[sephamorr]

My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.

[seanmcdirmid]

I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that.

You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.

[bgnn]

most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network.

It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.

[tim333]

>the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics

I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...)

Estimates for building it have gone from £38bn in 2011 to £136bn in 2023. They are still building some of it but brexit britain doesn't have that many spare £136bns lying around. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3088/economics/pros-and-c...

[bgnn]

Yeah the big infra projects in the West somehow became like this. It's a very different story in Asia though.

[TrainedMonkey]

Always upvote electric trains!