don't work out very well in the real world.
and this is what I learned in my apprenticeship in college.
Because they put me at the lowest level first, working with normal employees (great people, buddies forever, if I worked there).
Studies are mainly theory, and practice takes place in laboratories on specific examples. But reality is unpredictable. Therefore, if after defending my master's degree, I find myself in a design office, I am going to go around and ask ordinary employees first what's wrong and what's right, because it was not me who worked with these machines for the last 10 years, but them.
@@JeffDeWitt That's why when I became a Production Engineer I was ordered by my boss to work the assembly line for two months including the night shift. I've made friendships and gained knowledge that I'd have never gotten anywhere else. To this day I thank my boss for it. It should be mandatory for every manager, engineer etc. just out of school.
These people absolutely need to prove they can come up with ideas on their own, because otherwise they'd be out of their jobs. This is also why they stay in the office for long hours (regardless if they're actually working or not) and spend days in pointless meetings to discuss things that could be resolved in 15 minutes. They're supposed to be rewarded for results, but most of the time the top brass rewards them for effort instead. As long as the management delivers hundreds of pages of nonsensical drivel to the bosses' desks every week, they get a bonus, while you're stuck dealing with the fallout on the ground.
Usually, the longer the train can get, the more efficient it is. This system expects to block the entire track by a single carriage.
The best Capacity Killer ever!!
Add in all the hazards of autonomous vehicles and every rail crossing becomes a real life game of frogger. Even if it triggers the cross bars and alerts there are plenty of places with little to no alerts systems I've had to drive across nearly every variant up to and including, roll down your window, floor it, and pray you don't stall.
I wonder if these people even understand there are multiple breaking systems on trains, and for a damn good reason.
absolutely true, but is this really an issue when the block is suddenly the length of a single carriage?
as Adamant Forge says, it becomes real life frogger, but I'm sure you'll agree computers are somewhat better at these tasks than humans
Example: th-cam.com/video/l_KY_EwZEVA/w-d-xo.html
It would have to be set up like a road. Two sets of tracks that each go one direction only. Individual container could slide on and off the tracks like cars merging onto a freeway. They would all have to have overpass and under passes at road crossing to keep that flow going.
CZperso: NOT true in many cases. You should try driving in my town. The train that blocks the road always takes a whopping 20 minutes to crawl through because they load tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many trailers and the damn engine can't pull them faster than 10-15 mph
I've counted them. Sometimes they attach 120 trailers. That's just too much and overloads the engine car. Stupid.
Someone should just put some fancy plastic and rgb on trains, call them something futuristic and stupid like "Universal High Speed Carry Pods", and sell them as a "new mode of transportation"
I mean it's the 20s again. Time for another streamliner era.
Honestly that's crazy enough to work.
Lemme try. *Cough
Multi-mode capable, high fidelity, independently moving interconective metal enclosed carry plenum "Total Reusable Alternative Interface" .
Also known as Boxcar TRAIN.
It should be white which will look like a ICE or Airbus 😊
Let's call it:
"Frait"
Free
Robotic
Autonomous
Intelligent
Train
"I know a way to revolutionise transport!"
"Does it use pods?"
"Yes!"
"Then I don't want to hear about it"
the last time pods were used in a way that everyone liked, they were for combine prisoners in Half-Life 2. lol
Why don’t we make a very big pod that has room for 60 people, supported with 8 metal wheels, 4 under each end, hook many of them together, and add an even bigger pod in front with an engine and driver seat, and a pair of long metal *bars* for the wheels to roll on? I think i’m onto something!
I think we should use pods.
We should propel them with jet engines attached with cables, and make slaves race them through the desert.
@@thetheatreorgan168Genius! We’ll call it rolling planes or something like that
@@AVI-lh6rm[Pick up that can]
This sounds like something they started as an automatic trucking solution but when they realized how hard that would be they said "hey, why not just make it on rails? Those already exist. Then we don't need to make it self-driving".
It's a system for moving containers around ports that they are trying to upsell so they can charge more and get more investors.
@@BeKindToBirds And even for ports it wouldn't be too useful, because you'd need tracks for them. Systems like these are already in use, but not as trains, but as self-driving (partially?) electric vehicles, like for example at Hamburg port (which is totally automated).
Now that I'm thinking about it, the only thing worse than these things being meant for rails is these things being meant for roads.
why not just install a system of rollers with a few stationary motors sprinkled in to move crates around ports? Like a huge conveyor belt? Way easier and way cheaper.
@@cleanerben9636 rollers are not easier or cheaper than rails. Talkless of the huge electricity bill, they travel a fraction of the speed of regular trains, plus there's no human to intervene should things go wrong.
This is the kind of "innovation" you get from people who have no real understanding of the system they're trying to "improve".
Or they're trying to get some clueless investors and then rebrand after they get their money and it goes nowhere
@@1stCallipostle after what happened with Elizabeth Holmes they may want to be careful with that
Well the founders of parallel systems are former space X control electronics and software engineers, they pretty much fell to the good old "if all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails" mentality.
@@jeanf6295 And I guess the investors think that software engineer is the same as civil engineer because both have the word 'engineer'. And they will proceed to buy it anyway.
@@jeanf6295 "We have batteries, computers, and money! We can improve EVERYTHING!"
I’m a third generation railroader and I lost it when you said “ask… not management.”
You were 100% right about every issue you pointed out. I’d also like to mention that Conrail used to have higher speed electric freight throughout Pennsylvania on the old Dorchester line of Pennsylvania Railroad.
Weren't they using GG1s for the electrified freight, at least in the 70s?
@@jacobforsman3897 Re-Geared GG1s were used by Conrail between 1976 and 1980. Usually with 2-3 mu-ed.
@@albertetzel5925 Oh yeah, I remember in some videos that I had seen that said they were re-geared down from 100, to 90 mph for freight use.
Till did some long business trips to USA didn't know how bad your rail infra was. Tbh makes no sense USA rail infra is so bad, it could work so well there.
@@murphy7801 America's rail infrastructure is okay the problem is that America gives no fucks about passenger rail
A good rule of thumb is that if a company calls their new technology "pods" the technology is just a worse version of something that already exists
"Ask the workers, not the management" I completely agree, in a company I worked for (Huge construction, quarry, milling operation) we had an issue where the oil from the engine and hydraulics compartment leaked into the electric compartment. They called a bunch guys who had no idea what to do or even suggested installing a new motor and hydraulics. A few days later they ask our mechanic to have a go. He fixed it in 10 minutes. He drilled a hole under the engine compartment so the oil leaks there and installed a 10 liter canister underneath and we just had to empty the canister once a month.
Well it is not the cleanest solution to the leaking problem but effectively deals with the elctric compartement being free of oil.
@@metalhat3534 aslong its work.
Your mechanic is a true problem solver. The company was lucky to have him.
@@Isochest I mean, it's kinda just treating the symptoms instead of the illness
Well, that's moreso a cheap, slapdash fix that doesn't actually adress the issue (leaks). It just deters necessary maintenance until a more catastrophic failure occurs.
It's impressive that they've managed to combine the problems of multiple forms of current shipping while also introducing their own problems. Truly innovative!
Never underestimate a consultant add problems to a system and then try to fix new problems. All apart of the employment grift!
@@txag007 Consulting; if you can't be part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
I had a friend who was obsessed with innovation, he wanted to innovate everything around him, with his current knowledge of whichever subject he was fixated on at the moment, so most of his solutions ended up being things that already existed, things that were already discarded due to their flaws or things that wouldn't even work.
When I see solutions like this autonomous pod train, I remember him, as these seem to be created by people like him, heavily motivated and with scant knowledge on the subject they are innovating.
How is he now?
@@blakksheep736 due to personal reasons we are not as close as we once were, so I don't know much about him nowadays.
