A WAY TO MAKE RETAIL RAILROADING MORE PRODUCTIVE?

Loose-car railroading is a technology that fractures freight, with the adding, setting off, and classifying of cars, and it's labor intensive, in that somebody has to connect all the air hoses (in North America) and go between the cars to secure or release the coupling links to the draw hooks (in Europe and much of the rest of the world.)  Those buffers are between cars in part to protect the yard man from being crushed.

Now, the Germans are experimenting with a freight car coupler that simultaneously joins the cars and connects the brake and possibly the telemetry lines.  Here's the Railway Age take.

European railroads have never universally adopted semi-automatic knuckle couplers, a technology that revolutionized operations and improved safety on North America railroads generations ago. We take them for granted. But if you think about it, our system is still labor-intensive, as air brake hoses must be manually connected, and uncoupling is lever-activated, manually. Now it seems as though our European counterparts may leapfrog us, with a technology called DAC, for “Digital Automatic Coupling.”

You might ask, aren't the Germans over a hundred years late to the party?

That's a Chicago Aurora and Elgin car built in 1908 and equipped with Van Dorn couplers, one of several styles of coupler in use on interurban and rapid transit rolling stock, and some of the fancier versions made the air brake line and multiple unit control line connections as the cars were coupled.  Those applications could be non-standard with respect to other railroads, and more than one kind could be used on a railroad: for instance, the Chicago Aurora and Elgin steel cars have Tomlinson couplers, thus, you will never see the Illinois Railway Museum run a mixed steel and wood car train, as the couplers and control systems are completely different.

Clearly, no retail freight operation, where a German car might be loaded at a factory here and sent to a receiving dock there, where there might be in Germany, or it might be anywhere in the European Union running standard gauge cars fitting the continental loading gauge.  So you won't be sending coals to Newcastle any time soon.

The challenge, though, is in having enough freight cars fitted with this system in order that any economies in marshalling trains and setting out or picking up individual cars can be shared by everybody.  At the moment, it's still proof of concept.

Over the next few months, 12 freight wagons will be fitted with coupling types from four manufacturers, with one type set to be selected following technical tests. A test train with 24 cars will make its way through Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as other European Union (EU) countries, for several months. The [coupler] is also being tested through daily use in the shunting yards.

That should make for more interesting reading than the latest progression of the Wuhan coronavirus across national boundaries.