With all the recent research effort for self-driving cars, I wonder if there are also projects for self-driving rail cars that could cover the "last miles" to the destination without being part of a train. Of course, one problem is that in the last decades, most companies that might benefit from something like this were built on sites without rail connection...
Self driving trains have been in real world use for more than 20 years. What makes them easy compared to cars is with rail you just put a fence around the track and there is nothing else to hit so you don't need complex sensors to avoid killing people (more likely you put the tracks in a tunnel or elevated). Of course that gets into why we don't do this to individual houses - either the fences trap everybody in their own house (maybe they can visit a neighbor or 3, but not the whole neighborhood) or the costs to build it is extremely high.
Roads are dangerous, but also a lot more flexible than rail and so better for low volume use.
Like with roads rail requires a lot of maintenance if you put the heavy load on it. Having to shut down the transport periodically isn't good for business.
Perhaps with containers on rollers it is possible to replace one without shutting everything down. Kinda interesting puzzle, the rollers should fit in the containers. A telescope would make them to weak, picking up the old roller, rotating 90 degrees, bringing the new one, rotate 90 degrees, drop it in place.
