Higher velocity
In the last year, GE has released a series of products aimed at developing an "autopilot" system for trains, including a locomotive tracking and monitoring system called PinPoint, which can tell if an engine is in motion or idle, the train's exact location and speed, its fuel level, and so on. Coupled with GE's radio-frequency remote control system for trains, called Locotrol, and its Movement Planner program for optimizing the flow of trains across the entire system, this system can significantly increase velocity, or the average speed of all of a railroad's trains at any given time.

For U.S. railroads, says Kumar, a one-mile-per-hour gain in velocity can mean $1 billion in savings over the course of a year. Fully implemented across an entire railway, he claims, GE's Movement Planner can achieve 2- to 4-mph increases in velocity.

"Eventually, an engineer will download a trip plan onto the locomotive's computer," Kumar explains. "And the locomotive will figure out the best way to run the train over a piece of track."

For more localized applications, railroads are building wireless mesh networks in their yards, which can sometimes stretch for five or six miles and cover hundreds of thousands of acres. Most locomotives today carry event recorders, "black boxes" that record all the parameters of a given trip including fuel economy, average speed, the gradient of the line, and so on. These logs often contain hundreds of megabytes of data. When a train pulls into a WiFi-equipped terminal it can download all that information in seconds, allowing analysts at the railroad's network operations center to examine it and deliver a report to the crew on the performance of the locomotive and how to wring more efficiency from each trip.

No forklifts allowed
"There's a lot of fuel to be saved by operating the train better," explains Andrews, "and one of the best ways to give the crew feedback is immediately after the run: 'On this hill you did this, if you'd done that it would've saved a lot of fuel,' that sort of thing. We need to rapidly upload that data from the train to the mainframe, analyze it and put out a report before the train even gets to its destination."

One of the biggest challenges of upgrading to wireless systems is integrating new technology seamlessly into ongoing operations; There's no such thing as a forklift upgrade when you're shipping close to 2 billion ton-miles (one ton shipped one mile) of freight every year.

"We've got a huge physical plant and a huge investment in all this [existing] technology," says Andrews. "So we don’t do sweeping rollouts. It's more evolutionary as we move from technology to technology."

To that end, even as he replaces the legacy analog radio equipment on the UP network with IP-based digital microwave systems, Andrews is installing converters to let some of the older equipment work over the new IP networks. The good news, he says, is that while the budget for advance networking stays more or less flat, he can get more for the money as prices for equipment and software come down.

That's a good thing, because there's no end in sight to the railway capacity crunch: Total freight traffic by rail, according to Jacksonville, Fla.-based railway company CSX Corp., is projected to grow by 67 percent in the next 20 years.

— Richard Martin, Senior Editor, Unstrung