Being a "disruptor" has always required a certain degree of arrogance. It requires you to think that somehow, everyone that works in the field you're trying to disrupt is stupider than you are, and haven't thought of better ways to do things. That you somehow have some sort of special insight that people who have been working on the problems in the field for 40+ years haven't thought of. 99% of the time, unless there's some new technology, you're an expert in that hasn't been able to be applied to the field due to a lack of expertise in that field, everything you've thought of has been thought of before, and is a stupid idea which anyone who has a slight amount of experience in the field would know.
The fact that these projects can get so far that they're producing fancy CGI graphics and attracting investors is pretty embarrassing.
There is no problem in being innovative. The problem is to try to innovate something that is already perfected.
@@abrahamchogd7128 I doubt there is such a thing as something that has already been perfected, that reminded me of the quote from a physicist in 1897: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
And then quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, Higgs' Boson; heck, even exoplanets and gravitational waves were proposed and discovered after that.
I consider there is always room for improvement, but I get what you say.
Why is America rediscovering the cargo rail like this?
this company proposes a flat bed that is:
- bad at being a flatbed, because of 2 separate units.
- bad at replacing shunting, as it still proposes yards that change it to trucks
- bad at being long distance rail due to batteries
- as bad at braking as normal modern trains (you can't slow down more with steel on steel wheels)
Meanwhile Switzerland:
"let's just electrify even shunting engines with overhead power and make laws to require a sidings near warehouses, and see how people WILL like this"
One word "PSR"
swiss want to be green. you dont need to electrify everything even getting more cargo on diesel trains instead of trucks will mean less carbon emissions.
as for the company they just want their product to broke all the time so they can sell more of it
Monopolists just want to steal and make it as inefficient and ineffective as possible. Then they can suggest another "solution" that is just as crap. Grift it is again and again!!
American in Switzerland here: yes. I do like it, because it's part of keeping things nice and quiet! So peaceful 🥰
@David Moore Idk, I'd say the vast majority of Americans don't care about trains
Correction for you: Roadrailers do still exist. They’re not commonly used by any means, but I have seen them on the mainline between Port Huron & Detroit, MI. I asked someone at CN about the frequency of use. They keep them around because sometimes you need to “do what ya gotta do” to get shipments moved. They’ll use them if they need to. They're a rare sight, but a sight still to be seen every third or fourth blue moon.
NS still runs them on the Wabash line from near KC to near Detroit.
I'm glad you said this. Because when he said that in the video I was like "Wait what?! This guy is nuts. I see these all the time in Indiana." Damn near ruined the credibility of this video 😆
Yea I have a video of some of these from just 2019 of these being used in 2019 in sothern Illinois.
I had to look it up, turns out they are run by triple crown.
@@brotherbarry1864 He should add a disclaimer of some type admitting he was wrong about the roadrailers. But otherwise I think his video is spot on.
@@billwilson6670 absolutely
Cannot double stack should be the nail in the coffin. Most USA freight track operates at grade crossings, so double stacking will shorten the train length while also allowing it to carry more.
Plus the containers sit above the bogies instead of close to the ground like a well car does. That will be a major problem when US railways electrify because the overhead wire infrastructure would need to be much higher than for regular electric locomotives pulling well cars.
@@electric7487 To be fair, India does run double-stacks under wires.
@@alexhajnal107 I know, and it makes this idea even more ridiculous than it already is.
Parallel Systems: “Check out this doohickey we made that combines the disadvantages of rail and trucking. It will only work on territory equipped with rolling block technology that has never been implemented on a freight railroad. They also cannot drive on roads, so shippers will still use trucks for last mile delivery unless they build their own rail spurs.”
Venture Capitalists: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
The late and great John Kneiling ("The Professional Iconoclast" of Trains Magazine years ago) would disagree. His mantra was "the train hauls, the truck delivers". You move as much freight as you can in bulk, then let trucks handle "last mile delivery", unless you can make enough money delivering carloads of freight. No keeping money-losing (to the railroad) branches for 1-2 customers or deliveries of infrequent/LCL load to private-owner sidings. Oddly enough if E-trucks could be used for last-mile, it might work well for the pods and the E-trucks. But the idea as currently marketed is a total failure on so many levels.
VC's (at least some of them) can be seen as the equivalent of top management; any pipe dream that MIGHT make them billions draws their attention. They likely have no idea of the overall failure of RoadRailer (research, what's that?), which had the right idea, but the designers and the railroads both managed to make enough mistakes that RR fell out of favor for most users. If you had a dedicate ROW (think the Black Mesa and Lake Powell coal-mine line, or dock to staging yard runs as video suggested), the pods might serve a useful purpose.
N.B. I don't know why everybody pushes electrification--it's expensive and difficult to build out, let alone maintain. And if it comes down, how are you going to move trains once the wreckage is cleared off the tracks without internal-combustion locos?? Major storms, power failures, or terrorism could bring your rail networks to a long and expensive halt. (Yes, I know about the Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, Pennsy, and South Shore and South Bend electrified lines; I saw SS&SB's Little Joes years ago in action once or twice.)
@chemik so why are housing so expensive? Theres a FUCK ton of demand for affordable housing.
@chemik so capitalists are not, in fact, good at providing infrastructure.
@chemik so again, that doesn't mean they are good at it. It just means they are capable of providing it. Infrastructure can, and did, exist without capitalism. If capitalism was good at providing infrastructure, the roads across America wouldn't have to have been state-funded and the telecom companies in America would've spent the billions they were given to improve infrastructure, to actually improve infrastructure. Capitalism's idea of infrastructure failed the state of Texas last year when the energy companies failed to spend their funds on winterization of their infrastructure. Google's drive to provide fiber across America fizzled out and ended with only gigabit competition in a few major cities while parts of America still use dial-up because it isn't profitable enough to have better internet for customers that want it. USPS is the only entity that delivers certain items because it's not profitable enough for the private mail companies to deliver. Such as chicken eggs and stuff like that.
Capitalist, privately owned companies, are so good at infrastructure! That's why they fail to achieve basic infrastructure in many vital industries.
These things look awesome.....they remind me of those electronic mail/document carriers they have in hospitals in the 80s and 90s,small boxes that move on electric rails that hang from the ceiling,taking ur mail along preprogrammed routes across buildings and even different floors.
Imagine u have a whole network of these across the country and thousands of carts moving autonomously and synchronising with each other perfectly at the same time.
Since the units can communicate with each other,they know exactly where each other are,how far apart,how fast they are going and is able to coordinate perfectly,they can travel at regular intervals at a safe distance without tailgating each other too dangerously, they would be able to drivr together like no human beings could possibly coordinate,there would be no traffic jams,no accidents and no downtime.....
Along the main railway lines across the country,there would be hundreds even thousands of these container pods moving in regular intervals at maximum efficiency 24/7,the trains could be moving slowly at 50kmh and it would still be fine because the computers could manage the traffic with such high efficiency and density,each individual train could be spaced only 1km apart and still be safe as any accident the computer will immediately alert the rest and come to a halt or adjust......and there could be hundreds even thousands of trains travelling simultaneously on a single line...the volume of cargo ur moving is so insane,and since there's no need for human operators,the manpower cost would be next to zero.
Along this main line or "highway" there are multiple exits leading to various states or cities or different destinations,just like a highway there's no need for vehicles to stop to let another vehicle off......sections of the track where there are exits traffic will slow down slightly to let other trains exit safely......
I'm not an expert but maybe some could design a track system?
Imagine if these grifters instead invested all this time and money into getting more regular high speed track laid or even just getting the track you've already got properly electrified.
For a Monopolist that simply wouldn't do. Monopolists hate efficiency except when it comes to stealing from others
You can't scam investors out of their money with that
imagine if we taxed them enough so that they couldn’t accumulate the time and money to disrespect the rest of our time and money
providing solutions is expensive, just making people believe you have the solution is more effective in a bottom line sense.
Grifters? Like the California High Speed Rail System? That kind of $70 billion grift? Merced to Bakersfield will be glorious! Almost like the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, right?
