Is it currently possible for railroad customers to track their shipments in real time?
Plenty of cars have GPS trackers on them (either permanent or sometimes temp.), so yeah. Common practice, I would say.
Some customers have multifunction GPS units afixed to their shipments, reporting not only GPS data but various forms of impact data - vertical and horizontal.
I’d say yes and no. The technology is there. I learned a lot from a thread where I asked about something similar. Our railcars would be spotted after dark but BNSF’s website in the morning would still show them being 40 miles up the pike. Turns out, that the website only updated once a day. I’m assuming that if we were a big shipper or receiver, there would be a different arrangement and we could probably get real time info. That probably cost more than what we pay for our free information.
You coupld probably get your loader to slap a magnetic one on your car if you wanted real time tracking (and paid for it).
Not all data that Carriers make available to their customers are ‘real time’. Even ‘real time’ is not really ‘real time’ as most reports on any data base are done on a ‘periodic basis’.
FedEx and UPS come close to real time, but even they have ‘periodic delay’ built in to their reporting systems. ‘Arrived Facility’ ‘Departed Facility’ ‘Loaded on truck for delivery’ ‘Delivered’. I am signed up to get e-mail notifications on my shipments - actions can only be reported AFTER they have happened, thus they are always after the action has happened. It would be nice of UPS and FedEx could give the expected time of delivery within a 30 minute window (I know I am dreaming). FedE
Tracking is pretty comon with the trucking industry…Satelight receivers on highway equipment get a company almost instabeous communications with the driver…Some providers ue\sed to have a telephine circuit in their equipment, and these days at the very least the driver is able to access a keyboard.
‘Unteathered’ tracking is available, to those company’s who need to track trainer/cargo in real time. Info to a ‘shiper/receiver’ can be a negotiable cost item, if desired(?). Schneider seems to have a lot of their IM cans equipped with monitoring gear ( an exterior piece, high up, on the front.) More and more, JBH cans seem similarly eauipped, and reefers, in particular- for obvious reasons.
AS merntioned by other posters, sensors are available for en-route damage reporting, temperature control, some even are equiped to show if doors are opened. Whatever is needed is probably available, at cost$$$, of course.
We track ours via smartphone GPS IntelliTrans… real time and accurate. Of course, if the phone is not anywhere near the load then all bets are off. But there are still some customers who don’t need or want tracking… “just make the load appear at my dock when I want it”…
I have received a tracking e-mail that a package had been delivered before the truck driver got off the porch!
What bothers me about the tracking reports is that they often only give the location they just “Departed”… but you have no idea what its new “Destination” is. I have watched packages tour most of the country, hoping that the when the package “Departed” some place its destination is my city, only to find the next day that it just departed some city in a state that is further from me than the previouos city, or it passed over my city to some State on the other side. The last package I ordered went from Keasbey, NJ to Dandridge, TN
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BaltACD
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FedEx and UPS come close to real time, but even they have ‘periodic delay’ built in to their reporting systems. ‘Arrived Facility’ ‘Departed Facility’ ‘Loaded on truck for delivery’ ‘Delivered’. I am signed up to get e-mail notifications on my shipments - actions can only be reported AFTER they have happened, thus they are always after the action has happened. It would be nice of UPS and FedEx could give the expected time of delivery within a 30 minute window (I know I am dreaming). FedEx and UPS shipment tracking far exceeds the reportings that the railroads make available to their customers.
I have received a tracking e-mail that a package had been delivered before the truck driver got off the porch!
What bothers me about the tracking reports is that they often only give the location they just “Departed”… but you have no idea what its new “Destination” is. I have watched packages tour most of the country, hoping that the when the package “Departed” some place its destination is my city, only to find the next day that it just departed some city in a state that is further from me than the previouos city, or it passed over my city to some State on the other side. The last package I ordered went from Keasbey, NJ to Dandridge, TN
OmniTracs was Qualcom’s cash cow in their early years, before they started making big bucks in the cell phone biz.