The problem is not union or regulation. The problem is that American rail infrastructure is a complete disaster and then train companies use that infrastructure to push incredibly long trains on them driven by crews that have horrible working experience (crew switches in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and so on).
Having 1 driver is quite common in most of the world but most places don't run on that kind of infrastructure with that kind of loads. 2 crew has prevented massive desasters in US rail history.
If anybody was serious about logic, upgrading the rail infrastructure, totally new signaling system, electrification, shorter trains would allow for a huge amount of self driving.
But don't expect that rail companies will do any of that. They have very little punishment for there trains falling over, or delay caused by Amtrek and they can do with their crews as they like.
Not saying this as a negative thing. Because having well paid, healthy and rested employees looking after stuff like maintenance, safety, stuff like trying to stop the train when some idiot parks the car over the tracks, or when a badly loaded rail car breaks loose and derails suddenly, or just generally driving in places where fully autonomous operations can’t happen for various reasons.
But it’s the Unions. World wide one of the major things train worker unions have pushed back hardest on is smaller train crews for both passenger and freight… and it should be obvious why. It means companies that move to smaller crews would lay off union workers.
Plenty of this is actually justified by good arguments put forth by the unions, particularly in places like America where railroads have basically refused to spend money in capital expenses and try to run with the oldest railroad hardware possible in order to maximise their profits per ton per mile shipped, regardless of environmental impact, crew fatigue, or the long term degradation of the entire strategic value of a national rail network that can move the heaviest military goods efficiently in times of war.
You could not physically do automatic freight rail in America without getting people killed. The hardware and infrastructure are literally not capable of it. For all the automatic signalling systems in place, it’s all duct taped together around having a human in the loop that can be made responsible for decision making in the train driver cab.
In more modern environments like say Switzerland, they probably could get much closer, but they also have a well regulated railway system with incentives that ensure the companies don’t need to be so brutally effective to make enough money to meet corporate profits. Then there’s places like the trans Siberia railroad… good luck keeping an automated network of that size operating within safe automatic bounds over winter, or the parts of the UK where there are still physical mechanical based rock fall “sensors” in place to alert drivers to their being rocks on the track ahead that may have only landed there minutes ago… and they don’t run enough trains on the tracks to make maintenance of network of cameras and motion sensors worth it.
Railways are, when run well, very automation friendly environments. But that breaks down the further you get from a tidy metro area and surrounding country/farmland, further out into long stretches between cities or states where you would need to maintain thousands of kilometres of fences to avoid accidents, loss of property (stray farm animals) and the larger the network gets the harder it is to have it all owned and operated by a single company that could even begin such a project… sometimes you have a nationalised owner/operator but then it’s government budgets deciding if the actual rails and signals need the upgrades vs the potentially private companies that may own the trains and haul freight on the government’s rails…
The real world is messy. So the union does kinda have a solid point. But that doesn’t eliminate the fundamental fact that at the “big moving objects on continuously welded rails” level of controls theory, railways are very automation friendly and are in theory able to be nearly fully automated.
They also need cbtc, that is, self driving trains. This will allow higher frequencies (more capacity) and moving to single person operation (reducing operating costs, if the union would allow it)
One of the main issues is putting autopilots in trains and cutting the actual human staff to one person. I can't imagine being the only person on a train in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter and something goes wrong.
Edit: I relayed what I read here:
Why Railroad Workers Like Me Are Planning to Strike This Friday | Opinion
In the last few years, the railroad companies have mounted an assault on labor, costing livelihoods and sacrificing worker safety to a point where we just can't go on.
For starters, railroad companies have adopted something called "positive train control" or PTC for short. PTC is basically autopilot for trains. It's a great piece of technology, but since adopting it, companies have decided that the conductor role is obsolete, and you just need an engineer to take care of the train. In an effort to save money, the railroads have been pushing for a single-man crew the last few years, with the biggest freight railroads reducing staff by 29 percent.
I'm all for better technology. But it has to be safe. And there's a big problem with eliminating the role of the conductor. One of the major things the conductor does is if there is an issue with the train, some sort of defect with a railcar, say, the conductor goes out and checks what the issue is while the engineer stays in the cab to control the train.
There's an initiative to move to autopilot for trains, or Positive Train Control. The US Gov't started the initiative in 2008 after a particularly gnarly train accident which killed 25 people. It was due to be rolled out in 2015 and we're still waiting...
For long-haul rail freight the economics don't matter as much as they do for trucks. 1-2 people can control a 7 mile train as opposed to trucks which have 1 driver per 50' trailer.
> In some European cities (Munich?) autonomous trains often have "drivers" who do nothing because that preferred to fighting the union.
Many cities with autonomous trains indeed have drivers. But they don't do nothing, they sit there for emergencies and to set the go signal when leaving the station. In Austria for instance that's not because of unions but because the job of the driver is at this point considered important. For fully autonomous operation you need extra security features on the track which were not employed (fully sealed off track in stations, better emergency corridors, more reliable remote door controls etc.).
Where fully automated trains are in operation there are never any drivers.
First we remove human drivers. Then we add electronic signalling systems, to make the driverless vehicles work in all environmental conditions. Then we add central control. Then we add X. Then we add Y.