Another point is a huge amount of company sidings were torn up years ago. My mother worked for more than 20 years at a company in an older industrial area. One of those places where they built the offices on the same site as the factory. When she joined them almost every factory either had a dedicated siding or direct access to a shared one. When she retired her company, the big chemical company and the steel foundry (which seemed half the size it used to be and seemed to only smelt scap metal) were the only ones which regularly used their sidings and most of the others had been torn up
Excellent point. This system appears to be developed for low-volume loads to factories and the like. The problem is, if you have a factory that needs one tanker car per week, you probably are already using a truck to deliver it instead of a train.
One thing that's funny about their attempt to "rediscover" cargo freight is that it was never undiscovered. The US has one of the most extensive freight systems in the world and to my understanding it's about at capacity.
It's absolutely ridiculous, but they're mostly pitching this to tech bro investors who have never stepped near a railyard in their lives and have no clue how america moves freight.
Yep. The US freight system has honed transporting shit through rails to a fucking tee for almost a hundred years now.
While there may still be room for improvement, the current system is pretty damn tight, and its gonna take either some gradual upgrade of existing systems to be a revolution, and NOT a new sexy reinvention and only makes sense to laymen who don't know about the nitty gritty of logistics via rail
@@pointblank2890 indeed, the solution to our woes has been around for a long time; a slow upgrade to better rails and catenary wires is all we need. What we absolutely do *not* need is to buy tons upon tons more lithium from the usual suspects for these bigass batteries.
@@tissuepaper9962 yeah one of the big need is a high speed not more track or a new system less relatiable
@@pointblank2890 Yeah, don't know why the fuck they're trying to top an industry that's been going strong since the 1800s. Maybe if they tried to curb pollution caused by trains that might be an admirable goal.
Hey, at least we're getting somewhere! Now they're accepting the superiority of rails, I say give it a few more years and they figure out that putting several of these together behind one very powerful engine will be cheaper and more reliable.
On a different note, I think something like this might be useful for fully automated shunting, though it would be extremely expensive. Just use a single powered bogie to shunt one or two cars.
This might have also been useful 60 years ago, when more or less all industries still had a rail spur. But not today.
They got so close but failed at the last hurdle...
The idea of a semi-autonomous or a remotely controlled local freight solution that could easily link intermodal hubs (including in-land "portals") with factories or warehouses is something that could be viable. But the flaws are that these things can't couple, these things rely on the intermodal container for structural integrity and finally... the fact that these things just seem to solve "problems" like 3 mile long freight trains taking forever to clear level crossings (eternal car brain)...
It's not like this concept isn't entirely without merit. But it's a highly flawed concept.
One thing I did notice Parallel Systems mentioned was how the US is split up into 5 big class 1 railroads, and that there's fuck all interoperability between them. Often, containers will need to be unloaded from the CSX train to a truck to go to a Union Pacific yard to be loaded again. All for a journey from the east coast to the west coast.
The fact that these techbros have picked up on this is good. What isn't good is that they think pods solve this issue.
In the article I read about this said that they would be in “platoons” of 10.
Just give up and call it a train.
@@844SteamFan lol
@legojack "big ass batteries" used to be an early alternative to steam trains and some early diesel trains. Off course, old battery powered "self-propelled carriages" didn't have the best technology for the early 20th century, but they were a fairly viable alternative to railbuses, simply because once you started rolling, you didn't need much more power to keep going due to the low rolling resistance.
Ya forgot about not bringing your energy with you (battery or fuel), that saves quite some material and money (in the long run).
This reminds me of how I developed a reputation as an effective problem-solver with my fellow managers, despite being the guy who works in the office and only rarely ventures out into the dock.
I generally start by going out and talking to the people who actually work around the problem. Not only do I need to get a better idea of what they're doing, I _also_ need to know if any of our proposed solutions will actually work. It doesn't do us any good if we come up with a "perfect" solution that is too cumbersome to implement, introduces new problems of its own, or doesn't actually resolve the issue... or, as is really common with the gifts from the good idea fairy, all of the above.
7:18 A standard TEU box might as well be tissue paper compared to the most bog standard, beat to all hell, 45 year old flat car. People see a steel box and they think strong, but other than the floor (to an extent) and the four posts, it might as well be paper. Like, the flatcar so much as breathes on the techno bogies and the box will fold like a beer can. JUST LIKE ROAD RAILERS IF YOU TRIED TO SHUNT THEM!
Standard shipping containers are optimised for carrying vertical loads. They can be stacked ten high fully loaded with no issues (which you absolutely can’t do with truck trailers OR a standard box car).
A standard flat car is not optimised for container carrying either (as it has an unnecessary flat deck).
If you look at a skeleton truck trailer, it is optimised for container transport by eliminating everything except the corner attachment points and a backbone to carry tension and compression loads.
But it doesn't need to be shunted in the traditional way - each car is powered, so you can just take the whole string of cars onto the yard lead and one by one send them into tracks - no need to kick them or anything. The magnetic couplers also don't need to be super strong since each car is powered (like distributed power, only with one loco per car).
The main problem with the system I see is that it doesn't integrate at all with the current system (as Alan points out in the video).
Honestly it would just be easier to add EMU equipment to intermodal well cars
@@janmelantu7490 Just make container/truckbed EMUs for when you need a fast train and make small switcher locomotives (possibly battery electric for last mile connection) for other local work.
@@janmelantu7490 That's basically what Japan's M250 is
"The last people you want to talk to is management." Intelligence at its finest!
Oh? The people who know what they're up against? Reinventing the Wheel, it's called!
Cause thats what they do.
They _manage_ and thats important.
But they dont make their hands dirty, and most of the time dont know how to do the "lower" positions.
And often they do stupid decisions cause they are so far away from the common worker. Thats why a flat hirarchy is important, but thats *_really fucking_* difficult with big companies.
One minor improvement to the existing battery train you showed towards the end: fit it with a pantograph and associated equipment, so when the driver enters a section of track with wires, the train can take power from them (and possibly start recharging the batteries at the same time).
As for their idea, in addition to the problems you mentioned: very rarely will anyone want one or two containers delivered from X to Y via rail - for long distance travel, it's far more efficient to take dozens / hundreds of containers to a regional depot, then transfer onto truck for the last leg of the journey. Unless they want to design cities from scratch with rails heading into every business needing regular container-sized supplies...
I can imagine something like Costco or Walmart that are typically on the outskirts of town and do large volume of sales benefitting from these if they have rail nearby they could share. Outside of that...eh.
@@randomvideosn0where Point being that most chain establishments have logistics distribution centers which are easily accessible by localized shipping. In a sense of urbanization though, semi's are horrible for highway traffic, so if there's a system in which heavy freight trains can offload to freight yards, and from freigh yards, companies can commission local logistics/metro rail-line services to ship containers to distribution centers, bypassing roads, it'd make for a fast and efficient system, as well as provide revinue for the infrastructure which passenger trains may use too. A big problem in less dense cities is that mass transit simply doesn't meet the density requirements to be economical, so perhaps shipping goods would bridge that gap.
You could also just use an electro-diesel locomotive; often referred to as a dual-mode or bi-mode locomotive. These engines already exist and they're effectively a diesel-electric with a pantograph on top.
Well, now I definitely do!
Railways. EVERYWHERE.
Parallel mfs literally went: "let's make a train but in the most mechanically and electronically complex way possible"
Step 1: refuse to put the goddamn wires up and make everything 5 metric shittons heavier because of the batteries
Step 2: have as many moving parts as humanly possible, and then some, and also throw a fucking computer into everything idk
Step 2.5: separate the train cars and have a bunch of bogies instead (refer to step 2, the more parts the better)
Step 3: DO NOT COUPLE THE BOGIES DO NOT COUPLE THE BOGIES DO NOT COUPLE THE BOGIES (only complex computer system allowed)
Step 4 (GOLDEN RULE): it must be autonomous otherwise it sucks
As a train driver, steps 3 and 4 got me laughing really hard lololol
It's a scam to get some of that sweet venture capital. Don't think too much about it logically, you might hurt your brain lol. Imagine what we could do with that money if we just spent it on catenary wires instead. Think how great our rail system would be if Congress could stop pretending that Amtrak isn't a public service.
