Here is an interesting take on the Ohio train wreck. A hot box seems to have been the cause, and the question now is whether the sensors were being managed correctly, or if there were even enough of them, or enough people to read them and act on the results.
I’m sure we will find out what the real situation was after a while. But legislators are starting to formulate bills in congress that might mandate some standards that would be expensive for rail lines.
Views differ. We’ll see how it all plays out. But Rachel Premack lays it all out in clear words below.
Here’s an innovation that’s going to be popular at container terminals. It’s a fixed set of frames allowing containers to be stacked in individual pigeonholes. They’re placed and removed by stacker cranes running through the aisles. The system has been in development and testing since 2018.
Hardware innovations take a long time to develop, and they require a place for testing. The partnership of DP World and SMS Group, a German firm, combined the expertise and the need and test bed to create the product.
Stacking density may be improved up to 4 times using the Boxbay system.
This is not a new idea. Auto manufacturers and shippers have been using such arrays to store cars since the 90’s. I was shown a picture of one in Japan by Ernest Konigsberg, a Berkeley operations research professor who was familiar with the design and the optimizing software written to decide which locations to place vehicles. We would call it AI today, but then it was simply optimization software. It’s been around a long time.
An interesting question is why this technology is only emerging now. One answer is the Great Congestion about the time of the COVID epidemic. Yard storage was a significant problem during the supply chain crisis. This kind of system can improve the utilization of scarce container yard land. It’s a natural type of tech to invest in.
I’m sure we will see more such systems if container shipping demand comes back and exceeds the congestion period levels. But if ports aren’t handling so many containers, they may not be so eager to invest in this technology. I don’t see the large US ports jumping on this so soon, with traffic falling.
The article has a nice picture of Pusan Newport terminal, and judging by the stacking disarray in the right part of the picture, they can use this system1
When there’s a big train wreck, things are handled differently in Greece. Transport minister Kostas Karamanlis has resigned as a result of this wreck.
It’s different in the US. Here the large railroads have a lot of influence with government regulators. When someone like Pete Buttigieg comes in who is willing to put people and safety first and big rails second, we don’t want him to resign because of the Ohio accident. He’s the one pressuring the investigators to find out the answers.
Another key difference is that in Greece, the accident involved a passenger train and a freight train colliding. Apparently human error is involved. And rail in Greece is government-owned; the Hellenic Railways Organization (denoted OSE because of its Greek language name) owns, maintains, and operates all railway infrastructure in Greece except for Athens’ rapid transit lines.
So it’s not the same at all. Buttigieg, the US Transportation Secretary, does not have anything to do with day to day operation of rail lines. He can at most insure that government regulators and investigators do their research carefully and establish if any rules were violated or need to be changed to prevent this kind of accident.
The short history of the accident compiled by the BBC below details the tragedy.
Supply Chain and Logistics 