ON THE FAST TRACK
Wabtec system puts fully automated railroads within view
At the end of 2020, the U.S. rail system reached a milestone decades in the making and seeded by technology developed at North Shore-based Wabtec Corp.
All major freight and commuter railroads are now equipped with a safety system called positive train control, which aims to override human error to prevent collisions, derailments and other safety hazards.
To do this, train operators had to outfit their locomotives, their train tracks and their operating rooms with sensors, computers and satellite communication instruments so the safety mechanism can react to conditions in real time. Now that all that communication is in place, total automation isn’t that far off in the horizon, said Nalin Jain, group president of digital electronics at Wabtec.
“A lot of our problems and accidents that happen are driven by human error,” Mr. Nalin said.
And with a huge market — more than $690 billion worth of goods travels by rail, according to federal statistics, including critical commodities such as coal, ethanol, grain and steel — comes huge responsibility.
But safety isn’t the only thing that can be improved by crunching this much data all the time. Fuel savings, equipment maintenance and scheduling can — and already do — benefit from technology developed for positive train control.
With enough sensors and computing power, it may be possible to remove humans from the equation within the next decade, Mr. Nalin predicted.
In fact, full automation is the top goal of a technology ladder that Wabtec has made part of its investor presentation. At the bottom is the foundation on which it all rests: positive train control, or PTC.
“The next big thing,” predicted Patrick Ottensmeyer, president and CEO of Kansas City Southern railroad during an industry conference last year, “is using PTC as a springboard to running a more autonomous rail network.”
He suggested we’re already halfway there and that the “desired future state with autonomous operations” is maybe five or six years away.
Progress down under
To see a real-life example of a totally automated rail network, you would have to travel to
Western Australia, where Rio Tinto, the world’s biggest mining company, runs driverless trains on more than 1,000 miles of track. The trains haul iron ore from its mines.
In 2019 at a mining and steel conference, Rio Tinto’s CEO called those trains “the world’s largest robots.” Wabtec technology is inside of their cabs.
“It’s hard not to look at Rio Tinto and speculate when and if,” said Mike Rush, senior vice president of safety and operations with Washington-based industry group The Association of American Railroads. “You can certainly look at Australia and taste it.”
But Rio Tinto’s operating environment is a far cry from the U.S. rail network.
There, one company that owns its own track and trains has control over all the variables without the hassle of highway crossings or other impediments. It feeds those variables into the computer, which schedules and operates train trips.
The U.S. has seven Class 1 railroads — the biggest freight haulers — and hundreds of regional and smaller systems. One company’s trains can travel on tracks operated by another company, each operator with its own scheduling needs.
‘How digital electronics won’
“If you look at the history of automation in any industry, there are safety benefits and business benefits,” Mr. Rush said.
In other words, if you’ve developed a way for trains and tracks to communicate their conditions to some central brain, the data — and those communication channels — can be used for more than just safety. With help from machine learning algorithms, it can already help train operators pilot trains in such a way that they save fuel by minimizing breaking or prevent equipment damage.
Wabtec also makes technology that can optimize the train’s operation to save fuel, avoid breaking and manage speeds.
“Our next mission here is can you go down from a two man crew on a train to a one man crew,” Mr. Jain said.
The Federal Railroad Administration doesn’t mandate a two-person crew in the cab of a train. When legislation was introduced to require that, the American Association of Railroad opposed it, arguing it would stifle innovation.
Crew size has traditionally been a topic for collective bargaining negotiations, Mr. Rush said.
“The debate over whether you need some eyes in the cab is a debate that could take place at some point. It’s not on the table now,” Mr. Rush said.
But he was also quick to note there is a whole spectrum of automation between the current state and a driverless train.
Indeed, Mr. Jain said 2020, with all its difficulties, was a good demonstration of “how digital electronics won.”
The next milestone, he predicted, will arrive in less time than it took for positive train control.