As always, it was an educational couple of days in New York for RailTrends, with many thanks to Tony Hatch, Kirk Bastyr, and the whole Progressive Railroading team for putting on one of the top annual conferences in the rail industry.
There were five Class I CEOs in attendance, including Keith Creel of Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC), who won the Innovator of the Year award for his work as part of the first major railroad merger in recent times, a decade on from his inaugural win of the prestigious award for his contribution to our industry while President and CEO of Canadian Pacific.
There was a who’s who from the world of short line operators, railroad suppliers, industry groups and rail technology solutions companies like Tracsis. It was great to connect with so many of our customers and ecosystem partners, as well as past and present colleagues from around North America.
Leveraging emerging rail technology to move freight back to railroads
Naturally, the incoming Trump administration and the potential impact on freight rail was an unavoidable topic of conversation. With the prospect of an entirely new economic and regulatory environment—and so much talk about tariffs—widespread uncertainty is inevitable and we will wait to see what materializes.
On the regulatory front, there is optimism around the potential for change within the FRA. Industry insiders are hopeful the FRA will be more open to emerging rail technology, embracing ideas that can help enable further rail safety innovations.
The overarching theme for many speakers at RailTrends 2024 was leveraging new rail technology and accelerating options to better harness data to help inform better decision-making, ultimately driving growth for our industry. While historically the rail business has been a technological laggard, there are a plethora of new opportunities and new industry stakeholders, not only at the Class I level, but on the vendor and supplier side as well.
Data capture is improving the freight rail customer experience
There’s a lot we can do to help make it easier for our customers to do business with railroads. Shippers move freight by truck rather than train because it’s reliable, even though it’s more expensive and not as environment friendly. So, at baseline, the freight rail industry has good fundamental benefits, but we need to be more consistent on our first mile and last mile routes as well as do everything that we can to accelerate the adoption of technologies like telematics.
It was informative to hear from some of the people who are championing innovative new technologies, such as Kenneth Mannka, Executive Vice President, Operations, at Nexxiot, one of the companies in North America trying to propel the use of telematics on rail cars; Mary John, Director of Business Development at Parallel Systems, a company building automated battery-electric freight rail vehicles; and representatives of the RailPulse coalition, devoted to creating an industry-wide telematics platform, including RailPulse General Manager David Shannon and Michael Miller, CEO of Genesee & Wyoming.
Mr Miller – talked about how we can’t go fast enough at this stage and used the example of the transformative impact of Uber.
We all have a basic expectation of that level of visibility when we order goods from Amazon or book a ride with Uber, but this type of technology has not yet been widely adopted in the freight rail industry.
Data capture and train dispatch
And it’s not just about capturing the data but determining what data is important to each customer, then harnessing it, and leveraging it.
At Tracsis, we offer a highly configurable computer aided train dispatch platform. which is very rich and detailed in its reporting capabilities. However, some prospective customers still want to be able to have direct access to as much of that data as they can so they can do their own independent analysis as well.
For rail dispatching of the future, we need to consider microdata that is not being captured at the moment, for example, fuel levels and other key data points that can help to enable exception-based dispatching. We’re currently working with our technology partners to integrate GPS data within our dispatch platform to provide superior visibility for our freight railroad customers.
We pride ourselves on working with our partners and customers in a truly collaborative process to find the data that’s important to them for their networks and operations.
RailTrends 2024, presented by Progressive Railroading, was held at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square on November 14-15, 2024.
Tracsis is the leading provider of software-based rail solutions, trusted by railroads in North America including Class I, passenger and short line operators. Find out more about our innovative rail technology.