Something something machine learning blockchain as a service kombucha
@@modellbahnmoritz that's "micro-kombucha-service", easy mistake to make
Wow you are so wrong. Current trains are fantastically complicated machines, with many computers, going to electric pods would eliminate literally thousands of parts. Why is putting electricity in a battery more complex than in an overhead line? It's not. Cars that never touch is vastly superior to an engine pulling cars. The pods will be able to diagnose bad bearings sticking brakes or any other mechanical problem that will manifest as an anomaly to the overall efficiency of the pod. The algorithms for transport logistics is the same as any other complex distribution system, they are proven and reliable. These pods would lead to an overall reduction in the need for computers as they are simple and all the same.
While trains aren't really my focus (I am still unsure why youtube recommended this, but it was a good watch) this rings as familiar from other industries too.
Let's take the lock industry for example. Over the past few years a pile of tech startups have tried to "disrupt" the lock industry with their flashy *_smart locks._* The problem is that while they have some cool tech to manage access, they completely fail at being an effective lock. We're talking about locks that can be opened with a few taps from a hammer (and I do mean taps), locks that have exposed screws that allow disassembly while still being locked and attached, and locks that can't handle a little water.
The fault seems to be that these companies don't actually pick up anyone in the industry they're trying to disrupt to explain to them how things work. I swear, it almost seems like they read a Wikipedia article on their industry and figure that tells them everything they need to know.
So even these lock "disrupters" are not lock people. Same in cycling, "disrupters" pop up several times a year every year since 1900. Its always non cyclists who have no clue and their "invention" make them look like fools. Even Elon Musk had a go with something utterly idiotic (a moped with GPS). The mantra is always the same , the basic bike design hasnt changed since 1890, therefore there "must" be a better way. Still waiting.
@@garyking508 There are generally two types of failure in the "smart" lock field:
1) they forgot they were building a lock
2) put in a failsafe key lock that is terrible/compromised
If you want to see some examples of these failures, I can highly recommend the Lock Picking Lawyer here on youtube.
Forgot they were building a lock:
th-cam.com/video/pTys_WYBOLE/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/mGpMaShltbc/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/WeCGTosv-_c/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/PEaIadLDLIA/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/AIaFleFMPn0/w-d-xo.html
Failsafe key that's trash:
th-cam.com/video/rg9k12aTR5o/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/s7T3KeVQ2wE/w-d-xo.html
I'll stop there, but there's a pile more examples that include "just hit the thing with a hammer until it breaks open".
Locks made of plastic. Locks with screws exposed to take them apart. Locks glued together. Locks using latching mechanisms that were out of date 100 years ago. Locks using keyed-alike backup keys that are so common you can get them on ebay. Locks using tubular keys (these are so well exploited that you should never, ever use one).
Smart locks are, without a doubt, a mess right now.
I've seen the Lock Picking Lawyer do this a few times with electric locks. The problem is that most of your existing locks can be opened just as quickly.
The ones he struggles with are new and novel designs, like U-shaped keyways that make it impossible to get anywhere near the tumblers.
Sometimes the new ideas do actually work better.
@@johnroutledge9220 You'll note, if you watch the talk he did at SAINTCON, he specifically aims to show bad locks in his videos.
There are good locks and cores out there (Schlage primus, for example) that he won't do a video on because they aren't the problem with the lock industry.
@@ConstantlyDamaged Except the Schlage Primus was patented in the 1980s. It's not fantastically new, but it's not exactly ancient either. So as I said, he struggles with the new and newish designs. But not so much the older designs. And again, sometimes the newer designs are better than the old designs.
Going back to the train concept... They're throwing together a bunch of concepts that are (mostly) proven in other industries, and in some rail industries outside of America. Will the total be greater, or simply equal to the sum of its parts? Don't know.
This concept is far from proven, and it might be a tech bro bondoogle. But on the other hand, it might be a valid idea, and this video might be a TH-cam Manufactured Outrage Industrial Complex click-bait video. Whining about the young and straw manning the new are both cheap ways of getting a thumbs up. At this point it's hard to tell, especially for those of us outside the industry.
This channel has singlehandedly made me a train and infrastructure nerd. Thank you.
well, if you like misinformation then this is the place for you. He's a complete moron who doesn't know what he's saying he called a train in switzeerland "the future of local american freight"
I'm only up to the stopping distance example snapshot, and I already have an issue with the sales pitch. Stopping distance of a train has nothing to do with motive power. It has everything to do with the weight (length) of the train, and the friction between steel wheels and steel rails. If you have a single locomotive and a single box car, that's gonna stop lickety split. The extra weight of the locomotive will translate into extra downward force (thus friction) on the wheels. You strap thirty more boxcars to that train, and stopping distance goes up a whole lot. Who knew?! There are already duplicate braking systems on each and every car in a train, operated by air pressure from the locomotive, so you're going from 8 sets of brakes per car to 8 sets of brakes per car. Not sure what you're really changing, here...
Think it has to do with how it takes time for the air pressure to change between each car. This could be changed by having smaller compressors on each wagon (Or just some of them) that are controlled remotely. Or a set of small traction motors and lead acid batteries that are controlled remotely. Which would also have the benefit of making it easier for the train to climb hills. :)
But both of them would require some light servicing every now and again... So probably not worth it.
Maybe the idea is that they can...reverse the motors on the wheels or something? But I'm not sure that would meaningfully slow the cars more, instead of just making the wheels grind more on the rails and generating more heat.
Oh that's amazing. When I was seeing that, I thought: "Hey, the first marginal benefit of Pods over trains, I can't believe I actually see one", and now you tell me this. :D
Thanks!
@@timothymclean not brake, regenerate electricity ;)
@@timothymclean The construction of an electric motor and an electric generator is almost identical.
The rotor (the thing that spins) and the stator (the thing that makes the rotor spin) are identical between generators and motors.
Wether or not it acts like a motor or generator depends on if you are sending appropriate power to it, or you have something can take the power the motor is generating when it spins.
And you can have both and just switch between them when necessary.
I think it's a great idea. It will completely revitalize the train-robbery industry 👍
Seems like it's doing pretty well in LA.
@chemik it will be secured with the blockchain
Yeah I was thinking the same thing! It's hard and dangerous to derail a train, but a couple of autonomous bikes carrying a single shipping container? Won't even make the news.
yeee hawww time to rob an autonomous train!!!!
Why not make it a Virtual Syatem and throw the same amount of public money at it? Oh, that scam has been thought of and done already!
I love how they brought itemized shipping back by transporting containers one by one.
I work for the railroad and I keep imagining these pods attempting to go down a rotted track, pass a manual switch, somehow throw it and reverse into an industry into the exact spot the customer needs it. The tech required for just that customer, sensors and automatic interlocking etc would be way too expensive for any railroad to adopt. Hilarious vid
Could be a good fun. Bring a couple of beers and watch these things trying to navigate railyard with your buddies from work. Throw some bets, then throw empty beer bottles at them.
Let the car owners pay for the remote controlled switches, dispatcher notification, spotting control systems and costs and maintenance of these powered units.
@@erbewayne6868 Let the customers who wanted those things pay. And then make them pay for the removal of the crap aswell, after it failed hillariously.
The only place I could see this work would be at a totally automated port (like Hamburg port), but they're already using (partially?) electric self-driving vehicles, that don't need tracks. I don't know how far along they are with using electric-only vehicles, the last article I could find was from 2018 where they say that they're planning to replace the ones they have with electric vehicles.
And it can't be any more energy efficient than a train on level tracks.
Well said! I like playing in a park with my daughter that's next to exactly the kind of low-volume line that this company wants to serve. She gets great views of the daily train waiting impatiently for clearance to enter the factory's line and then watching the crew throw the switch.
Something about watching a short train slowly lumber along an uneven local track is just satisfying, look at it sway 😳
US track seems worse than abandoned lines in britain...
@David Moore Yeah but at least maintain the track so that trains arent restricted to walking speed.
