World's First Self-Driven Train Now Operational In Australia

One of the biggest advances in transportation has been self-driving technology, which has facilitated breakthroughs in not just self-driven cars, but even driverless trains, self-flying planes and self-navigating ships.

Rio Tinto, an Australian mining corporation, has unveiled the first operational driverless train in Western Australia, even before China, which has its own similar automated train in the works.

The train completed its first run of 100 kilometers (62 miles) in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, without anyone manning the train.

“This successful pilot run puts us firmly on track to meet our goal of operating the world’s first fully-autonomous heavy haul, long distance rail network, which will unlock significant safety and productivity benefits for the business,” Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury stated in the press release issued Monday.

“New roles are being created to manage our future operations and we are preparing our current workforce for new ways of working to ensure they remain part of our industry.”

The company is in the process of setting up an autonomous train network that will support its mining operations in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The company had previously run semi-autonomous trains on half of its network, but has now switched to fully autonomous trains.

The company expects to set up this network by early 2018, but it operability will depend on the issuance of regulatory approvals by Australian authorities.

While self-driving cars are expected to make the roads safer, since most road accidents occur due to human error, self-driven trains could make rail networks safer.

However, self-driving systems for trains need to be designed differently than self-driving cars, since they travel large distances at a go and need to react to obstacles differently since they cannot swerve or change directions to avoid obstacles.

"The stopping distance of a train is much longer than a car, could be close to a mile. You don't have rights-of-way that are completely sealed. There are no grade crossings, there's no pedestrian access. It's hard to detect a car stuck on the rails or a pedestrian on the tracks," Dr. David Clarke, director of the University of Tennessee Center for Transportation Research Center, told Wired in 2013.

Dr. Clark said due to these reasons, a human operator is necessary at the wheel of such trains. However, this presumption is skewed by the fact that 87 percent of train accidents are caused by human error.

Another hurdle that could stop such trains from going mainstream is their effect on the organized labor in the railway sector, which has functioned in an unchanged way for more than a century now.

"Organized labor doesn't like the idea of losing the jobs of its members to driverless trains," said Clark. "There has been push back with the allegation of safety issues. Politically, that makes it hard to implement."

But there are solutions to these issues too. Elevated systems like metro trains can be insulated from the risks that rail networks face.