Rail vs Road Transport

It was a two hour drive from Brisbane to Warwick where I live. Plenty of time to ponder whether loose coupling of the road interface vs tight coupling of rail interface accounts for the large number of trucks I see on the road. The Australasian Rail Association writes

Australia has the highest volume of road freight carried per capita in the world

For trucks, cars, bikes to run on roads, the approach seems pretty straightforward, the road can supply friction as long as the wheel is in contact with it. With rail, there is the added requirement that dimensions of the carriages match the rail gauge. It surprised me that one extra coupling would have such a big impact on transport economics, perhaps there were other factors at work.

I then came across this news article on The Australian, which sought to explain the hurdles faced by rail transport.

To summarize its main points:

1. Size of rail gauge in NSW was 1435mm and Victoria was 1600mm (up until 1962)
2. trucks got bigger, and roads got better, but rail tracks were expensive to upgrade. [It was all or nothing]
3. rail tracks under a mix of private and public ownership
4. government policy of neglect towards rail network. [The rail network was inefficient. Australia was heavily unionized. Truckies were like small-business owners, they worked for themselves.]
5. 445 km of single track rail between Junee and Melbourne, causing great inefficiency
6. spending on roads subsidized by other users [car owners, who are also voters]

In the context of web-services, I query whether the introduction of the WS-* stack will turn into the railroad nightmare of the next century, when we struggle with interoperability problems due to the mismatch between different combinations of WS profiles in used by different organisations. Whether the presence of the unified stacks sets the barrier of entry so high that it becomes non-competitive.

Annrai O’Toole of Cape Clear said “the information bus runs on a dirt road.” I’d like to see the dirt road being preserved, so that innovation of trucks and road design can be decoupled. Also read David Isenberg’s “Rise of the Stupid Network“.

There are a lot of smart people who are trying to bake this dirt road into a highspeed rail track, like Eric Newcomer who wants transactions¹. It’s not that I don’t like fast things, but let’s not forget the steam train was pretty cool when it first came out. The rail networks just needs too many pieces together before it worked.

¹I’m not sure how well this is going to go down between different organisations. I curious to know why customers prefer WS-transactions over Corba in this case?