international shipping is so wild because like instinctually your assumption is that it’s probably catastrophically bad for the environment but the enormous capacity of the modern cargo ship and the extremely low resistance of being a boat means that even with all the chicanery around burning different grades of fuel in different jurisdictions cargo ships come out extraordinarily efficient per kilogram transported, I think they even beat out trains.
While there are situations where something locally produced or manufactured will have a lower transport carbon footprint than a long distance import, that’s by no means certain, especially if you live near a bulk rail station that connects to the coast.
also easier to ship someone a bicycle than the iron ore and coal necessary to smelt the steel with which to manufacture a bicycle
yeah although usually this means we just ship the iron and the coal to China in the middle!
centralised mass production allows for capital intensive investment in logistics, like the AutoHaul trains that carry iron ore in Western Australia:
The autonomous train, consisting of three locomotives and carrying around 28,000 tonnes of iron ore, travelled over 280 kilometres from our mining operations in Tom Price to the port of Cape Lambert. It was monitored remotely by operators from our Operations Centre in Perth more than 1,500 kilometres away.
no human drivers!
In a manual system, every time one driver ends their shift and another comes on board, the train needs to stop. On a typical journey a train will stop three times, adding more than an hour to the journey. The trains that move iron ore from the mines to the port for shipping are 2.4 kilometres long.
“The time-saving benefit is enormous because the train network is a core part of the mining operation. If we can prevent those stoppages, we can keep the network ticking over, allowing more ore to be transported to the ports and shipped off more efficiently,” says Lido.
“The other major benefit is safety,” he continues. “We are removing the need to transport drivers 1.5 million kilometres each year to and from trains as they change their shift. This high-risk activity is something that driverless trains will largely reduce.”
Freight rail companies will see a high capacity iron ore line and be like “is anyone going to push rail technology to the limits of its capacity” and not wait for an answer.
The Sishen-Saldanha iron ore line isn’t autonomous but it’s got one driver, one copilot, and a four kilometer long train
do you like the color of the train
Oh man, imagine being stuck at a crossing waiting for that to pass
