Its 2006. Electronics have gotten cheaper and easer to install.
If owners of freight cars are willing to spend upwards of 50,000 a railroad car
they should have eletrocnics on them that can tell things like when they need new brakes, Hotbox,when the the door is not working,when the car has been broken into. Tempurture,Mosture.GPS of were the car is and a elecrtronix record on read/write CD of maintance.
It should only be matter of time before Carmen and switchmen in railroad yards instead of switch sheets have a handheld computer and each “Smart” Railroad car tells the Conducter verbaly where its supposed to go and whet track
Considering how many computer glitches I encounter every day from our vendors at work, I sure wouldn’t see this as an improvement.[}:)]
Electronic devices may indeed have become cheaper and easier to install but they still won’t survive too well in the railroad environment. Consider that the EOT device is comparable to hanging your stereo on the rear coupler and you can see how much additional maintenance would be involved with these devices described above on every car.
TT,
A computer already builds the switch list, and some of us already have a palm pilot…but in the end, the ability to adjust what we do in a few second time, and the ability to make decisions based on our knowledge instead of following what the machine tells us, make all the difference in the world in how fast and efficient we built the trains.
No, there are no longer yard clerks that walk tracks and write down car numbers, then go to a office and hand write switch list…the AEI system and scanners does that on every train, several times a trip.
No computer can decide that the next car I am kicking to track 36 is a good cover car, nor can it decide to stash it in track 40 for a while, till we are through switching into track 36, then decide to pick up that car and go to track 36 to spot the track for ground air, there by saving several other steps in trying to put the required number of cover cars on that track.
As for the GPS stuff, well, there is a entire fleet of refrigerated cars out there with GPS, which tells the shipper how much fuel is in the car, what the temperature is inside the car, and its location.
For other applications, if the shipper wants to see “where” his car is, it’s a simple thing to throw a GPS device inside the car and track it on their own system.
As for the rest, trust me, unless you encase them in concrete or steel, not much of the electronic worlds stuff would survive over a few days inside a rail car, what with the actual abuse and such they go through.
Ed
I agree it’s about time for frt cars to get “smarter”. Lots of benfits for braking and defect detection. I’m not so sure you need it to “talk” to the conductor - unless he’s lonely.
Keeping track of the cars and maint. history is probably still best done off line. Data exchange thru Railinc takes car of most of those issues.
The big trick is power and communications. These issues are far from settled. And, with such a larger % of the fleet in private hands, it will be difficult to get done.
Smart Cars hum I’ve never herd of that before, I’ve heard of a Smart Board which is something that many classrooms in schools have as the latest and greatest projection device. Well, unfortunitly this device needs some improvement because, sometimes the screen will frezze up on you or it won’t project exactly what you have on the computer that it’s hooked up to. There are other times were it would say no signal. If the Smart Board is having all these problems I can only imagine how many problems a Smart Railroad Car would have. I do wonder that if technology such as this were to come about, would the railroads depend too heavily on it like cashiers depending on the cash register at the supermarket? This does not mean that this area of freight car technology can not be studied, and developed, who knows a system such as a Smart Car might work to train service crew’s advantage in some ways.
What is the point of spending all the money necessary to put hardware on the car? The transponder for the AEI system already provides car number and location. From that point, using data file links and appropriate logic, it is possible to have a record of everything that has to be known about the car. Where it has been, where it is going, what is inside and probably 50 other things that I could think of if I wanted to take the time.
Take this to the bank. If you are making your assumptions about railroad technology based on what you see when you are out looking at trains, you are going to be way off the mark. You get no more insight of the technology doing that than you would by looking at a computer keyboard and a blank monitor to gain knowledge of computer systems.
So, I guess we won’t be seeing “smart” scrap gondolas anytime soon?
We’ll need some smart hoboes to ride in smart boxcars!
Ed:
Perhaps you can answer this for me. Almost daily I hear a simliar conversation between the conductor and dispatcher on a major railroad.
The conductor will pass a detector and the axle count differs from what his manifest shows. Almost always his manifest is incorrect and the dispatcher will verbally give the car number, location, shipper, etc.
How does this happen? Is this a frequent problem or just to this one carrier?
Today, the dispatcher told the crew to stop the train until they could figure it out. And to top it off, it was a HAZMAT car (empty).
ed
Look at it from this point of view…
I am sure you have seen the Microsoft commercial where the 18 wheeler is stopped on the road, and the lady from the help desk tells the driver “the boxes told her they were lost”…?
All we do when switching cars is take them off of one shelf (track) and put them on another shelf (track) in a specific order.
Once we fill that shelf up, we put it on the truck (train)…
Now, for us, the truck (train) tells us where it is and when it went by a particular point, as do each of the boxes (cars) in the truck.
