1970s railroad barcode system

[Norm48327]

Interesting link, Balt. Good educational read.

[BaltACD]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_equipment_identification

[cindy313]

Falcon48

This seems like a legit question to me.  People who are old fossils (like me) might know what the bar codes were for, but I'll bet there are a whole lot of younger railfans and normal people who don't. 

i've seen barcode is inserted  on the road ! and it is a qr code image , is it just for fun?

[espeefoamer]

Great info! I learned things about the ACI tags that I never knew,or had forgotten.

[Lyon_Wonder]

Looks like this former-BN GP38-2 still has an ACI.

http://rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1454789 

 

 

[rvos1979]

tree68

The RF tag system in use now by the railroads is very similar to the system in use by many toll highways.  A sensor trackside sends out RF pulses, resulting in a reply by the tag which contains information about the car.  Just like the highway systems, the tags can be read up to a certain speed (I don't know what that speed is).

 

I imagine it is also very similar to the Pre-Pass system used by many trucking companies to reduce time spent at scales, the transponder on my truck is actually dual purpose, it doubles as my EZPass.  As far as I know, they have no problems reading at speeds above 70mph, though on the toll roads, you will get a ticket for going through the booth too fast

[CShaveRR]

The ACI system used by the railroad was based on the Kar-Trak developed by Sylvania.

There was apparently an earlier system (perhaps the one that Oscar mentioned, as being done by Westinghouse) that was not universally adopted.  The panels actually looked more like the grocery-store bar-codes:  no color.  They were taller and thinner than the ACI labels based on Kar-Trak.  I recall seeing these on several series of KCS cars built in the early 1960s.

[zugmann]

So.... who died and made you the king decider of what should be asked on a forum? 

 

Nuff said.  

 

tdmidget

 

I guess I am supposed to be a horrible person , my post in this thread having been deleted due to a whiner complaining. I must point out that a google search of " railroad car" "bar code" yields 2740 results, the first of which with out even clicking on it will tell you that the system was patented in 1960 by Westinghouse. Nuff said.

 

[tdmidget]

 

I guess I am supposed to be a horrible person , my post in this thread having been deleted due to a whiner complaining. I must point out that a google search of " railroad car" "bar code" yields 2740 results, the first of which with out even clicking on it will tell you that the system was patented in 1960 by Westinghouse. Nuff said.

[videomaker]

diningcar

It is NOT Chico depicted on the locomotive because Chico was a small Indian boy usually posed in a joyous way, and was never on equipment.

What is shown was a part of the WARBONNET theme which Santa Fe used on their passemger locomotives. This theme was resurected about 1990 and used on freight locomotives, but without the Indian Chief decal as shown in the photo initiating this discussion.

 

 The Santa Fe Chief is NOT  Little Chico? Yes I knew that ! That is not what I was implying ! I thot you knew what I was talking about, I did !

[CShaveRR]

Elaborating on my earlier post, the first strip (above the "start" strip) was designated as the Equipment Code Number.  Values were:

0:  Railroad-owned freight cars.

1:  Privately-owned freight cars.

2:  Trailers

3:  Trailers or containers (expansion)

4:  Containers

5:  Containers (expansion) or secondary and variable labels.

6:  Work equipment (I believe this was later used as expansion for railroad- or privately-owned freight cars, but possibly never employed as such on labels--the numbers identifying the companies are apparently still in use.)

7:  Passenger equipment

8:  Cabooses

9:  Locomotives.

The secondary and variable labels were never employed, as far as I know--had the system stuck around, you might have seen them relaying such information as fuel tank holdings, refrigerator car temperature, and other such information.

It might be a coincidence, but almost as soon as the ACI program was discontinued, some railroads began a push to renumber equipment so that locomotives, cabooses, and non-revenue equipment no longer duplicated numbers (not a problem on many railroads, but C&O was one where number series overlapped).

[tree68]

The RF tag system in use now by the railroads is very similar to the system in use by many toll highways.  A sensor trackside sends out RF pulses, resulting in a reply by the tag which contains information about the car.  Just like the highway systems, the tags can be read up to a certain speed (I don't know what that speed is). 

The rest of the system (communications, processing the data, creating reports) has changed only inasmuch as the technology available has.  Of course, that means you can find out where your car is on a website instead of by searching through a stack of printed reports.....

