I ran across this article today about how the UP is using various types of Internet and cellphone technology to monitor the condition of train components and hopefully predict failures before they happen. Does anyone have any first-hand comments about this?
The concept of monitoring operating parameters of equipment such as temperatures, vibration levels, oil samplings, etc to predict when failures will occur is not new. The power generation inustry, the chemical industry, and industries that use rotating machineey have been doing this for many years. What is new is the use of the internet and cell phones to transmit and acquire the data.