**1. Introduction**

For decades, freight rail has been vital to growth in countries around the world. This development took place despite the fact that freight takes significant manual labour for handling and checking the wagon subsystem. The manual labour is spent mostly during train formation as well as on the first and last mile.

While in the original applications of rail freight, mostly the efficient transport of mass goods such as coal and ore, these inefficiencies were outweighed by the energy efficiency of rail freight, such goods are set to decrease due to decarbonisation and the circular economy. Instead, shipments are getting increasingly individualized and require more timely and efficient handling. **Figure 1** shows the development of lifted goods in the UK, with the decline in fossil fuels and raw materials clearly visible.

The wagon subsystem differs from most vehicle types in the railway system in that it is in many cases optimised to provide low investments, with wagon prices ranging from 50.000 € to 140.000 € [1]. For this reason, little to no advanced technology is supplied with the wagon, such as monitoring or actuation. Telematics systems are considered feasible and economic, despite providing only limited assistance in the handling of the rail freight system [2].

While low investment in the wagon subsystem leads to very economic freight rail operation for the original mass goods, it leads to higher costs when handling highvalue, comparatively light goods to individual sites.

#### **Figure 1.**

*Freight moved in the UK (financial year) [3].*

The costs occur mainly due to


Further, this leads to a high requirement of track capacity for serving sidings, mostly due to the fact that the little advanced wagon subsystem cannot be operated safely together with passenger services within their schedule due to these timeconsuming activities.

The Wagon 4.0 concept [4, 5] was conceived aiming to provide solutions to these challenges while at the same time yielding a sufficiently high return to justify the inevitable cost increase. This is mainly achieved by adding automation and assistance systems to replace manual activities.
