In freight traffic, the railways are not in the 21st century, rather they are stuck in the 19th century. The trains are coupled as in the days of the Kaiser, and that is hard work: shunting workers have to place the 20-kilogram bracket of one wagon on the hook of the next wagon, tighten the coupling by turning a screw thread and also connect the air line for the brakes. This happens around 70,000 times a day at the freight yards in Germany alone, and around 400,000 times throughout Europe. The screw coupling is not only very physically demanding, it also takes a lot of time. The brake test alone takes around an hour. A train cannot start for that long.
Industry and politics agree that this is absurd in times of digitization. The new Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing (FDP), speaks of a “grievance that has lasted for more than 70 years” and of an “urgently needed transformation that will not tolerate another day’s delay”. Because the old system ultimately costs money and – even worse: It endangers environmental goals, fears in Berlin. Deutsche Bahn plays a leading role for the government coalition in the fight once morest climate change. Not only should the number of passengers in passenger transport rise sharply by 2030, but also the share of rail freight transport in the so-called “modal split”. With the tried and tested clutch, however, the extremely ambitious goal of increasing this rate from the current 19 to 30 percent at the expense of the truck is considered hardly achievable.
DAK should fix it now. In the healthcare sector, this is a health insurance company, in the railway world the abbreviation stands for “Digital Automatic Coupling”. The DAC automatically connects freight wagons with each other. It establishes a mechanical connection between the wagons without the need for a human being to do it. At the same time, it couples the air line for the brake and a power and data bus line to one another. In correspondingly automated shunting operations, capacity is to be increased by up to 40 percent, process costs are reduced and longer, heavier and faster freight trains are possible, adapted to the modern ETCS signaling system.
An automatic coupling couples two freight trains together in Berlin before a test run through Europe.
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Image: dpa
An alliance of associations makes it clear to anyone who still thinks this is only a topic for rail specialists: a real revolution in freight transport is at stake. In an unpublished joint statement available to the FAZ, Deutsche Bahn (DB), the railway industry association VDB, the transport company association VDV and the freight wagon owner association VPI emphasize one thing in particular: “The DAK is more than a clutch.” It is the “digital one Backbone of the intelligent, emission-free logistics of the future”, the basis of the digital freight train. Among other things, this means that you can do everything that makes digitization so attractive via data evaluation – such as monitoring the load in real time or predictive maintenance.