Finally, we have reinvented the railroad. Amazing. I feel like the fact that we don't have automated railroads (in practice) should tell us something about the viability of the self-driving car. The problem for autonomous rail isn't even technical anymore, it's regulatory.
Level crossings aren't an issue. It's easy to detect the presence of large objects blocking a level crossing if the barriers fail to come down and signal to the train to stop before it reaches the crossing.
Drivers tend to earn much more money than guards do because the work is more skilled. If all you're doing is opening doors then you can be a min wage worker who is easily replaceable and thus not very unionisable. So there is benefit even in systems that still need guards.
The real issues are deeper. Yes, union opposition is a big one, but there are technical problems too. Full moving block signalling i.e. trains that track how far they are from other trains and know to slow down or speed up depending on distance was being discussed in the 1990's but the only implementations anywhere are on metro lines. For above-ground heavy rail there are no implementations anywhere in the world, as far as I know.
As observed by the OP this cannot be entirely a technical issue. If Google can make a driverless car that can navigate California, a driverless train is surely far easier. The real problem is that train automation is not a problem that attracts the best engineers. Google can hire out entire academic departments of the top machine vision researchers in the world to work on self driving cars because self driving cars are something that appeals to the whims of billionaires and techies alike. Also because the market size is effectively limitless.
But when was the last time you heard about an automated train startup? When did you hear about someone leaving their job at Facebook to go work on train automation? Trains do not appeal to rich billionaires or American tech workers in the same way that cars do, so funding for them comes entirely from the capex budgets of mostly government funded rail operators, and is spent on a handful of large engineering conglomerates. There are I think only about 4 companies in the world that can make automated train systems of any kind. Each engagement is a massive activity that always requires very large and expensive customisations to the base system. Because there are so few competitors they're huge public contracts and it only takes one or two to be ruled out or refuse to bid and you're down to a single potential supplier.
Projects like this can fail and when they fail they fail very expensively and with huge political fallout. They are the epitome of huge expensive government IT projects. The Jubilee line automation project started installing equipment in 2006 and didn't activate until 2011, with loads of line closures and problems that made major news.
There are also some more direct technical issues. Trains have huge stopping distances. They need to know where other trains are blockages are far in advance of being able to physically see them. They also spend a lot of time in tunnels. Therefore camera based approaches like what self driving cars use are not so trustworthy. This means upgrades to the track so all trains can know where they are at all times, and to get the benefits means reliable communication from a central control room rather than all trains autonomously deciding things like how fast to go (remember they cannot see slow trains on the track ahead). These things in turn mean line closures and engineering works, which are very expensive. And remember there's no money for upgrades because they're all government subsidised.
There's an article about some of the issues and the smoother rollouts London is seeing these days here:
It is very difficult to convert trains to run fully automated not because of the technology but because of unions that typically run the show. Don’t underestimate the power of the unions. They have decades of experience in getting their way.
Trains shouldn't have any crew at all. They can't do anything useful when the train is moving now that we have modern automatic train control. (they cannot hit the brakes fast enough to stop if someone is on the tracks). Unlike cars, self driving trains is an easy problem that was solved 20 years ago. If a train brakes down send a mechanic to the train - they only need a couple in every state.
They train companies should still have crew, but they should be for use on secondary lines and the crew lives near that line and just works 1 week a month (most of that time doing mandatory training). With a little work on scheduling they can find local farmers looking for a side job when there isn't farming to do.
This "safety" legislation is mainly about requiring 2-man crews on trains. The unions are of course very much in favor, but it would do nothing to prevent derailments like what happened at E. Palestine.
A number of european capitals seem to have managed to do driverless high capacity underground trains. Here in the UK, we've got a number of automated trains but for union reasons they still have drivers in the cab who press go at each station.
In the US, it looks like Detroit has a self driving line, and there are a bunch of airport shuttles. Presumably you are hitting the same union issues as us?
At least in the US, the FRA is a regulatory nightmare though and extremely red tape heavy. The lack of progress in train automation is partly caused by the heavy-handed rules the agency rights which push implementation costs through the roof.
It'll be interesting to see if the DOT reacts similarly in time to vehicle automation.
Safety regulations are what prevent more trains from running in many European places. Limiting rail to automated-only trains would allow them to run right up next to each other without the huge gaps between them that exists right now. You could move thousands more people than automated cars could manage for a fraction of the cost.
The Tube (TFL) are trying to introduce driverless trains. Its the unions that are stopping them.
I'm sure if TFL could get rid of all drivers tomorrow and replace them with driverless trains they would.
The thing that will hold up real deployment of this will be unions rather than the technology.
Human train labour is not really a big deal. Modern drivers are basically security, comms, engineering, exception handling that conveniently moves with the vehicle.
If freight trains go routinely robotic then expect to see more of this in the USA:
Having 1 driver is quite common in most of the world but most places don't run on that kind of infrastructure with that kind of loads. 2 crew has prevented massive desasters in US rail history.
If anybody was serious about logic, upgrading the rail infrastructure, totally new signaling system, electrification, shorter trains would allow for a huge amount of self driving.
But don't expect that rail companies will do any of that. They have very little punishment for there trains falling over, or delay caused by Amtrek and they can do with their crews as they like.
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