I was actually looking in absolute horror. Maintain your tracks goddammit, why is the grass 5 foot high, why are the trees growing over the path.
@@MrJimheeren Maybe you're not American. Here the freight railroads are privately owned corporations, for-profit. They squeeze every penny of cost out of the operation where possible, including maintenance, on lightly used branches and sidings; that is, the ones they haven't been able to eliminate altogether.
@@davidty2006 thats a shortlines branch probably. Save costs they use the hell out of the industrial track until its unusable. Mainlines are maintained to allow usually 75mph (somewhere just above 100kph iirc)
I kindof freeaking love the train traveling down the overgrown local rail line at 3:31. It's so surreal and I wish there was a way to replicate that on miniature trains XD
I just heard the beginning of the first sentence and had to pause because I was laughing way too hard 😂😂😂 The shade 😂😂😂
Lol same
Well… that was when I knew that the video wasn’t going to be objective or trying to weigh the pros and cons.
@@DerKatzeSonne at a certain point it's not worth taking the time with such an obvious coked up tech bro scheme
@@DerKatzeSonne You can't weigh pros and cons if there are no pros.
@@lomaii2847
Falsche Sprache du Vollidiot
Can you imagine your local RR crossing closing traffic every 5 min so a single car or a loosely spread out group of "train" cars can pass? Trains are the way they are because they work.
But wouldn't they also reopen much faster, since the trains are a lot shorter and can be broken apart? It'd be closer to a red light at a normal traffic light, and people are already used to waiting for a few tens of seconds when they get a red light...
@@rickrickston3202 You wish for more red lights? You must be a glutton for punishment.
if autonomous cars can communicate with these autonomous bogies then nobody would have to stop, the computers could calculate the speeds and distances to not intersect, someone may have to slow down slightly but no stopping would be required
@@jasonwilde197 No, I'm saying that instead of having to wait 15 min for a train crossing, you wait for 30 seconds.
For that matter, taking trucks off the roads means even fewer red lights/traffic.
@@rickrickston3202 I agree, and multiple-5-seconds red lights works best in my city, Jakarta, to alleviate traffic compared to long 120 seconds red light
I just looked up “parallel systems” on TH-cam, and I’m happy to report that your video came up before the original did
they just took the best aspects of intermodal traffic away and made it 10 times worse by moving the containers individually
@@lomaii2847 SHUT UP
Its actually better.. You can eliminate the overhead cranes. Replace them with a cheaper system that would consist of some kind of roadrailer that would facilitate the transition.
I think one of the big things with the tech grift is that their whole thing is predicated on the idea that existing things need to be radically disrupted in a way that allows you to sell product. like they're starting with that premise and then looking for a good target, so it's always going to be a bit flimsy
So it makes you wonder: Is capitalism about filling unmet needs in the marketplace, or is it about filling your bank account through any possible means?
Remember the dot-com bust, which followed the tulip craze? Maybe we can just replace physical goods with NFTs, so transportation becomes moot.
reminds me of juicero.
Some issues I saw right away at the start of the video:
1) What is the range on a single charge?
2) What happens when one of the little pods goes dead battery while the other still has charge?
3) How are they charged?
4) Where are they charged?
5) How long does it take to charge one completely?
6) What is the life expectancy of the battery?
7) When a pod goes flat battery, how can the two pods and cargo container be cleared from the track before another container, or a full train, needs that piece of track?
@@MonkeyJedi99
the answer to all of those is not applicable because it doesn't exist. it's just pretty graphics, I doubt they even thought about this stuff let alone tried to put together a prototype, it's straight to the flashy 3D animated presentation
@@Graknorke
@MonkeyJedi99
And as we all know, if you can 3d it, it must be true, so therefore,
1) the range is* infinite,
2) the batteries never die,
3) they aren't,
4) they never need charging ever,
5) negative infinity infinities,
6) forever,
7) the batteries never go flat.
Boom, get dest0y3d :O
The weirdest part to me is that if you're individually driving these things, each one has to deal with wind resistance. It's like the opposite of car pooling lmao.
the idea is sound if they can combine as one big train for longer track and each business that accept the freight have their own small stations to accept the car, the truckers would be angry tho.
@@fltfathin except that ain't gonna work too well either.
@@fltfathin also truckers don't care. The industry has been trying to price truckers out of the market since the late seventies
@@LMYS5697 How? And with what? I'm genuinely curious, what is the replacement for trucks making the final delivery to grocery stores, retail stores, etc.? Without a replacement i don't see how anyone could try to price them out of the market. I'd love to see what bright idea they had in the 70s.
@@DrZygote214 what I meant is wages have continued to stagnate for truckers, since the seventies. The career has a pretty bad turnover rate. It's also one of the most dangerous jobs in America with something like 25-28 OTJ fatalities per 100,000 workers.
Most freight transport is dangerous work, in significant part because freight companies simply don't care about the people moving the freight.
This is as true of truckers as it is railroad engineers.
The thing I find hilarious all these “innovations” fail to understand is that there’s a limited supply of lithium that’s able to be produced each year. Meaning these “things” will just eat up the supply.
Anything to avoid stringing up catenary over the tracks. A heresy to the oil oligopoly
And care to guess what country has the biggest supply of lithium??? Ready...............Afghanistan!! And care to guess who's in bed with them??...........China!!
Well there’s no reason at all to put batteries on trains anyways (aside from very small emergency power supplies), as you can easily electrify rail with either overhead cables (generally preferred when possible for safety reasons) or a third rail.
@@JohnnyAmerique Still though it would make diesel locomotives practical and environmentally friendly for how much it would cost to get some of these things running around. Not to mention where is the power for them going to come from. Definitely not a renewable resource
But Tesla could do it
You really want to impress me, techbros, design a system to get a container from a boat to a train to a local rail/tram freight to dropping the whole container off at the end consumer without ever touching a fucking truck.
We used to have that...it's called rail infrastructure...
@@kevadu Yeah just have your own company industrial engine to go pickup the wagons and bring them in from mainline trains.
Something like that used to exist. One example I can think of is Suffern New York. There are old railroad tracks that go between the buildings in the town center. I believe they use to do drop offs for stores in their backs. A similar system was supposed to be set up where the old American brake shoe company was in Mahwah NJ just down the road. Developers who bought the land had to promise to set that infrastructure up but eventually wormed their way out and threw up some retail and storage units. I don't know if there's a name for that type of infrastructure but wish we still had it.
Zürich, Switzerland actually has cargo trams, as well as waste trams, it's really interesting to see, if you're nor used to it
A C-130 Globemaster dropping your container using the PGM-system the USAF has?
"Don't talk to the management" earned you my subscription right here and there XD
Also. Yes. THANK YOU. Please do look at the Swiss, German and Austrian way of cargo-railroading and how it is being integrated into shipyards (Best examples there being Hamburg, because, of course it is, and also Vienna, while it might not be right next to the open sea, the Danube and its canals ARE still very important ship ways, to this day. And it can be made even better, and even pulled off across Europe (and maybe even combine with Asia?) if we'd put our minds to it.
Autonomous "pod" railroading at best works in rather small-scale things, like in the lower levels of a hospital where such autonomous mini freighters bring food and fresh cloth and whatever needed to the appropriate lifts so that the stations can call their stock up to their floor where they need it and they also collect the dirty cloths to bring it to the laundry room, or MAYBE something like that old ass London Underground postal railway. Something like an Amaz0n warehouse could work perfectly well with such autonomous systems, yeah. But regular long-distance cargo rail? LMAO, don't make me laugh XDDDD
1:50
We have that.
Autonomous container-carriers at harbors or freight yards exist.
And they're electric.
And they run without rails.
Keeping those things at exactly the right distance from each other while loading would be an incredible challenge, let alone the rest of the crap they claim they're going to do.
I bet some sort of coupling mechanism would take care of that problem.
Ultrasonic or infrared sensors or simply mechanical switches or magnetic sensors that tell the system if they are still close to another waggon or not. It would be cheap and simple
@@razorblade7108 That's not cheap, and that's not simple.
