Montreal-based RailVision Analytics has developed artificial intelligence-enabled software to help locomotive engineers make small adjustments in train driving that could lead to big savings in diesel fuel. That could help freight and passenger trains cut into the roughly 100 million tons of planet-warming gases released into the atmosphere every year…

Essentially, the idea is to enable locomotive engineers to eliminate wasteful practices and leverage invisible forces that could assist their driving. If you’ve driven a car, you’re almost surely familiar with the law of inertia discovered by Isaac Newton in 1686, which states a moving object can continue in the same direction unless a force affects it. That means a vehicle can stay in motion — in other words, coast — without the use of manmade propulsion until friction or other forces stop it.