3.0 Rail Container Tracking Technology and Services

The rail lines have embraced EDI technology and conduct a large amount of EDI transactions with their larger trading partners. These trading partners are usually identified as shippers, ocean cargo carriers, ports, some large drayage operators and intermediary product receivers/wholesalers.

There are a host of EDI services utilized by these partners such as electronic payments and viewable bill of lading information in advance of physical freight delivery. Here the focus will be narrowed to EDI tracking applications available to not only large trading partners, but to partners/customers of any size. The following sections will focus on how the rail lines initially capture railcar/container location and then how external users access this EDI based tracking information via the Internet.

3.1 Rail Container Tracking

The rail industry has invested heavily in Automatic Equipment Identification (AEI) technology to capture railcar arrivals, departures, and passing points en route. The demand for the rail lines to provide asset location data has increased as more customers incorporate asset location reporting into their supply chain management systems [2]. The data captured from this technology has dramatically improved asset location capability.

AEI is a valuable tracking tool when the container is on a train, but once off-loaded, a physical check may be required to locate a container within a rail yard unless additional technologies such as GPS and yard management/mapping systems are used.

3.2 NetREDI

This cargo tracking application (located at the NetREDI web site) utilizes the rail industry’s central computer applications to obtain shipment position data from over 300 railroads in North America. Most customer location requests are accurate to within a couple of hours of their actual position. NetREDI has many user features that allow the customer to self- track their rail shipments. These include:

• Shipments can be traced on NetREDI one at a time or en mass. The system allows the submission of single or multi shipment location status. The tracking or “trace” list form is shown in figure 1. The data entry to NetRedi also allows the entry of equipment ID through cut and paste utilities, obviating the need to retype equipment ID’s.

• Shipment tracing requests may be stored for future use to facilitate the tracing of the same shipments several times over the course of hours or days. There is also the capability to trace the same containers week after week.

• NetREDI allows the customers to view any of their previously submitted trace responses or print a copy for their records. The tracing data can be saved on an individual computer’s hard disk, and then imported to the customer’s other software or system applications. NetREDI output is available to the customer in the following formats:
  • Blank format–Location
  • A format–Location with SPLC
  • B format–Train
  • C format–Train with SPLC
  • D format–Destination
  • E format–Destination with SPLC
  • F format–Flatcar
  • G format–Flatcar with SPLC
  • H format–ETA
  • I format–ETA with SPLC
  • Text Format–Event Translation
  • W format–Scale Weight

Figure 1 NetREDI Demand Trace Screen [3]

 D

2. Thompson, Keith, “Tracking freight cars: AEI data tags and readers”, http://www.cyberspace.org/~snowolf/rail/aei.html

3. “NetREDI Demand Trace Demo”, http://registration.railnetredi.com/.gifs/page9.htm#InputPage

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