Autonomous battery-powered wagons to be deployed in Michigan

Autonomous battery-powered wagons to be deployed in Michigan

USA: Intramotev has been awarded funding for the first commercial use of its TugVolt concept for an autonomous battery-electric wagon.

Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility & Electrification has awarded a $200 000 grant for the deployment at a mining site in the state’s Upper Peninsula in late 2023.

‘Utilising the most advanced battery-electric technology and other proprietary tools, we look to apply the packetisation of the internet model to freight logistics’, said Intramotev co-founder and CEO Timothy Luchini on May 11.

"We look to apply the packetisation of the internet model to freight logistics"... whut? Now that's a guy who got a 4.0 in his business school class "How to Make Mouth Sounds Without Saying Anything Intelligible". Extra points for throwing the "proprietary" buzzword in there too.

I don't know if it unfortunate or not for me that what he said had meaning to me.

A packet is the smallest thing that can be routed between two computers on the Internet (similar to a railcar being the smallest thing that can move on a railroad). When traffic is routed on the internet, all packets carrying part of a piece of data do not move together, but are sent individually (possibly on different routes). For example, let's say someone wants to send a live video of a train from a camera in New York to a computer in Los Angeles. That video may require 100 packets a second to be moved between those two devices. Some packets may travel via Chicago and Denver on AT&T wires, while others travel via St Louis and Dallas on Verizon wires, and still others go via Memphis and Salt Lake City on Sprint wires (all places and carriers are hypotheticals). Those packets are routed based on kind of immediate routing decisions (re)made continuously to try to get the packet from New York to Los Angeles as fast and cheaply as possible.

An analog to this is sending 10 car loads of widgets across the country -- do you send each car as it is loaded and ready to go (packetized), or as a single string of 10 cars once all are loaded? It's preferable for railroads as they are run now to take all 10 cars at once, but probably preferable to the shipper and receiver for each car to move individually.

I too knew what he meant, but then again I have a business degree, in logistics in fact. It's how he said it that so amused me, and the fact that most people would probably have zero clue what he meant.

"This will enable us to economically ship by rail one carload at a time, as soon as it's ready to go, much like the trucking industry. But we will use remotely operated, self-propelled battery-electric railcars instead of separate diesel motive power." There, no buzzwords.

Anyway, interesting technology, and I can readily see the potential in the so called "closed loop industrial" market - this would be a boon in those places where line hauls are short and sometimes railcars are moved individually using Trackmobiles, cables, even bucket loaders instead of locomotives. I'm very curious, though, how (and when) this technology could be "scaled" to the national/international network. Might be great in the MOW equipment sector - self-propelled ballast cars, anyone?

And they are being deployed at Cumberland Mine in PA (free to read, but you have to register).

USA: Intramotev is to supply three ReVolt battery wagons to enable regenerative braking on a industrial railway.

The battery and automation technology company said this would be the first deployment of self-propelled battery-electric wagons in a traditional freight train, with regenerative braking and battery technology used to reduce locomotive diesel consumption and thus costs and emissions.

The technology will be deployed on a 27 km isolated line which Iron Senergy uses to transport coal from its Cumberland mine to Alicia Harbor on the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania.

(The Cumberland Mine railroad is covered on the ccrx 6700 That's Railroadin! Youtube channel.)

Are they talking about moving coal less than 18 miles from mine to port in individually self-propelled cars? How long would it take to move a shipload? Or even a bargeload?

I'm amazed that they'd think 100 individual cars would be more energy efficient than one train of 100 cars... I hope there aren't grade crossings. 100 triggers of a grade crossing in a couple hours might wear the gates out....

Sent from my SM-G981U using Tapatalk