Many of us think nothing of boarding a driverless transit service at an airport or taking a short hop on an automated metro system.
Both are examples of what innovation has made possible on the world’s railways, and how adaptable technology must be to cater for such varied uses and contexts.
On the other side of the world in Brazil, the fully automated Line 4 of the Sao Paulo metro system carries a human cargo – sometimes as many as 800,000 people a day – along an 11km route through one of the most populous cities on the planet.
In the remote Pilbara region of north-western Australia, a heavy-haul locomotive sweeps across the plains, its 240 wagons stretching two and a half kilometres behind it towards the horizon. Laden with iron ore, the driverless train is making the 300km journey from mines inland to a port on the Indian Ocean, while a team of controllers from the mining giant Rio Tinto monitors its progress from a control centre in Perth, 1,500km away.
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