A new technology partnership is providing rail shippers with a broader look at the status of freight cars as they make their way from origin to destination.
Telegraph provides a full suite of tools that allow shippers to price, book, trace, and track the status of their cars in real time. RailState operates a trackside camera network that monitors main lines across North America and can provide high-resolution images of cars en route.
This gives shippers an independent view for spotting network anomalies such as delays, congestion, or unexpected routing behaviors, the companies said in a Tuesday announcement. When this layer of visual awareness from RailState’s network is integrated with Telegraph’s telematics and machine learning, it creates a multi-dimensional operational picture.
The result is a system that doesn’t just react to issues as they occur, but anticipates them, the companies said.
“When we speak with some of the largest rail shippers in North America, we continue to hear of friction with the four D’s — delays, dwell, demurrage, and disputes,” Telegraph Chief Executive Harris Ligon said in a statement. “With RailState, we’ve found a team that also believes in returning real value back to the rail ecosystem. We believe this integration will further our goal of offering more tools and insights to shippers, by tackling the opaqueness often associated with shipping by rail, and eliminating some of the back-and-forth between rail carriers and shippers.”
“The rail industry has been limited by data that only shows where individual shipments are, not the network conditions that determine where they’re going, and when they’ll actually arrive,” RailState CEO Jamie Heller said. “Working with Telegraph changes that fundamentally. We’re providing customers with network-enriched intelligence that reveals the hidden factors affecting their shipments — the congestion building three states away, the velocity changes indicating emerging bottlenecks, or the volume patterns that predict capacity constraints before they impact operations.”
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