@@electric7487 These sensors and the controllers only cost a small fraction of a waggon, it's super cheap these days and very simple to program. A 12 year old can do that, just like they can do it with LEGO Mindstorms robots.
@@razorblade7108 Some people fail to realise that building a serious piece of equipment is not as simple as building a Lego set.
All these sensors represent unneeded complexity, additional failure points, and maintenance hassles. Plus, they would make an already non-standard design even more specialised and harder to integrate into existing infrastructure.
Remember, *_don't fix what ain't broke._*
Hi Alan, if you want to know more about the development and testing of RoadRailers I would be glad to discuss. I was the Director of R&D at Wabash National back when they acquired the product rights from Thrall Car.
Multi-track drifting? Oooooooh, I thought you said multi-track GRIFTING!
Another issue- anything really expensive needs to have high utilization rates to get acceptable productivity. These units would likely spend a lot of time doing nothing-not good! Also, almost all of their idle time would be in locations where they cannot even use the time to recharge their batteries. This is just one more reason why they are not feasible. But your idea of a battery yard switcher sounds good. If an often used section of track could be electrified, it could be constantly topping off the charge.
They could have trains that are powered by cables that are hung over the top of the tracks. Then they wouldn't even need batteries.
"Another issue- anything really expensive needs to have high utilization rates to get acceptable productivity. These units would likely spend a lot of time doing nothing-not good!"
that sounds like car-based infrastructure
I think you hit the nail on the head the main problem with these startups is they need to talk to real people and identify actual problems and not just pitch something they thought of with no research or experience
So what I'm hearing is "Tech bros have invented the *most* complicated way to convert intermodal rail cars into electric multiple units, a technology that has been used in passenger trains since the _1890s."_
Sounds like something they'd do.
I mean, I'm not opposed to the idea of making intermodal freight beds self-propelled so your traction effort scales immediately to the length of your train, but I _cannot_ wrap my head around why they chose to make _each bogey_ its own vehicle.
If you need high speed (for freight, like 160 km/h maybe) freight just build an EMU. It's not hard.
Here's some guesses as to why each bogey is its own vehicle (playing the devil's advocate here, I also think it'd make more sense for the entire bed to be one rigid piece at a first glance):
- Reduces weight
- Lower costs in prototyping (i.e. they'll eventually join them, reusing a lot of tech/software)
- Less space taken up when unloaded
- Ease of manufacturing (maybe it's suddenly harder to make things that are train car length compared to independent bogey size?)
- Slightly better economies of scale (yeah i don't think this reason makes too much sense)
- Improved interchangeability (if one bogey breaks, it can be replaced with another bogey, whereas if two bogeys were connected as one bed unit, you'd have to replace the entire unit)
@@rickrickston3202 Not a bad list of points but I think the only one that makes sense is 'Less space taken up when unloaded'. I bet the tech bros would also make claims that the system is 'inherently more adaptable to different freight configurations by letting the units dynamically support freight loads of variable sizes' or suchlike, as if the current intermodal infrastructure couldn't.
@@Vespuchian Being pedantic here, but you know how there's non-standard intermodal container sizes (48ft, 53ft)? I guess independent bogeys would allow you to adapt to those sizes without needing to buy new intermodal train cars.
Anyways, Parallel Systems probably thinks they can avoid having the container itself carry significant tension/compression loads since both ends are independently propelled, but if they run into any problems with other forces (e.g. one person has raised liquid slosh as an issue in another discussion), they'll probably just weld an I beam or two between the two bogeys. I suppose it's one less step = slightly cheaper if they can dodge needing to buy and weld that I-beam.
Although, they could save the cost of two magnetic bumper/couplers by doing so...
Overall I think it's unlikely but not entirely impossible for the trade to work out in favour of separate bogeys.
@@rickrickston3202 Oh, I'm well aware of the different sized containers, Parallel Systems seems to think that having a single sized rail car that's large enough to carry all of them is terribly wasteful.
Imagine all the maintenance on all of those autonomous boggies.What you have effectively done is replaced one locomotive, or two if doubled headed, with 40 locomotives!I use to work on the railways and when it's not infrastructure most problems are engine related problems so the less complicated engines you have the better.
Why scale up the power source for maximum efficiency, using mains power even as an option, when we can try and make every single unit have to have the onboard power and machinery to overcome friction and propel itself? We all know that one locomotive can only pull one container at a time, right?
@chemik But what if they are not more reliable? And what if they aren't better/more convenient? And what if they require more infrastructure eg charging? Current trains can last for decades and don't require battery maintenance (eg charging and replacement). They may be noisy, but thats the cost of industry.
@chemik The problem is that that container to be transported is using the same tracks as every other container to be transported, so its not like a drone that can fly direct to you, more or less without impacting the route of another drone. That's going to make them impractical on existing infrastructure.
Noise is a negative externality, and we should look at reducing it where practical, but I don't think it should be the primary concern. Ultimately they should be located far from population centres as much as possible, and people moving in close by need to understand they are moving near train tracks.
Exactly. And when the batteries are fully charged, they pose an extreme fire risk, no matter the chemistry. If they manage to make a battery with the same energy density as gasoline or Diesel fuel, then once that battery is fully charged it becomes a GIANT POTENTIAL BOMB sitting on the rails.
@@electric7487 Funnily enough, electric locomotives already exist. Much safer than battery locomotives.
Used to occasionally haul Schneider rail trailers when I drove big trucks 30 years ago. The frames weren't anywhere as near as strong as a native boxcar, and all of the added hardware and bulking up of the frame meant you couldn't carry as much freight as a regular van or container trailer because of the total vehicle weight restrictions. They stopped using them on rails and used them in the general freight pool but they weren't popular because of the extra weight involved.
That was what I was thinking too. They had to be as strong as a railcar but as light as a truck trailer, so they ended up having to strike a compromise between the two. The resulting carriage was the worst of both worlds: way overbuilt for a truck trailer, but too flimsy for a railcar.
I'd say the first step in solving a problem for a major industry is knowing how the industry currently works, what challenges it currently faces, and what it's done about them so far. Or you know, anything at all about the industry you're trying to fix.
My solution would be to put one (or multiple) "tractors" (I'd call them locomotives) up front that are electrified with overhead wires and pantographs. I think I'm on to something.
Something that a lot of these -scams- ideas have in common is that they're big, grand and require significant upfront investing. Some examples:
1. Install solar panels next to roads? No! The roads _are_ the solar panels!
2. Use the existing rail-car form factor? Nope, that's for losers! We'll rethink _everything!_
3. Make an electric car? No, Hydrogen! Won't work unless you build so much refueling infrastructure that it rivals what exists for ICE engines
4. Store energy as methane? No, use Hydrogen for that slight efficiency boost! Doesn't matter that it's incompatible with natural gas infrastructure!
Anyone who has ever modified their car has learned that cars have been evolving for a long time. You can get something, but invariably you're giving up a lot more, overall, than you gained. Beware of anyone who shows up with a slick computer rendering of a, *gulp*, "revolutionary", new method, device, or machine for a well-established industry.
The guy that had the job of connecting the truck trains or road railers together, he deserved a raise. That looks like that was a dangerous job.
I work in an industrial park were only 1 business gets freight cars delivered to them. Every time it happens the road outside my job is closed because the train has to do the equivalent of parallel parking on a side line after kicking the last 3 cars. I could see something like this working well for this kind of situation. Let me be clear. I am talking about a full size car not these little carts. Something that couples to the train, but has an effective power assist for the final couple thousand feet. So 1 man could hop off the back of the train, cut the cars loose, move them back, switch the line over, and hand them off physically to some at the company before flipping the track back. The closest thing I could describe to this would be die plate movers.
They just disabled their comments section on their video right now
classic corporation.
I wonder how many dislikes they got.
I could see that you might want a boxcar or other wagon with a small simple battery and motor, with the capability for remote control. Because that might make switching yard/last mile operations slightly easier?
