A pair of technology companies have teamed up to provide rail shippers with a broader look at the status of freight cars as they make their way from origin to destination, all while generating alerts about actual and potential delays.
Telegraph provides a full suite of tools that allow shippers to price, book, trace, and track the status of their cars in real time. RailState operates a trackside camera network that monitors main lines across North America and can provide high-resolution images of cars en route.
This gives shippers an independent lens for spotting network anomalies, such as delays, congestion, or unexpected routing behaviors, the companies said in a Tuesday announcement. When this layer of visual awareness from RailState’s network is integrated with Telegraph’s telematics and machine learning, it creates a multi-dimensional operational picture.
The result is a system that doesn’t just react to issues as they occur, but anticipates them, the companies say.
“When we speak with some of the largest rail shippers in North America, we continue to hear of friction with the four D’s — delays, dwell, demurrage, and disputes,” Telegraph CEO Harris Ligon said in a statement. “With RailState, we’ve found a team that also believes in returning real value back to the rail ecosystem. We believe this integration will further our goal of offering more tools and insights to shippers, by tackling the opaqueness often associated with shipping by rail, and eliminating some of the back-and-forth between rail carriers and shippers.”
“The rail industry has been limited by data that only shows where individual shipments are, not the network conditions that determine where they’re going, and when they’ll actually arrive,” RailState CEO Jamie Heller said. “Working with Telegraph changes that fundamentally. We’re providing customers with network-enriched intelligence that reveals the hidden factors affecting their shipments — the congestion building three states away, the velocity changes indicating emerging bottlenecks, or the volume patterns that predict capacity constraints before they impact operations.”
Just as electric utilities decline to report outages attributable to their own poor maintenance so do railroads avoid acknowledging service delays that result from self-inflicted congestion. It’s worth noting that money can be made monitoring private enterprise.
This could have been done 25 years ago, the technology existed even back then. But it takes a third party to actually spend the dough to develop it. This is where I think the AAR falls down. It took the USG to pass a law to get PTC in place and now another company is placing the tools needed to improve flows, but it had to come from the shipping side, not the railroad side.
Just you wait, when the data comes out, the AAR will be all over it complaining about accuracy.
I hope the railroads get the same come uppance the music industry got in the late 1980’s when SoundScan came out. SoundScan found that almost 60-70% of verbally reported record sales were baloney. I hope RailState will find where Class 1’s are terribly ineffective in managing their network.