Trailer Trains to Save Gas

Most of us are looking at our gas gauges and wondering why it seems to go from F to E so fast. I remember seeing the needle actually move when I pressed the gas pedal on the old V8 Ford. It would accelerate from 20 to 80 in 6.2 seconds and use about an eighth of a tank in the process. Impressive.

We don’t drive cars like that any more. Those old guzzlers had 10 gallon tanks and dual carbs. Maybe more. Today we have 20 gallon tanks and electronic fuel injection. We can’t use leg muscle for acceleration. We’d hit that enormous truck in front of us. And that’s my complaint!

Last month I had the extreme pleasure of visiting Chicago’s 26 lane “expressways.” There are more huge trucks in Chicago than any city I’ve visited in the last ten years. They belong on the nation’s railroads. Really. And, of course, there are problems with that. Sharing the roads with them is worse. In Chicago they want $4.++ for a gallon of gas. Probably more now, as that was two days ago.

In order to get where you need to be you have to negotiate overly narrow lanes filled with overly wide trucks. They aren’t local delivery trucks. License plates show every state and province in North America. So why is a truck with a California plates crowding me in Chicago? Shouldn’t it be on the back of a railroad car? Isn’t that what those big flatbed Trailer Trains are all about?

Well it turns out America’s railroads are choked by their own success. Here’s how it works. Each train can be about a quarter of a mile long. They use an old system of light signals and radio dispatch to control movement. If there’s a train in the section ahead your train gets a red light. You have to wait until that train is out of the section before you can enter. All the trains behind your train have to wait on you to pass through the next section. The result is the railroads are “at capacity” even though there are thousands of miles of empty track.

But wait; don’t we have GPS and computer dispatch systems? Yes, we use them on trucks. But we don’t have that technology on trains yet. See, one very real problem is a train can’t stop within its own sight distance. If a truck comes around a corner and there’s traffic ahead it can slow down or stop pretty quickly. A train can’t. It has steel wheels and steel track. It slides.
That’s why trains have loud horns at grade crossings. Instead of stopping for traffic it just tries to scare it off.

The effect is America’s railroads are generally empty. A quarter mile long train occupies a 50 mile section of track. One train.

Ok, so why don’t we get GPS and computer dispatch systems on the railroads? I don’t know. They’ve never used those kinds of systems except for tracking payloads. Allegedly. It would be easy if the train people would just look around and open their minds.

Also they need to bring all the trains onto the systems at the same time. If a few have it and the rest don’t it might be interesting. But inefficient. And what about the equipment itself? If only one unit failed to function we could have a train wreck in Nebraska that would shut down California. And we need California, even though they don’t need us.

Oh, and if we figured out how to convert the railroads to 100% high tech dispatch can you think of other problems?

The answer is yes. Send me answers about what you think might be the other problems. Meanwhile, lobby your legislators about it. If we have fewer trucks on the road we could have smoother traffic and save gas.

Al