Perhaps even the batteries as a part of a larger power system, so that if there is a locomotive involved, they may not even have to run off their own batteries. Potentially an intermodal container freight EMU or EDMU, that sounds fun.
Or it could be used to bring back urban rail. Like a new cargo tram.
@@ironlynx9512 issue with that is the charging, EMU can access power from overhead wires, these battery cargo things do nhave the container overhead. Probably best to keep the cargo segment cheap and have a single dedicated electric locomotive, it's not like cargo train benefit from faster acceleration like passenger anyway
@@herlescraft Having a single powered boxcar/container car, that has both overhead electrification and battery capability, would be better than a heavy 1500kw locomotive. you only need a couple hundred kw of power to move a short train at slow speeds, which is what local freight is about.
@@madmanthan21 Just have it charge by using the wheel as a generator while braking. Or external through cables.
As someone who's ridden like 100,000+ miles of freight trains i can certainly attest to the inefficiency of the sector...One glaring issue to me is the difference between western Europe and the Balkans, the same train is expected to run at 70+mph across all of Western Europe, then be pulled by a diesel switching engine at 20mph on un-welded tracks for 3 days to cross Eastern Europe. Maybe start with fixing the ancient equipment before putting robot containers on the lines LOL
This is one of those things that if you don't think about too hard, it makes complete sense. But the more you ask questions and explore, the less it makes sense.
Definitely an idea thought up on a coffee break or when high. Would be super cool, except reality and costs are completely different than pie-in-the-sky ideas.
If they had a coupler on each end, i could see them being useful for small industrial places that need to move 1 or 2 cars at a time. Otherwise? Hmm
whats preventing you from using a dedicated shunting engine for that in the first place?
@@davidty2006 you can't feel like you have army of droids
Track mobile has entered the chat
@@davidty2006 nothing, but I could see an automated one of these being cheaper for a steel mill or foundry to replace an older unit with than say an older Diesel-electric switcher they would probably want to convert to remote control anyway. It's niche, but I could see it filling it
@@greynolds17 yeah like a track mobile but probably lower maintenance and cheaper to run at least in the short term. No tires, no fuel, no oil, no turbos, idk about hydraulics. Trackmobiles sometimes seem like all the worst maintenance aspects of a truck doubled in size lol
Excellent analysis. I always wondered how Triple Crown and the like could weather the long haul or be efficient at all. Hadn't heard anything prior to this about APTs. Thanks!
2:48 Here in India we have double stack trains running with standard container flatcars, no well cars needed, so if the height restrictions allowed, you could have them be double stacked.
Make this an actual container car/boxcar with underslung batteries or such, with normal couplers, and you could probably make this work for short local freight without requiring a locomotive, with or without the autonomous system, which is cost saving.
8:30 IMO battery locomotives are a fantastic complement to electrified railways.
Electrify your mainlines, and have normal electric locomotives charge up the batteries on those mainlines (and for regen), and then you can run via battery locomotives, which will also power those normal electric locomotives on the branch lines where there isn't enough traffic to electrify.
The reason they can stack two containers on a flat cat is because Indian gauge is considerably boarder than standard gauge or Russian gauge, so center of gravity is not much of an issue compare to others. And I believe freight EMU trains, likes what you've described, can't be as economical as having a locomotive pulling your train, let alone trying to attach a battery on it.
@@trungpham5022 Indian gauge is only 24cm wider than standard gauge.
Also youve completely misunderstood me.
I'm talking about having a batter *locomotive* not a freight EMU where every axle is powered.
Read my comment again.
EDIT: i see where the confusion comes from.
For the powered boxcar/container car, it would just be that 1 car that is powered, not all the others it's pulling, since you only need a couple hundred kw for local freight, instead of the several thousand kw of a locomotive.
@@madmanthan21 24cm is quite a lot. Sport cars and race cars just several cm can make quite a difference on cornering. And powered cars, I think the problem is already included in the video. First is cost, second is theft. Local means these cars will spend many time in their costumer's yard or industry tracks, loading, unloading, or just temporary store their for a while. Many of these places is "open to public", no wall, no fence, and no lights, no camera, no guarding system, everyone can put their hands on them without being spotted. Clearly you can't put guard on these cars due to cost, so current best solution is make these cars have noting can or worth to be theft, which is the way cars be since day one of railroading until today.
@@pqhkr2002 Locomotives spend quite a lot of time in yards with no guards, and i haven't heard of anybody stealing parts from those.
I have heard of people stealing diesel from locomotives, but actual parts? no.
@@madmanthan21 I actually didn't heard such case either, but I believe theft is still a thing, somewhere else in the world. And not only theft, naughty kids can also be a threat.
So weird that trains are trying to go battery, while electric trucks are experimenting with overhead wire recharging. Maybe we can just finally meet in the middle.
Yeah, just wait till you’re paying 100+ for a pair of Chinese jeans…..🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂
Another thing that poses a problem with the Grift idea is the fact that the freight has to be transported from the rail yard to the store i.e. Walmart, Target, Lowe's, Sam's Club, Cosco, etc. After a seventeen year truck driving career, I know that getting the freight to the store means that big trucks have to make the deliveries. If any vehicle on the road is hated more than a semi tractor trailer inside a city, I don't know what it would be. Getting less than all of a load to a store means there is the likelihood of theft. Yes, I know there is theft of rail freight now, but the theft I am referring to means everything within a container would be stolen which would mean higher prices and angrier customers. The Grift idea needs to be dumped in file 13; trash!
I don't know anything about this company, but it seems like a lot of "innovators" get themselves involved in areas that they're not familiar with.
Indeed. Elon Musk did that with cars. He tried to revolutionize car manufacturing by automating the whole thing. ... It didn't work. One failure and the entire line comes to a halt.
Car manufacturers tried this in the 90s. They met with the same results. So instead, the process is run in parallel and asynchronously. If one part of the assembly line stops, the rest of it can continue until whatever that one machine did is the only thing missing.
@@CiaranMaxwell This is true. Tesla's production line is now very similar to any other major automotive manufacturer production line.
The occasional rail car with a small built in motor could greatly streamline shunting at rail yards and ports.
Otherwise, I don’t see much use for rail pods, or anything else remotely like them.
I think this could work really well inside railyards. They can autonomously carry a container and use a parralel track to give it to a longer train. This is one of the only good uses, apart from times where cargo is just one or two containers down some branch line (like on the trans-siberian).
YOU’RE NOT THINKING BIG ENOUGH!!! We need to apply this to shipping too! No more bulky container ships, just add some pontoons and a propeller to the back of a forty foot container. Toss them in the ocean, and next stop, Wilhelmshaven!
Air freight? You want air freight? Just add a wing pack and a jet engine on top. Mix in some AI. Ready for take off!
Bro, what are you doing wasting these genius ideas here?! You could sca- I mean make so much money if you just pay like $100 on some CG pitches.
I like your idea and it seems more practical than the individual pods shuffling themselves around. I thought the idea of local delivery was to expedite moving containers out of the shipping ports to other locals. If I understand it, right now the problem is lots of trailers sitting at the port. I could see how an autonomous switch engine could shuffle rail cars to switch yards or truck offload sites. EV optional.
Sounds like the system of my old workplace...
They used to hold management meetings to improve productivity.
6 machine operators, 3 managers and the team leads went into the meetings for 2 hours per day for 90 days. Coffee and food were provided and by the end of it all... they decided that meetings would be held outside of normal production hours. Productivity fell by 32% in those 90 days. It is really strange, like the meeting stopped most of the machines for 2 hours or so. After 90 days the production manager stopped the productivity meetings and cancelled them indefinitely. Productivity returned to normal levels.
Actually, this concept (except for the batteries) was developed 20 years ago by Siemens in Germany. It was called CargoMover. It's not that stupid, but expensive. By then, (and still now) it was too dependant on continuous high-speed data connection, fully automated traffic control and all-remote controlled switches. Not available then and still lacking today, hence it still has some technological barriers, but that hardly makes it a Grift.
