  The Lieb-Robinson bound implies that the unitary time evolution of an
operator can be restricted to an effective light cone for any Hamiltonian with
short-range interactions. Here we present a very efficient renormalization
group algorithm based on this light cone structure to study the time evolution
of prepared initial states in the thermodynamic limit in one-dimensional
quantum systems. The algorithm does not require translational invariance and
allows for an easy implementation of local conservation laws. We use the
algorithm to investigate the relaxation dynamics of double occupancies in
fermionic Hubbard models as well as a possible thermalization. For the
integrable Hubbard model we find a pure power-law decay of the number of doubly
occupied sites towards the value in the long-time limit while the decay becomes
exponential when adding a nearest neighbor interaction. In accordance with the
eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, the long-time limit is reasonably well
described by a thermal average. We point out though that such a description
naturally requires the use of negative temperatures. Finally, we study a
doublon impurity in a N\'eel background and find that the excess charge and
spin spread at different velocities, providing an example of spin-charge
separation in a highly excited state.
