A lot of cargos cube out before they weigh out. In Scandinavia, our gross vehicle weight limit is about 70 English tons, so there is allowance for some battery weight.

Swiffer dusters will cube out. Clothing to H&M will cube out. Most package express will cube out. IKEA will cube out. Distribution from our regional grocery warehouse to the local stores will cube out. I have seen the pallet packing.

https://www.trafikdage.dk/papers_2018/Praesentationer/HelenaKyster-Hansen.pdf

Yes there are some things that will cube before they weigh out. However most fresh produce fresh meats cheese and many other things will weigh out before your close to cubing out. Plus there are plenty of goods that pay per hundred weight hauled. No carrier is going to willingly order anything that is heavier than their rivals are. The name of the game is weight savings. They literally are willing to buy lighter weight equipment to make more money within reasonable costs. If you can carry a ton more than your competitors your going to make more money. There is a company named Dart in the USA that literally saved it's company by coming up with a set of specs that allow it to carry more weight than its competitors. They can carry 10 truckloads of goods on just 9 loads with their entire fleet. That gives them one heck of an advantage when compared to say JB Hunt that is all container based for talking about rates. JB has to offer a volume discount while Dart can offer a higher rate but less overall cost due to less moves required. So say your a maker of unexpanded Styrofoam pellets and your choices are JB Hunt or Dart. Now Dart will cost you more per truckload but can move the same amount of pellets in 20% fewer movements than JB does and JB Hunt is wanting to charge you just 10% less than Dart does. Which one would save you money.

At least until you add in the fuel cost savings.

No doubt out of date by now, but I recall that a Tesla could go 100 miles on $2 of electricity. How many decades has it been since a I.C. car could do that?

A lot of these posts are like the pony express rider shaking his fist at the telegraph line, every technological advance results in problems for the technology it replaced.

At 40 tons in weight fuel savings from a lighter load are minimal. If you're weighing the same amount as the other truck is you're both getting about the same mpg. The biggest savings come in idle time reduction. Instead of using the main engine at 1gph. Put a little apu on the truck at .1 gph. So Instead of 35 bucks to stay warm or cold it was 3.50. Do that over an average OTR year of 300 nights and you're saving about 9 grand a year in fuel per truck.

Unless one fuel is diesel, and the other is electricity at 1/3 the mile per mile cost.

Dagnabit!

I just saw this posted on LinkedIN - Progress Rail /EMD 's new "Joule" battery locomotive line.

https://youtu.be/Ib7tn_x5BnQ

https://www.progressrail.com/en/Segments/RollingStock/Locomotives/FreightLocomotives/EMDJoule.html

As you say, total cost rules. When I was making railroad tariffs for New Hope & Ivyland RR and Tyburn RR, I had to keep that in mind to get any business from Dart and JB Hunt into my heavy steel freight cars. Of course, those truckers could make more money than my railroad did by charging more than my rate, and I had to cut mine to get the business, but there would be no profit at all to help pay my wages if the business went to the trucks!
As a railroad, I had some advantages to offer over the truckers that could bring my potential customers' total costs down.
I got a farmer's fertilizer business away from over the road truckers with lightweight aluminum trailers and truckload rates for about 25 tons per trip. Their rates may have included the interest on the loans to buy those trailers. My track gang had an old heavy steel end dump trailer that they used to bring ballast from local quarries. I filed a Less than Car Load tariff per hundredweight including Delivery (and a Division Sheet with the connecting railroads) that had a minimum charge per shipment of 95% of the rail car's load limit. A minimum charge per delivery didn't apply if the customer ordered more and the railroad loaded less. Sure, it took me 5 trips (at about 20 tons) to deliver what the truckers could do in 4, but my employer was making money and the farmer was paying less!

That's the same project and product referred to the link I posted a couple pages ago, but for it's specific installation in Australia rather than an open advertisement. Doesn't anybody read linked relevant information or does it interfere with the arguments about technology from trucks and Teslas being wrong for the adaptation to rail use too much?

Oklahoma Railway Museum is saving an early hydrogen-powered unit, not sure it is the donation I would have requested from BNSF: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... ay-museum/

That unit has tremendous historical significance, both in its first conversion fo a 'Green Goat", and in its second use for fuel-cell demonstration. I applaud BNSF for donating it, and Oklahoma for taking it.

But I do NOT like the implications of their intending to 'convert it into a shoving platform' if that involves removing any of the existing 'historic fabric' of the modifications, or modifying what's there just to have a cab at the far end of one of their consists...

Germany is opting for battery-power over hydrogen: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... in-future/

Keep in mind that you're likely seeing a number of things conflated into one.

For services within the capability of battery-electric cars, the operating economics are much the same as for other types of BEV. Hydrogen fuel-cell is an adjunct to battery-electric in the first place; the lion's share of carrier-hydrogen cost is in the sup-ply infrastructure, which always tacitly involved synergistic leverage of that fuel across a range of zero-carbon needs including area or space heating or additional transportation take rate. What I think you're seeing is an admission that the vaunted method (and it was, in my opinion, a very well-thought-out approach) used by the government to supply the hydrogen for the iLING and similar equipment is not turning out to be sustainable at even government levels of 'cost-effectiveness'. This is particularly interesting as Germany has shot itself in the foot regarding reliable growth in grid electricity.

The situation, again in my opinion, is precisely parallel for attempts to build "hydrogen" road locomotives. Much of the investment-banking support for early adoption seems to think that the options are battery-electric vs. hydrogen fuel-cell -- they're going to lose their shirts. What's going to work -- and it's the only alternative that actually promises to work in a real-world zero-carbon railroad environment -- is reasonable hydrogen (fuel-cell, not combustion) supplementation and hybrid parallel power over a capable traction-battery architecture like the FLXdrive. That has all the cost of the stable fuel infrastructure, much of the cost of a pure battery-electric locomotive, and all the cost and maintenance of the fuel storage and fuel-cell equipment. But if we do go directly to zero-carbon (instead of, say, zero-net-carbon with B100 biodiesel, which is an immediate and near-perfect bridge to hybrid power) there is no practical alternative that doesn't involve a great deal of prospective pain and shortcomings sooner, rather than later, into the likely future...

I apologize in advance that this is the stuff of future, not present, preservation.

Food for thought: I think hydrogen may be the way to go looking far into the future. A current problem with hydrogen from a green standpoint is that it’s mostly produced using high carbon energy i.e. methane and coal. Once production with low or no carbon sources becomes practical, scalable and profitable, I’d think we’d see much more hydrogen used outside of heavy industry.