Improving Safety Through Telematics: Railway Age CEO Perspectives on Safety

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Conversion of freight shipments from truck to rail, combined with recent developments in innovation, can benefit more than just shippers’ bottom line—and the broader public wins, too. 

The industry has done an impressive job highlighting rail transportation’s sustainability advantages. By now, we all should be able to cite “one train can carry one ton of freight nearly 500 miles on one gallon of fuel” from memory. Freight rail transportation in North America has noteworthy safety implications, as well. 

At the most basic level, removing trucks from our roadways can make them safer for passenger vehicles. A study from Texas A&M University found that rail is nearly five times safer than truck when measured by fatalities per ton mile. When it comes to the shipment of hazardous materials—necessary ingredients for modern life, like chlorine for clean water—rail has demonstrated an impressive track record. More than 99.9% of all hazmat moved by rail reaches its destination without a release caused by a train accident and the hazmat accident rate is down 73% since 2000.

Nevertheless, the railroad industry must continue to strive for an even safer network. One area of emerging collaboration between railroads and railcar owners that can aid in these safety efforts is the investment in innovation, railcar-based telemetry. Making railcars more than a “box on wheels” can convert them from passive pieces of equipment to insight-generating nodes in an interconnected rail network. In the future, railcars outfitted with sensors and communication devices could alert railroads and shippers in real time, when their railcars are breached or damaged. Real-time remote monitoring on railcars has the potential to make these assets even more impactful contributors to a safer railroad environment.

In seeing the transformative potential of railcar-based telemetry, TrinityRail launched our Trinsight© visibility platform in 2021 and was one of the founding members of RailPulse. RailPulse has the potential to drive the sharing of safety-critical information from the railcar to the railroads to assist in avoiding accidents through its role as telemetry data aggregator and guardian. 

RailPulse is also working with vendors to foster standardized development of safety-related sensors that deliver real-time actionable and accurate information about the railcar.

We believe the railcar is a vital intermediary of value between the shippers and railroads in North America. By working across the industry to foster investment in railcar-based telemetry, railroads, railcar owners, and shippers are coming together to deliver more datapoints about the location, condition, and health of railcars and the important contents they deliver. These datapoints are a critical ingredient in making an already safer choice even safer.