Rail operators and authorities spend millions trying to find a way to reduce switching costs in order to make rail transportation more competitive for smaller and shorter shipments. A train like that can switch itself with no need for human intervention or a yard.
Nowadays, the US rail system gets a much higher market share than European rail, and also emits less CO2 per tkm.
Since batteries won't give too much range in rail service, the old diesel concept from the Germans still makes sense. Or maybe a series-hybrid, for better battery use.
Anyway, when cars are self-propelled, they don't have to be designed for high tractive forces. That's one of the reasons why Japanese passenger trains are lighter.
I can see the appeal of having each container traveling autonomous on the railway lines, and I think that is a process easier to automate than road traffic since it shouldn't be any unauthorized traffic on the railway lines.
But in practice the requirements on the infrastructure to get that to work will probably restrict this to a busy harbor if even that. And in that case it is better to feed the power via a power-rail bellow instead of batteries.
Trucks are necessary for local deliveries because 99% of shippers and receivers don't have rail access.
They always talk about the "no emissions" of things like this. There's always emissions somewhere, and the environmental cost for the battery material is horrendous.
There are too many ways this can go bad - how's the autonomous pod going to stop when some idiot crosses the tracks? If it is good a detecting and stopping, the cargo thieves will jump on that tactic in a heartbeat.
"If you don't see the emissions, there are no emissions" - Eco grifters
I mean, it's not like a train can stop when an idiot crosses the tracks tho... These things need a lot of braking distance.
i like how the video mentions how rail freight lowers traffic on roads, as if that's somehow unique to trains that use batteries
The biggest problem is they are looking at automated logistics from a component perspective instead of at a systems level right.
They want to automate the train (which has been done already) but have forgotten about all the other manual systems.
Talking and listening to workers instead of managers is a great idea. Unfortunately, in most American businesses senior management usually thinks the best way to address a problem is to add an additional layer of middle management. And then, to offset the cost of the additional managers, cut back on front line workers.
Yes.
Middle management is a waste, but then again, so is most senior management.
Maybe management in general.
Maybe we should get rid of overseers.
"Listen to the workers, not the management" is great. That problem is endemic in many industries, not just railroading.
@7:05 While they are at it, apparently they are going to casually invent floating containers that can be loaded from a truck onto a train without the help of any cranes and while on the move
Once again, this is proof that creating a slick computer animation of an idea is easy, but thinking is hard
I feel like Parallel Systems jumped into this project without really understanding how railroads work.
Retired SoCalif freight conductor. Resembles the 'Trailer Train' idea.
They 'Made It Work' for a short time but finally scrapped it in Los Angeles 20 years ago.
What i learned from videos like this and one videogame is that the effective way to freighting is large engine + the freight. The engine may also be the cockpit
This is the stupidest thing they’ve come up with yet. I’m a former thru freight train conductor.
The fact that you added Sell Out when you got to Road Railers, *chef kiss* fantastic. One of the reasons they never took off, or at least according to my brother. Carrying capacity. The reinforcements needed to bolster the trailer frame lowered the carrying capacity. So instead of being able to haul 40,000 lbs. You're now down to 20,000-30,000. Something like a 1/3 to half of what a normal 53 ft trailer can carry.
The instant i saw the concept i found an obvious improvement to it: just merge every 2 pods into normal wagons and use a third rail for power instead of having batteries.
I can't see any reason to have two separate carriers for each container, and if you just use normal wagons that you make independent then you keep most of the interoperability with standard systems.
Can you even move cargo using a third rail system?
the point of battery is so you don't to make scary thing of upgrading infrastructure.
Overhead power, third rail can't deliver enough power, meanwhile 25kv overhead electrifications is a global standard.
@@Barten0071 instead you make replacing the rolling stock far more expensive. Way to go!
Battery-electric isn't *that* stupid for shunting - freight yards are dangerous places anyway, and the infrastructure for electrifying all of a freight yard is non-trivial (third rails and catenaries get quite complicated when you add points and junctions into the mix); speeds are generally low so drag losses will be small, and shunting naturally involves a lot of slowing down and stopping so there's plenty of scope for regenerating power back into the battery.
They also already exist and are replacing diesel-electric and diesel-hydraulic shunters; autonomous ones haven't shown up yet but a freight yard with autonomous shunting seems like a very sensible and relatively doable operation compared to autonomous mainline operations.
Every company has this problem. People working with tools have no say in what tools are being used. After 20y of mechanical work at numerous company's (i do factory maintenance stops mostly, so usually only there for a couple months max) ive seen it every where. Managers thinking they know best, forgetting decennia of floor work teach more then 4y in school...
So often people get new ideas how to fix something that works perfectly fine with something that is expensive and do not work in real life for many reasons...
"STOP. REINVENTING. THE. TRAIN.
THEY WORK FINE."
These schemes aren’t actually trying to create a useful product and have no interest in the industry. These schemes are trying to get money out of investors and as such are marketed to people that don’t understand the industry. Keep that in mind: the customer for a tech bro company isn’t a user, it’s an INVESTOR.
In a very large UK company I once worked for this would smell like some graduate trainees' final project that a bigwig fell for. It would be loathed by the employees and ridiculed. Yet it would be forced into existence.
How long would these projects normally exist before being forced into retirement?
@@cubasfidelcastro The One that comes to mind was in place four years. At which point I left.
Ok, "local freight" might work, if by local they mean, "around the factory" i COULD see these things zipping around between factory warehouses, zipping over to a storage area of empty containers, picking up an empty, bringing it up to a loading area, loading it, zipping it over to a local freight yard a few miles away where its unloaded, zipping over to pick up more empty containers, and bring them back to the base warehouse.
This would work for a company that is running 24/7 and moving shipping containers from storage to factory, factory to transfer point. This would allow more automation, reduce risks for driver and such, and lower costs, as you aren't paying for drivers 24/7.
That said... anything past that.. nope.
Batteries on board seems dumb, on an electrified line this idea would be a lot more apealing for on site transfers.
It seems like there wouldn't be many times where they would be more efficient than traditional freight movers which can lift as well as transport containers meaning they can be used for changing modes of transport as well as moving short distances.
@@SineN0mine3 yep but most load/unload movers tend to be fixed. Those that aren't, again, to unload and move across a plant then come back for the next... that can take a lot of time.
Simply put, the ONLY use for this is automation over short distances, which reduces manpower, so rather then having 4 movable loaders, you have 1 static, and these things. The ONLY reason to go with batteries, is "safety" in as much as a "hot rail line" can be a hazard to workers. that said, having a "hot" section" where access is limited for quick charges on the run, would work.
This is right up there with “Solar Roadways”. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
An important aspect that a lot of projects don’t count is that in Europe we have nearly every important line electrified and one of the biggest change that the pod made was to change From disel to electricity but the aereal cables are a great solution to that problem, another think that electric train like we have in Europe are great is that they don’t need batteries so less expensive than batteries ones, smaller and even less heavy
There is no such thing as europe. For example, brexit, lol. And even if you were to insist otherwise, youre still trying to advertise yourself as equals to America, which will never work because, well, you sound needy
@@aaabbb-py5xd europe is a continent you can’t deny it …
@@filippogamer2994 Lol, so you mean I was comparing continents?
General Public who knows Sh** about Railroading:
This is a Great Idea.
Railfans:
NO! GOD PLEASE NO! NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
1:13 Oh cool!
* Four destroyed shipping containers (that smash directly into the cabin of the train behind, naturally)
* That much less room to stop for the guy behind
* Eight -- count them, _eight_ -- lithium fires (because what powers the batteries?)
I'm just talking realistically, but already this seems like a bad idea
@9:02 I was hoping you would suggest if they have to be fancy to do existing container double stacks with electrification. Beauty is you could basically do a skateboard design and have the battery pack in the structure, and perhaps even port that same architecture over to box cars, etc. At least that way you’re moving twice the freight and could easily set it up for couplers. The problem is they’re reinventing the wheel.
Do you know that well and box cars don't have driveable axles? Are you an engineer? I feel like the answer is no
As someone who works in rail freight, everything you said is 100% accurate