1666761 - Freight Transportation with Self-Propelled Autonomous RailCars (SPARCs)

The major freight railroads in the United States together consume approximately 13 billion litres of diesel fuel each year. While the fuel consumed by freight railroads represents less than two percent of transportation consumption of fossil fuels in the US, emissions of CO2 and other pollutants from train operations are critical to freight rail industry efforts to minimize their environmental impact and achieve net-zero carbon status in the coming decades. Spurred on by the global push to reduce carbon emissions, railroads and industry suppliers have begun to explore the possibility of electrifying freight rail transportation using battery locomotives. However, current battery technology lacks the energy density required to store sufficient charge to fully electrify typical North American freight train sizes over long distances and across common route topography.

One way to improve the effectiveness of batteries for freight rail propulsion is to leverage them in combination with advances in train control technology, such as moving blocks and virtual coupling, along with increasing levels of automation in the rail industry. This emerging “TEA Nexus” of Train control, Energy, and Automation offers a pathway towards the development of potentially disruptive railway operating technologies that re-imagine the use of rail infrastructure. Current long train sizes and railway network operating strategies in North America are driven by the economics of two-person crews and the efficiencies of high-horsepower diesel-electric locomotives.  However, these efficiencies often come at the expense of freight shipment transit times. Switching to single-person crews or full automation, combined with battery hybrid, fuel cell, and/or electrification technology, and operating using either virtual or moving blocks to facilitate smaller in-train “power units” or using self-propelled autonomous railcars (SPARCs) in place of traditional locomotives, could radically alter the way railroads are operated. 

Multiple start-ups in North America are working to develop battery-powered autonomous rail vehicles in the mold of SPARCs. Parallel Systems is targeting the intermodal market, building entirely new autonomous rail vehicles designed to be resizable to efficiently carry multiple container sizes. In contrast, Intramotev is primarily targeting the bulk commodity freight market, adding batteries, motors, and an autonomous control system to existing railcar designs. Powering smaller groups of railcars that can more dynamically combine and separate to repeatedly form and reform into different trains (or platoons) of varying sizes for different segments of their journey from origin to destination could eliminate time-consuming railcar sorting in classification yards. This may facilitate the creation of fast, direct service between many more origin-destination pairs, and make more frequent departures for existing train services economical. As a first step towards assessing the feasibility of SPARCs, this presentation will provide an overview of some of the proposed technologies, and then focus on the potential ability of short platoons of autonomous, battery-powered rail vehicles transporting containers to improve the transit time of short-haul rail intermodal service on low-density single-track corridors connecting ports to inland terminals.