In Canada, a few shippers and some regulators are a step ahead of Amtrak and the STB in deploying such digital tool sets. I recently interviewed RailState Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer John Schmitter as to how this works across his company’s networked system. RailState is a small start-up company. Its rail industry founders are James Heller and Schmitter. Their company’s private off-site cameras/sensors are located along the right-of-way of CN and Canadian Pacific strategic routes.

I have been following this company’s network rollout for about two years. Based on Schmitter’s responses to my questions, and my previous association with network monitoring systems including highways, I’d like to share the following observations with my Railway Age audience…

Instead, its camera images capture actual dated and timeed movement volume and speed and pattern numbers that actually can populate one’s spreadsheet cells with highly accurate and open sharing data.