Driverless trains

We heard a lot about self-driving buses some time back, that has all gone very quiet, as has the progress on self-driving cars. However, given the long ongoing rail drivers’ dispute and the attendant disruption to travel for the long suffering public, I can’t help but think the search for automation started at the wrong end of the spectrum.

Roads are full of unpredictable creatures like humans, many vehicles and some animals which can all behave in erratic ways such as swerving or braking joining the flow of traffic at junctions, thus making driverless vehicles difficult to design. It would have been better to start on the mode of transport with the least interaction with other misbehavingorunpredictablecreatures and events – the railway.

Driverless trains would be so much easier to work with. They move on a fixed guidance system, there are no humans in the vicinity and hopefully no animals, no other vehicles should join the flow without permission so with a good GPS tracker system surely it would be relatively simple to produce a system which tracks the location of the train and controls the speed for any given section of track.

Signalling info used to change lights to red could also be fed interactively to the train control system to allow it to stop if needed due to an unforeseen event such as a train failure or to queue when needed on approach to a station.

They would also eliminate all the overtime working which seem to have become a major and ingrained part of the system and part of train drivers’ working life and income. Neil Robertson

Edinburgh