Railroad As Class A Member of The Logistics

Thinking of a supply chain for general cargo implies considering railroads as a fundamental part of that. Sustainability provided by fuel efficiency, at least, besides costs and productivity, should be enough motivation for having that solution for goods transportation.

Considering the evolution we have observed at that modal in the last decades, it is easy to believe we can achieve a lot more development. Also is true that railroads in general, have a massive homework to do to reach the state of the art to attend to their customers.

That way, including the train itself, the main issue is how new technologies will provide a completely automated operation.

It means trains run most effectively in terms of speed, preview minimum stops, and maximum safety. So, we need robots for operating the locomotives, cameras to emulate the engineering eyes, IA for recognizing obstacles or people, IoT´s for monitoring the train and the permanent way conditions and connection with the control center to say the essential.

Yet we mention the control center, dispatch must have smart tools for planning the train circulation, programming the schedules, and distributing locomotives, cars, and operators. It will be impossible to do this even for the best-prepared people in an optimized model.

As soon as the railroad gets all those solutions and is prepared to manage its trains so well, it is mandatory to solve the pains of the most important player in the real business: the customer.

"An integrated and automated operation is quite close in technology and far from the complete implementation at railroads"

The question is how it can share with clients the correct information they wish, and, on the other side, the railroad needs to return to set up its own operation. Technology has the answers to provide a connection between the cargo on the train and the client control, load and unload included. Again, IoT, cameras, a huge telecom structure, registers and AI, working 24 hours a day, including Feb, 29th.

In spite of these considerations doesn´t cover all the subject, we can attest that railroads in general are far from having all those requisites installed. The capital for preparing the basic structure and the essential solutions is very high and the resources, I mean, people to for doing the task, are much less than enough. And they are the main resource.

The challenge is to define the priorities to increase their infrastructure to collect registered data and systems to exchange this in real information. In our operation, we started with a big road map followed by the installation of several IoT´s in a pilot yard, connected to an important client terminal. This year we expect to have the initial conclusions about the effectiveness of our service.

To achieve customer expectations an integrated vision of the system is an obligation. And planning. And programming. At least. It demands tools a lot. The bad news is that in general the available tool does not fit every system and should be developed for each specific operation.

To have a powerful integrated planning and programming tool has been a search happening since the 1980s. Despite some offered by the market they suffer the problem mentioned before and they do not fit quite well in our process. We are very close to developing a kind of solution in our company, in association with Wabtec.

At last, focusing on just one of the big objectives railroads have in mind we should mention the unmanned cargo trains. We have the technologies to implant it but they are sparse. The challenge is to put all those things together. In MRS Logistica we have been operating an unmanned train since 2020 in a specific 8 km region with reliable and robust performance. It is a region that has zero people crossing the way and this is the main condition that permitted us to decide implanting the train. Our next goal is to teach the train to react immediately when an obstacle appears in front of it. We will have this this year.

An integrated and automated operation is quite close in technology and far from the complete implementation at railroads. But there is no other path to follow. In the end, the customer will be served by a railroad, inserted in the whole logistics, at the technological level they deserve.