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Freight railroads generally have operated the same way for more than a century: They wait for cargo and leave when customers are ready. Now railroads want to run more like commercial airlines, where departure times are set. Factories, farms, mines or mills need to be ready or miss their trips.
Called "precision-scheduled railroading," or PSR, this new concept is cascading through the industry. Under pressure from Wall Street to improve performance, Norfolk Southern and other large U.S. freight carriers, including Union Pacific Corp. and Kansas City Southern, are trying to revamp their networks to use fewer trains and hold them to tighter schedules. The moves have sparked a stock rally that has added tens of billions of dollars to railroad values in the past six months as investors anticipate lower costs and higher profits.
Calling all Railroad Tycoons...
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday April 05 2019, @03:01PM (1 child)
Almost. You don't want to put the trucks and drivers on the train - that's a waste of space and of people's time. You just want standardized trailers, or even just containers. One local driver drops the cargo off on one end of the journey, and another local driver picks it up on the other end. This shouldn't be difficult, yet somehow it is.
My limited experience with freight shipping by rail is that it is damned disorganized. Cargo will sit for hours in switching yards, for no apparent reason. Trains won't run to schedule, for no apparent reason. If there was ever an area calling for widespread automation, this is it: freight trains, shipping yards, loading, unloading - the whole shebang could be almost entirely automated, and really ought to run like clockwork.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday April 05 2019, @07:09PM
Sea freight terminals are already very automated.
The order of container unloading and where each needs to go in the yard (or directly onto a truck) is all sorted before the ship docks
And they want to automate more. http://www.saf-project.org [saf-project.org]
Truck-train and train-truck is where things get messt. Sliding loading of some sort (yes, standardised containers). And 'industry support'.. But the industries are many many competing interest groups and companies, not known for cooperation.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex