As a risk to the employment of current train drivers, automation of rail vehicles is not a medium term threat. As others on this thread have said the most you have to worry about is an ‘attended ATO’ type system with ERTMS. There are currently no firm plans to go beyond this and even on Metros, full unattended automatic operation (GOA4) is only being investigated and is not committed on that kind of time scale.
However, automation of their own vehicles could end up being the least of a railway workers worries late next decade. The key threat is from fully Autonomous Road Vehicles (ARVs) that don't require a driver in attendance or anyone else on board.
Development of these is continuing apace, mainly in the US, where the interests of the workers likely to be displaced carries less weight. For sure, they are not ready yet. Significant problems remain to be worked through, such as the avoidance of ‘over caution’ and the ability to deal with adverse weather such as heavy rain, ice and snow. Sceptics tend to portray these issues as insurmountable or point to red herrings as show stoppers, such as choosing who to hit in an accident; anyone who believes a human driver ever gets this choice in the split second before a crash has never had an accident.
In reality the efforts to overcome these issues are very well funded and employing many hundreds of researchers and are making good progress. Regulatory models that deal with safety and liability are being established and these will end up serving as models for the rest of the world. If I had to guess fully unattended vehicles are four to seven years from wide spread roll out in the US. Be in no doubt though, when unattended ARVs are rolled out in the US, others, including the UK won’t want to be too far behind.
The UK rail industry in so far as it has thought about the question, hopes that ARVs will increase customer numbers by offering faster and cheaper feeder services. I think this rosy scenario is unlikely. The good news is that rail will continue to have advantages of capacity (mass transit in major conurbations) and speed (long distance intercity). The bad news is that many UK rural and cross country rail routes do not have either advantage. Rail freight also stands to suffer as its main competitor gets rid of much of its labour cost.
A salutary illustration of what might happen can be found in my copy of an edition of the US magazine ‘National Geographic’ from the mid-1950s. It has an article that runs to 30+ pages about the state of US Railroad passenger network and services. It show cases in detail rapidly improving technology (diesel and electric), quality and speed. At the time, the US network was a dense network of frequent passenger routes enjoying its heyday. They carried everyone from the ‘great and the good’ down. Many trains ran in two or three portions, such was the demand. Within two decades of the article, all that remained was the state run and heavily subsidised and much reduced relic of this network – Amtrak – at its low point. Once grand stations in big and medium sized cities were derelict. I can remember boarding a train in the US in a station that had 10 platforms, almost all abandoned bar one for the six trains a week that remained. The network was swept away by the arrival of air travel, which grew in those twenty years from a niche for the really rich, to the point where it was much quicker and cheaper than rail and available to the masses. At least the US Railroads had growing long distance freight to fall back on.
The impact of ARVs on employment in our industry will depend on the speed of take up during the ‘mixed’ phase with both automatically and manually driven cars. Economics suggest a move away from the ‘everyone owns one’ model of cars towards the ride hailing (Uber like) model. Ironically Tesla-like hybrid automatic and manually driven vehicles are a doomed attempt at hanging onto the 'everyone owns one' model.
Today’s cars are so poorly utilised, that all road journeys could be catered for with a small fraction of the total number of vehicles ‘on the road’ today. Today, even at the height of the commuter peak, residential streets are full of parked cars. Take away the high cost of so many vehicles and the cost of a taxi driver and a taxi ride will cost no more than journeys we make in our own cars now and possibly less. Regulators allowing slow speed automatic operation first means that it is a slower speeds in urban areas that ARVs will come to dominate first (very bad news if you are a taxi driver). Railways however are in the unfortunate position of relying on some of the people for whom ARVs are ideal for much of our passenger traffic such as students and young people who can’t afford the insurance, older people who can’t drive or who have lost confidence in driving. ARVs offer this latter group, guaranteed interchange free journeys with any departure time they want, with plenty of space for luggage.
I am a rail enthusiast who has enjoyed working in the rail industry for two decades and hope that it will be able to carry on paying me and providing for my children as long as I need it. My guess is that train drivers could be some of the last workers to actually manually drive - as opposed to simply attending and operate an automatically driven. Sadly, I suspect that sometime as soon as 2030, we will see passenger numbers slump on secondary routes and pressure to convert these into ‘ARV’ only roads...
Sorry to go on a bit - hope it isn't too tedious...