If the customer wants to know where his box is, all he has to do is go on line and ask the system, it already tracks the cars…as for maintenance issues, they are on a scheduled inspection system, and every time they enter a yard, the get looked over pretty well, including things a electronic device cant see of inspect…how will a chip tell me the A end side stirrup is damaged, or a hand rail rusted through at a weld?
There are things the human eye will see that no device would or could.
When you see a train out on the road, you don’t realize how many people have already inspected every part of it just hours ago, all you see are the cars going by…but when it enters our yard, it gets inspected by the car department, then the switchmen look it over again while they switch it, then the car men get another shot at it when they lace up the air hoses, and again when they do a initial terminal brake test and inspection, then a crew will give it a roll by some where along the line…
And the current computer tracking system is getting better all the time.
When I hired out 9 years ago, having a “lost car” or a stranger in a switch cut was common on every train…now, finding a stranger in the cut happens less and less, I didn’t find one all last week.
Ed
I heard something years ago (already) about the possibility of having an overheated wheel bearing transmit a radio alarm that would enable a crew to find it and set out the offending car as soon as possible after the bearing went critical. This is one area where cars could possibly benefit from becoming smarter.
As for the business of a car telling us where it would like to go, I can’t wait long enough for something like that. How would we do it? A cut of cars comes up to the top of the hump…as each car gets to the crest it “announces” its destination. Right there you lose all options for advance planning–determining whether all of the cars for a certain destination will fit in their track, or even knowing how many cars to tell the pinpuller to turn loose. No, I’ll take a printed list over something like that any day.
The paperwork will just pile up higher and higher.
I recall in the early days we needed about 4 hours with 4 people to find, verify and match each of the roughly 5600 packages of McCormic Spices by both barcode and by UPC number in a trailer load.
In today’s smart boxcar you will still have to find a way to transfer the information faster, without errors and cheaper with the goal of keeping the freight moving. Anything such as damage claims will throw a wrench into the works.
And finally you might not have a well paid dock worker who actually has the training or the care to do the smart boxcar’s systems properly.
Until then containers seem to be the best way to move freight. Count, pack, palletize and load it one time into a box. Enter the box’s data into the system and send it on it’s way. It does not have to be opened again until it arrives at the customer who SHOULD have all the data needed to handle the cargo.
So my verdict is any additional “Bling” is just a liability in a regular boxcar or trailer.
That usually happens because a switchman or hump operator puts a car to the wrong track when building the train. It could also be a yardmaster giving wrong instructions or a clerk entering bad information into the computer. A train crew could pick up the wrong track or take too many cars out of a track. It’s a fairly frequent problem on CSX.
Then the trainmaster needs to talk to the crew that builds the train…I would bet they kicked a car to the wrong track, and were too lazy to go get it and put it where it needed to be.
It happens to all of us, myself included, but because my railroad is a switching and terminal road, we take pride in building the train right, so any mistake is corrected…it is a matter of pride for us.
In a flat yard, it isn’t too hard to fix that, but in a hump yard, it requires the trim crew to dig the car out.
Ed
There are many many things an electronic sensor will pick up that no human eye ever could. That is why we use them everywhere.
I read in other posts that electronics wouldn’t stand up to use in the RR. That is a crock of crap…sensor technology is being used everywhere…in the corrosive salt water oceans, in cold cold (outer) space, oil fields, farmers fields, automobiles, airplanes, computers, printers, manufcturing, …etc. Heck tractor-trailor trucks have sensors inside the axel units to monitor ring-gear and bearing tempertures, and helicopter transmissions have “loose partical” detectors. Don’t kid yourself.
As for tracking purposes…I don’t know enough about it to comment.
I don’t doubt that it’s possible. I question the economics and dendability.
As a matter of information for you, the later generations of railroad locomotives have been equiped with all sorts of sensors and processors, just like trucks. The railroads are not afraid of using technology for practical-read that cost saving- applications. However, the about the only practical benefit of hanging more bling on freight cars would be the prospect of getting a nice story in “Popular Mechanics”.
Here’s the rub with lineside hotbox detectors -
A roller bearing can go from cool and servicable to a burn off in two or three miles. HBDs are typically spaced 10 to 20 miles apart. RRs play all sorts of games trying to fine tune the detectors to maximize protection and minimize false positives. They’re also trying out acoustic detectors to “hear” bearing defects before they become hot boxes. Onboard temperature and vibration sensing make the whole game simple and reliable.
If you install ECP braking and find a way and agree on a method to power it and do a “virtual trainline”, then all the detection hardware only has to justify itself on an incremental cost basis. ECP with wheel slide protection can justify itself in reduced stopping distances, which will increase safety and line capactiy. If you can increase effecitve braking ratios on frt cars from 10% to 20%, you can reduce stopping distances by half, which, at the very least, would double restricting speed (track conditions permitting), and increase line capacity.
I knew that… I thought we were talking about freight cars?