NEW YORK — RailPulse, the joint venture aiming to provide shippers with real-time, precise freight car location no matter where the car is in North America, will expand its pilot program to more than 1,000 cars early next year.
The pilot program began in April with just over 300 cars equipped with GPS sensors that can monitor a car’s location as well as telematics showing whether it’s loaded or empty, its doors or hatches are open or closed, if handbrakes are applied, and whether the car has been involved in a high-impact event that could damage its cargo.
“Our objective is to prove the technology works, not as individual pieces but as a consolidated system on the railcar – because we know that if that technology does not deliver in a reliable way it won’t be used. And if it’s not used we will never get the benefits,” RailPulse General Manager David Shannon told the RailTrends conference this week.
By February more than 700 cars from all of the RailPulse partners — Class I railroads Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific; shortline holding companies Genesee & Wyoming, Watco, and Railroad Development Corp.; railcar leaser GATX; and railcar manufacturers and leasing companies Greenbrier and TrinityRail — will be added to the test program.
The plan is to fully roll out the service sometime in the second half of 2023, including the online portal that will allow users to see all of their cars in one place.
“Merchandise business in the U.S. is declining. We thought this was really one of the things that needs to happen to stem that decline and ultimately reverse it,” says Norfolk Southern Chief Strategy Officer Michael McClellan, who spearheaded the coalition behind RailPulse.
RailPulse aims to improve on the current AEI system of tracking railcars and become the first industrywide solution to put car information at shippers’ fingertips in one online location.
Eric Monger, vice president of KBX Rail, the logistics arm of the Koch Industries conglomerate, says KBX ships more than 180,000 carloads annually of everything from lumber and toilet paper to diesel fuel and anhydrous ammonia and relies on 177 railroads in North America.
KBX’s young new freight schedulers get a crash course in Railroad 101, he says, and can’t believe that rail’s current visibility systems show where cars were, not where they are, with data that’s four to 12 hours old. “Now you tell a 22-year-old — who can literally access anything they want to know on their phone at any time — that they have to wait 12 hours for anything and they get this look on their face like, ‘What did I get myself into?’” Monger says.
Truckers provide shippers with real-time visibility. The railcar location messages shippers currently receive are at least four hours old and don’t pinpoint a car’s precise location. “If rail is really going to compete in the 21st century … we have got to move and we’ve got to move faster,” Monger says.
Monger is looking forward to using RailPulse data that monitors a car’s health. When cars are spotted but have defects, KBX can’t load them, must change its plans, and has to call in a crew to repair the car. RailPulse data will allow defects to be spotted sooner so that cars can be sent to a shop, where they can be repaired before arriving on a spur.
Another benefit of car health data, Monger says, is determining what caused a hazardous materials release in transit. Currently the assumption is that the shipper did something wrong until it can provide data that it was not responsible. Sensor data will make that possible, he says.
Railroads will benefit from location and health data, too, says Josh Perkes, vice president of Union Pacific’s LOUP Logistics subsidiary.
The GPS data will let railroads know where a car is in a yard — and whether it’s on the correct track. It also will give yardmasters and crews a real-time and accurate view of how much room is left on yard tracks.
The car health data, meanwhile, will let the railroad know if handbrakes are released. If not, crews can then release the brakes before the car departs the yard, avoiding a mainline disruption down the road when the car trips a hotbox detector.
“From a rail perspective, there’s so many benefits that we see just from having better sensor data, better telematics data,” Perkes says.
RailTrends is sponsored by trade publication Progressive Railroading and independent analyst Anthony B. Hatch.
RailPulse’s biggest obstacle will be who maintains the sensors?
When a door open sensor is frozen in winter? A professional thief inserts a widget to fool the sensor that the door is closed, when in fact is open and being emptied.
I am all for rail based telemetry and it can add a large amount of value to the rail shipment industry, but the rail entities don’t show a lot of love for anything that tries to provide more details on their operations.
Many NASA and USAF rockets malfunctioned in the late 1980’s as they transferred from analog controls to digital controls using sensors. How many railfans just love modern rail power with digital controls?
The point is that RailPulse needs to be prepared for sensor abuse, non-functioning ones, and ones that impact the safe operation of a consist. If the railroads find they provide more interference than value, they will disappear.
If they can use the telemetry to optimize movements in the system (what a concept) they will most definitely find a new tool in the competition with trucks.