A MODEL RAILROAD IN FULL SCALE?

Seriously.  "Self-driving trains could be greener, carry more stuff, and help unclog America’s congested supply chains. And making them a reality will likely be far easier than perfecting autonomous vehicles."

The article was offered as a tease, and now it's behind the paywall.  The argument, though, is that there's no reason a fully grade-separated railroad could not be operated entirely by remote control, presumably with the positive train control information being processed by an onboard computer that does what the human operator is supposed to do.  That might involve working around the paywall.

I’ve written about the limitations impeding grand ambitions for self-driving cars. But trains have qualities that let them steer around those problems. Most important, trains are on tracks, which means an artificial intelligence train engineer doesn’t have to worry about issues affecting drivers of cars or trucks—no tailgating, lane changes, left turns against traffic, and so on.

“We think that trains are going to reach full autonomy faster than vehicles,” says Maxim A. Dulebenets, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Florida A&M University who recently published a broad review of the literature on autonomous trains. One reason: hundreds of passenger trains are operating autonomously in the world already, as part of city metro systems.>

Yes, as long as the dispatcher can't set up conflicting routes, and as long as no miscreant can hack the control system. Think of one of those old-style spaghetti bowl model railroads with the owner throwing remote control switches and turning the rheostat on the power pack.  Or perhaps there's a way of adapting walkaround radio control in the manner of the Cold Spring Shops layout to the Great Outdoors.

A future of autonomous trains could mean putting a lot more freight onto America’s existing rail network without adding new lines, says Nalin Jain, group president of digital electronics at Wabtec, a Pittsburgh-based train-manufacturing company that traces its roots back more than 150 years. Existing and future technology allows trains to be longer, to run with less distance between them, and to be broken down and reconstituted at ports and rail yards in a more efficient fashion, he adds.

Yes, a new generation of automatic couplers, plus distributed power and proper blocking of the cars, has potential.  Whether the railroads will go after the additional traffic, or consider adding more retail railroading, is another matter.