Unfortunately Rio Tinto already beat them to the autonomy market. AutoHaul, their self-driving solution, has been in use for the past few years operating on around 1800km of track. Around 50 trains at any given time are currently driverless throughout Australia, including navigating level crossings without issue.

https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/rise-machines-rio-tinto...

I’m not a domain expert in electric propulsion or trains. My immediate questions:

1) It appears these are “trucks” and there is no actual “car” (frame). How much pushing/pulling force can a shipping container withstand?

2) The weight capacity is listed as 128,000lb per car, which I interpret as a pair of these trucks. This is compared to a road going semi truck but how does it compare to a conventional container car? Can still containers be stacked?

3) Is decoupling a benefit? It seems to be trains gain some benefit of shared braking ability by being connected, how do these cars work at the top of a steep grade? Is the speed and range limited by the heaviest car in a consist? Can the cars share power?

4) Can a regular car be retrofit to provide an electric “boost” but maintain the same “api” (coupler, beakes) to the rest of the train so they can be mixed in with conventional trains?

I think this is a really interesting idea but seems like it could be more successful if it was less radical.

Is it really better to have batteries on them than to run powerlines?

This is scaling Kiva robots from warehouse to country level. Pretty obvious once you have the funds secured.

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