this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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You calling railroad tycoon a liar?? gasp!
So, I've been thinking about this. Remotely controlling the trains should actually be quite viable. Maybe not from Home via the Internet, that's a whole level of security complications worrying about hackers. But a closed network over fibre running along existing track lines? Why not?
The question becomes "how much of an advantage is this over on-board drivers?" It'd be fairly expensive to set up, and there certainly would be some advantages (like instantly swapping drivers, drivers instantly swapping trains etc), but enough to justify the cost of setting it up? Probably not.
You really need to design the network to support driverless trains. The upgrades to support it on an existing network are almost prohibitively expensive Sydney’s “metro” line from Hills to North Sydney (and being extended to Bankstown) uses driverless trains, but the entire line was built relatively recently.
Drivers are a small proportion of the total staff anyway. There are still station staff, signalling staff, infrastructure maintenance staff, cleaners, security staff… You can’t exactly clean a train, wash down a platform, help a person in a wheelchair off a train, and so on, from home.