Murphy Siding Our car showed up yesterday afternoon. As of this mornig, the website still shows it about 110 miles away.
Do you know if the web site you are accessing is updated in real time or on a batch basis?
If it is real time - you experience shows it is not. If it is a batch update, your placing report missed the cutoff for the batch you are looking at.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACD Murphy Siding Our car showed up yesterday afternoon. As of this mornig, the website still shows it about 110 miles away. Do you know if the web site you are accessing is updated in real time or on a batch basis? If it is real time - you experience shows it is not. If it is a batch update, your placing report missed the cutoff for the batch you are looking at.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
In a sensibly-designed query system -- which this might well not be -- the car-location information would be fetched from current information 'on demand' at or near the time the customer makes the request. But where the information is fetched from then becomes the situation.
Security concerns alone indicate the 'customer-accessible' information will be in some kind of data warehouse, perhaps periodically batch-updated from a potential variety of sources. The changes must be made coherently in what corresponds to a 'batch transaction', fully completed and tested before any 'old' values are swapped out. Under PSR one of the first 'economies' I can see being made in personnel are clerks updating the customer-convenience tracking portal feature... so there may be some latency in the periodic updates to the data-warehouse 'storage'.
We certainly have some measure of this in the reported incidence, where it's pretty clear that neither the AEI data nor any kind of delivery report is being put into data ... wel, perhaps even on a 'daily' basis like a bank deposit post. Even net of customer security or corporate competition-driven secrecy, this seems more than a little extreme.
I have no connection with railroads, so my question is from the outside.
Could knowing a car's location cause any security concerns? Is anything ever shipped that a terrorist group may want to know about, or where it is?
York1 John
York1I have no connection with railroads, so my question is from the outside. Could knowing a car's location cause any security concerns? Is anything ever shipped that a terrorist group may want to know about, or where it is?
MOST military shipemts are handled using DODX freight cars (DOD = Department of Defense). I don't know what specific actions are taken concerning DODX cars, that being said, I suspect they are not reported to the general 'customer viewable' data bases. I suspect DODX tracing is limited to internal railroad personnel and to the appropriate offices of the military.
The reporting Murphy Siding is seeing is nominally delayed sufficiently that it will be of little to no value in trying to plan a real time terrorist issue with any car(s).
Customers that deal in HAZMAT are well known - what security actions those shipper/consignees are taking as well as the railroad security actions are not publicized.
Murphy Siding BaltACD Murphy Siding Our car showed up yesterday afternoon. As of this mornig, the website still shows it about 110 miles away. Do you know if the web site you are accessing is updated in real time or on a batch basis? If it is real time - you experience shows it is not. If it is a batch update, your placing report missed the cutoff for the batch you are looking at. I think you solved my mystery. I figured that the technolgy would allow it to be reported in real time. It probably does- to the railroad where it's nice to know things like that in real time. I'd imagine that the customer portal is onky updated once a day.
I think you solved my mystery. I figured that the technolgy would allow it to be reported in real time. It probably does- to the railroad where it's nice to know things like that in real time. I'd imagine that the customer portal is onky updated once a day.
Oh, my. That's really dumb. It should be hitting the live car inventory data. It exists and is shared with the AAR-Railinc.
For line of road movements, the data is near real time. AEI scanners are generally used to verify consists and occasionally do location arrival and departure messages. Often the arrivals and departures can come from the train arrival and departure which more often than not these days, can come from locomotive GPS with geo-fencing. So, that data is pretty accurate.
When a local goes out on the road, things get a bit iffier. If the RR uses a hand held reporting device, it's possible that the crew can report placements and pulls in near real time. Sometimes, they will kinda save'em all up and do them once back at their yard. In the paper days, the crew would fax them in when they tie up and a yard clerk would type them all in - so their could be a sizeable delay (and lots more errors)
I can't believe that BNSF does not have a near real time web portal for customers to track their pipeline. NS has had one for nearly 20 years. (ex-Conrail guys were responsible for putting the data up and building the portal. Both of us are retired, now.)
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
The way the tracing systems work; you must be a party to the waybill to obtain info either from the various railroad systems or those provided by third parties.
BaltACD York1 I have no connection with railroads, so my question is from the outside. Could knowing a car's location cause any security concerns? Is anything ever shipped that a terrorist group may want to know about, or where it is? MOST military shipemts are handled using DODX freight cars (DOD = Department of Defense). I don't know what specific actions are taken concerning DODX cars, that being said, I suspect they are not reported to the general 'customer viewable' data bases. I suspect DODX tracing is limited to internal railroad personnel and to the appropriate offices of the military. The reporting Murphy Siding is seeing is nominally delayed sufficiently that it will be of little to no value in trying to plan a real time terrorist issue with any car(s). Customers that deal in HAZMAT are well known - what security actions those shipper/consignees are taking as well as the railroad security actions are not publicized.
York1 I have no connection with railroads, so my question is from the outside. Could knowing a car's location cause any security concerns? Is anything ever shipped that a terrorist group may want to know about, or where it is?
Thanks for the info, Balt!
oltmannd Murphy Siding BaltACD Murphy Siding Our car showed up yesterday afternoon. As of this mornig, the website still shows it about 110 miles away. Do you know if the web site you are accessing is updated in real time or on a batch basis? If it is real time - you experience shows it is not. If it is a batch update, your placing report missed the cutoff for the batch you are looking at. I think you solved my mystery. I figured that the technolgy would allow it to be reported in real time. It probably does- to the railroad where it's nice to know things like that in real time. I'd imagine that the customer portal is onky updated once a day. Oh, my. That's really dumb. It should be hitting the live car inventory data. It exists and is shared with the AAR-Railinc. For line of road movements, the data is near real time. AEI scanners are generally used to verify consists and occasionally do location arrival and departure messages. Often the arrivals and departures can come from the train arrival and departure which more often than not these days, can come from locomotive GPS with geo-fencing. So, that data is pretty accurate. When a local goes out on the road, things get a bit iffier. If the RR uses a hand held reporting device, it's possible that the crew can report placements and pulls in near real time. Sometimes, they will kinda save'em all up and do them once back at their yard. In the paper days, the crew would fax them in when they tie up and a yard clerk would type them all in - so their could be a sizeable delay (and lots more errors) I can't believe that BNSF does not have a near real time web portal for customers to track their pipeline. NS has had one for nearly 20 years. (ex-Conrail guys were responsible for putting the data up and building the portal. Both of us are retired, now.)
You get what you pay for. Free access will be less timely than paid access. Carriers reserve real time access to those that, one way or another, pay for the PRIVLEDGE.
Railinc is not a free service of the AAR.
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