[deeviant]

Rail is already highly autonomous with external monitoring systems integrated with vehicle control systems, but I'll just go on as if the distinction between what it is now and what are calling "autonomous" is significant.

What problem does autonomous rail solve? The single driver is already a rounding error in total costs. Also, rail is already a controlled environment where collisions are much less likely to happen than road, so the fruit is much higher up the tree on that aspect too.

It seems to me that bringing autonomy to rail would have little on it's bottom line.