#driverless trains

So, how do driverless trains work in the sentient locomotive universe? There must be an enormous amount of trust involved with allowing them to basically run themselves - and it really shows how much we’ve progressed as a society that we’ve gone as far as letting this happen at all. Although, there are pitfalls, of course.

Back in the day when steam locomotives were first created, chaps such as Richard Trevithick and Robert Stephenson - household names now - wanted to experiment with how much these new iron horses could really do on their own… and it turned out that the answer was ‘not much’. They were a creation of humans, and were really dependent on them to do things - without going too deeply into a philosophical debate here, they essentially had no freedom. The driver and fireman fully controlled the engine, and engines were pretty poorly treated for this reason, just like horses were. They were there to do work.

Now, engines don’t usually mind this because they’re generally quite simple minded beings… I mean, if you look at the Railway Series, do any of the engines really get particularly complicated emotions? The most we saw was Gordon’s depression, but that’s because his own siblings were being cut up. The mindset of locomotives is pretty much just ‘enjoy the small stuff in life and be a good engine’. There were some engines who were exceptions, and sometimes it got quite scary for the humans when engines just spoke up with really deep thoughts.

“Driver?” “Yes?” “If engines are just here to do work for you, then what’s the point of everything that we enjoy? If it’s all for nothing?” “… Woah.”

It wasn’t all work work work though - drivers who ‘knew how to speak to engines’ were well regarded in the early railway companies, and given the job purely because they were good at making an engine happy. A happy engine means that more work gets done, and you also get a good reputation - the Great Western Railway was a brilliant example of this, with CME Daniel Gooch letting engines choose their own names and giving them just their names without numbers. It was when larger companies like BR came along that locomotive happiness just got thrown out of the window, and this is reflected in the mass scrapping of the 1960s which gave no regard to feelings of engines (i.e. they were often sold to private companies to be cut up as this was cheaper - these companies often cut corners by not taking the body off the frames before melting the engine down… basically meaning they were still conscious. Even some of the BR works did this to make it easier to melt down masses of engines quicker.)

Anyway, this is a VERY LONG side tangent. How does this relate to driverless trains? Well, when locomotive rights improved massively in most countries in the late 70s, engines still didn’t really have any freedom from crews because they literally couldn’t. So instead the UK Government made sure to make it a requirement that UK railways made tough choices in regard to drivers - only ones who respected engines could stay, and those who were abusive or ignorant were fired.

But as technology improved in the middle of the 20th Century, driverless trains became a real prospect. Following experiments where computer systems were tried in cabs on new build electric locos, it became clear that trains could literally drive themselves from place to place without the need for a driver and wow that is an odd concept for most people! Even with better locomotive rights, it is DIFFICULT to put so much trust in this sentient machine to do the job well - which is why most railways still don’t have driverless trains to this day, as well as it being really expensive to implement. The 1950s saw the first experimentation with this concept in France, where one of the metro lines became semi-automated. The other lines of the metro system followed in the late 1960s, along with Barcelona Metro’s own driverless system - a few London Underground lines went the same way at a similar time.

Since then, a small handful of railways around the world have tried it… and amazingly, it works. The engine is able to control their own speed, but the computer system is there to automatically override if they get too close to another train, and stop the train in question immediately. This has caused some problems in the past on the Singapore metro, when multiple trains were mysteriously stopped at random intervals, disrupting an entire city. There were some wild theories behind why this could be the case, but it turned out that one of the engines’ computer systems was acting up… and the rebellious engine didn’t say anything.

The UK mostly has trains with drivers, although there have been a couple of recent innovations that have forayed into driverless territory. The London Underground was planned to be fully automated at several points, but it has yet to happen (although as previously mentioned, a couple of lines are now automated).

However - despite all of this innovation - there has yet to be a widespread driverless train movement on main line railways. It was only in late 2021 that a train, moving by her own control, ran on a line shared by other traffic. This was in Germany, although the UK is also trying out a couple of similar options, with the trialling of ETRMS in areas such as West Wales.

The engines themselves, of course, are greatly intrigued by the concept - the closest that a steam locomotive has got to this sort of level is Tornado, who was fitted with an in-cab signalling system which is going to be trialled after she is back in steam. The hope is that NWR engines will also be trialled with this same system if it goes well on Tornado… the engines have mixed views on the subject, with some simply preferring a hand at their controls and finding it comforting.

Despite this, it is still a fascinating concept. Ask any diesel or electric engine about the concept of driverless trains, and they’ll be giddy with excitement to tell you all they know about it!