Rolling Highway
13 comments
·May 13, 2025Animats
SoftTalker
One such "strange approach" was the Roadrailer
twobitshifter
Have they won out or has freight shifted to trucking from rail? Heavy, slow, and double stacked is the most efficient, but shippers look at more than a single factor.
Animats
If it came in on a container ship, and has a long way to go, the next step is often rail. This has led to "inland ports", in such places as Tucson, AZ and Columbus, OH, where the containers leave rail and go on trucks. In the US, it's not exactly "last mile" from there, more like last hundred miles.
Union Pacific's container trains are heavy, fast, and double-stacked. Once they get clear of the congested area around LA, they pick up speed.[1]
bsder
Truck is about 30% more than rail, but they both move an awful lot of stuff: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-ton-miles-freight
theendisney
I once ran into a website about some french industrialist who made a hundred drawings of roads and rail mixed with vehicles that looked like they belonged in some epic cartoon. Im sure his version would be a very long passenger or cargo train (probably both) with the roof exactly the height of the road. Trucks would drive onto the roof and park all the way to the front. Then the train would dive deep into the grounds because gravity is free.
Lammy
This article is focused on the freight aspect, but Amtrak operates a passenger Auto Train too. Danny Harmon has a great video about the unloading process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYlWBWlS4t0
SoftTalker
Very few routes (maybe only one) offer this, however.
burnt-resistor
Makes you wonder if there are 8+ axle road trailers for rail cars. Wouldn't that be some transception to place a trailer on a rail car on a trailer? ;D
bombcar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEWvw2JE3A4
If you can put a locomotive on a truck, you can put anything.
bitwize
Before reading the article I was thinking/hoping this would be the kind of "rolling highway" described by Heinlein in "The Roads Must Roll"; think cross-country conveyor belts.
cyberax
This can really take off once self-driving matures. The _main_ problem with freight train is not their speed or the rail track throughput, but the time it takes to sort the train cars ("dwell time"). It's so bad, that the average car "speed" can be around 10 km/h. Or even slower.
And the railroads do not particularly care about optimizing their network, they are content to milk the bulk hauls for as much profit as they can. My friend worked at a startup that tried to pitch fully automated couplers to rail companies. They didn't care, even though it could have cut the dwell time significantly.
But if the improvements can be made on the _cargo_ side, then it's a different story.
SoftTalker
> They didn't care
I find that hard to believe, anything that could reduce time in transit and switching yard labor would be attractive. The process of assembling a train is far more automated today than it was in the past, so evidence does not support that they are content to just "milk" their current business.
So there are ones besides Eurotunnel.
In the US, containers have won out. The other schemes - roadrailers, Trailer On Flat Car/piggyback, and some other strange approaches - have pretty much become obsolete. Double-stack container trains have maybe 4x the capacity of hauling an entire truck.