SCHAUMBURG, Ill. — The power of data, or more accurately, of well-used data, may not have explicitly been the topic of BNSF Railway CEO Katie Farmer’s presentation at the Midwest Association of Rail Shippers Winter Meeting. But it was a recurring theme of several subjects she touched on as part of her keynote address Wednesday on the conference’s first day.
Data played a part in Farmer’s look ahead to BNSF’s Barstow International Gateway intermodal and logistics project; in discussing the railroad’s program of automated track inspection; and in efforts to improve information on arrival times for shippers.
“I’m really excited about what we’re doing in Barstow,” Farmer said. “And not just because of the capacity. … What I’m really excited about is the conversations we’re having with our customers, ocean carriers, drayage companies, the largest importers in the country. … What we’re talking about is not only capacity, but how we’re going to be interchanging data with each other.
“To give you an example, if I’m a large importer and I have a box on a vessel, wouldn’t it be cool if while we have a box on the vessel, we have all the information coming to us and we can make decisions, the customer can make the decision while that box is on the vessel about, do I want to go IPI [inland point intermodal]? Do I want to stay local? Do I want to transload it? We have that information, we [can] plan to work in our intermodal hub around that.
“That’s the kind of conversations that we’re having, and that’s how we’re going to continue to adapt and evolve the logistics park concept,” she said.
Regarding track inspection, BNSF has been working to extend a Federal Railroad Administration waiver for its automated inspection program — an effort slowed by the FRA’s desire to make those waivers more difficult to obtain. [See “FRA aims to tighten rules …,” Trains News Wire, Oct. 28, 2024.] But at the same time, Farmer said, it has been working to develop an inspection system mounting cameras and lasers on locomotives in revenue service.
“It allows us to look, real time, at foot by foot by foot of track for any structural integrity issues. … It allows us to take that information, send it to [company headquarters] Fort Worth, and quickly use machine vision and artificial intelligence to identify, more quickly than ever, if there’s an issue with that piece of track. That allows us to take our track inspectors and move them from finders to fixers, and to be able to remediate that track issue and not take large windows of time that interrupt that service,” Farmer said.