Problem: Driven by the goal of improving business efficiency, automotive and railway carriers are advocating for the use of larger truck trailers and longer trains. Increasing efficiency is a reasonable goal, but will that be achieved by allowing mega trailers and mega trains on our networks? In Europe, 740-metre trains are seen as a desirable standard, but contributing author Borys Ganaylyuk offers a different perspective.
Borys Ganaylyuk, from Ukraine, is a physicist by training, with a career spanning research, economics, and industrial management. After starting out in a research institute, he transitioned into economic consulting and later led major automotive enterprises in Lviv. Since 2018, his focus has shifted to research on the Lviv railway junction.
Ganaylyuk explicitly welcomes your opinion and constructive criticism and wants to discuss concrete alternatives to improve transport efficiency without increasing truck mass or train length.
Increasing efficiency is a reasonable goal that meets the public interest, since it is aimed in particular at reducing the cost of freight transportation services. Why are these requirements – increasing the permissible mass and dimensions of a car trailer and increasing the length and mass of a train – questionable from the point of view of public interests and the interests of the carriers themselves?
When it comes to automobiles, the disadvantages are numerous. In short, it causes discomfort for other road users, provides only dubious benefits for the car carrier and solves problems that are temporary. Moreover, there are other simpler and cheaper ways to increase efficiency.
What then, about the much-desired longer trains in Europe? The motives of railway carriers are identical to those of the road sector – increasing the volume and mass of cargo transported by one locomotive and one locomotive crew in one allocated window in the traffic schedule.
Longer trains equal a sharp throughput reduction
Why is this approach, like the road sector’s approach, also wrong? Why does it not meet the interests of society and the interests of market participants – manufacturers and operators of rolling stock?
First of all, freight trains in general (and of those increased length especially) interfere with the movement of other trains. They not only increase the load on the infrastructure but (and this is the main thing) sharply reduce throughput.
The interval between trains is formed by several components. These include: the time of exit from the station to the main track, the train separation distance to ensure safety, and passing intermediate “bottlenecks”. Those are sections with reduced speed associated with both switches and simply with relief or temporary restrictions due to poor quality.
Freight trains usually move through these sections at speeds up to 40 kilometres per hour. Passenger trains, which are much shorter – typically ranging from 60 to 300 metres and only rarely reaching 400 metres – benefit from greater acceleration, allowing them to pass through these areas significantly faster. By contrast, freight trains, often as long as 600 metres and with much slower acceleration, can take up to a full minute to clear a single bottleneck.
An increase of 20% in length increases the time to pass these places by a corresponding fraction. In fact, it can grow by 40-50% because the rear part of the train passes at a speed lower than 40 kilometres per hour.
Also when they’re not moving, longer trains present their drawbacks. The longer the train, the longer it has to prepare for departure. It has to wait for all containers to arrive, for example, and load them for longer. The same applies to unloading. When counting the time spent waiting for a train to form as part of the total delivery time, then longer trains lose out.
Social and economic impact
On a practical level, longer freight trains not only take more time to clear infrastructure bottlenecks, but also create additional social inconvenience. When passing passenger platforms, long trains extend the duration of discomfort for passengers. At level crossings, longer trains increase closure times and, consequently, disruption for other road users. And for the economy, longer trains block the movement of cars or passengers at level crossings for a longer time.
Therefore, longer time intervals are required to let longer trains pass, which creates obstacles in the operational coordination of schedules. Accordingly, it leads to an increase in time spent on the route due to unproductive downtime. In addition, the carrier must use a more powerful and, accordingly, more expensive locomotive.
For longer trains, it is necessary to rebuild the station tracks – which costs society money and is sometimes technically impossible because the infrastructure was created a long time ago and, as a rule, there is no reserve of land plots. Moreover, the reconstruction of the electrification network may be required to pass locomotives of greater power.
Public money for a suboptimal solution?
This requires public investments. However, before these investments are made, it is necessary to assess how justified these investments are. Is it possible to achieve an increase in transport efficiency not by satisfying these requirements, but by other solutions instead?
Indeed, a superficial analysis shows that the lobbyists of such a solution – intermodal carriers – use extremely inefficient rolling stock. It is reasonable to expect that they invest in more efficient fleets.
It was disappointing to read that these intermodal companies insist on increasing the length of the trains for military mobility as well. Without mentioning details in open sources, this is definitely the wrong goal – a long train is a tempting target and the elimination of the consequences is not proportionately complicated. The same holds true for civilian freight trains.
The goal of allowing trains over 740 metres long as the TEN-T standard should be “not a priority”. It can be solved in stages after resolving more pressing goals – eliminating level crossings and reducing the share of single-track and non-electrified lines. These are much more important for the development of intermodal transportation.
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