[Falcon48]

This seems like a legit question to me.  People who are old fossils (like me) might know what the bar codes were for, but I'll bet there are a whole lot of younger railfans and normal people who don't. 

[Bob-Fryml]

ACI = Automatic Car Identification.  During the early 1970s, the General Manager of Transportation for a major Class 1 railroad told me that the best the system ever achieved was this:  80% of the North American interchange fleet was tagged, and of those cars only 80% had readable labels.

ACI was an optical reader technolgy that relied on scanning beams of light within the visible color range ("visible," that is, to the human eye). The color bars appearing on an ACI plate were made of Scotchlite or some similar, highly-reflective material.  They could actually get quite dirty and still be readable.  Yet with exposure to harsh sunlight, weather extremes of hot and cold, plus moisture, the material would get brittle, crack, and eventually fall off.  Surprisingly, though, as the industry was converting to the newer AEI technology, Burlington Northern continued to exploit the usefulness of ACI for a number of years within its Powder River Basin operations.

AEI = Automatic Equipment Identification by contrast is a microwave driven system.  As a wayside AEI scanner detects the nearby presence of moving equipment, a microwave beam generator switches on.  When the beam strikes the AEI tag, it imparts enough energy into the box - energy that converts to electricity - to tickle a computer chip and a radio transmitter.  When these two components come to life, they transmit the equipment's reporting marks and whether the tag was mounted closer to the A-end or the B-end of the car.  The Association of American Railroads (A.A.R.) requires that all locomotives and freight cars subject to interchange service carry AEI tags.  Nearly all End of Train devices now carry AEI tags as well; and because the system works so well, many non-revenue, company service, and maintenance-of-way equipment now carries these tags as well.

In contrast to ACI's best-of-class 64% dependability factor, I hear tell that the A.A.R. gets all bent-out-of-shape whenever AEI reliability falls below 99.5%!

[aegrotatio]

 Thank you!! These are all over the older Washington DC Metro cars and nobody could tell us what they meant.

Thanks!!

 

[Deggesty]

jrbernier

Lyon,

  This is the old ACI sytem.  Reliability was the reason it never was fully implemented.  The labels would get 'slushed' up in the winter and the reliability would drop.

  The current AEI system uses RF technology and amounts to a small 'package' attached to the rail car.  BN started developing the system(based on container tracking) around 1988.  It was implemented very fast by the AAR the following year.

Jim

I remember seeing the coding on freight cars in the sixties and early seventies, and the description of how it worked in Trains. As I recall, even then there was comment on the difficulty of reading the coding because it was impossible to keep them clean. I do not remember seeing, anywhere, a description of the current system and how it is usable under almost all conditions. Thanks.

Johnny

[diningcar]

It is NOT Chico depicted on the locomotive because Chico was a small Indian boy usually posed in a joyous way, and was never on equipment.

What is shown was a part of the WARBONNET theme which Santa Fe used on their passemger locomotives. This theme was resurected about 1990 and used on freight locomotives, but without the Indian Chief decal as shown in the photo initiating this discussion.

 

[wjstix]

IIRC one of the first - maybe the first user, was the Missabe Road back in the sixties. It allowed them to (for example) weigh ore cars in motion without having to manually record the reporting marks and weight. It probably worked best in a situation like that, where it was one railroad using their own equipement so everything could be standardized. I guess it didn't work so well in general service, plus being an optical read it didn't work if the car got dirty.

Still an interesting thing - they were virtually nonexistant on freight cars in the sixties, then showed up on virtually all cars for about 20 years, then went away again.

[Murphy Siding]

tdmidget

 

Oh please. Did you just have a compulsion to post or what? This system has ben out of use for 30 years and you had to post why? Heard of Google? Where have you been?

   Oh please.  Did you just have a compulsion to answer this post or what?  How's the weather up your way?  I have a son named Ben.

     This is a forum, a place to share information and communicate with others of like interests.  It's kind of hard to do that in a civil way without.....civility.

    I wouldn't have known how to look up "1970's railroad barcode system" on Google.  I do know, however, that there are a lot friendly, intelligent folks on this forum, who would be happy to share their knowledge.  It would be a pretty boring forum, if the answer to every post was "Look it up on Google you lazy mutt".

    Have a nice day.

[jrbernier]

Lyon,

  This is the old ACI sytem.  Reliability was the reason it never was fully implemented.  The labels would get 'slushed' up in the winter and the reliability would drop.

  The current AEI system uses RF technology and amounts to a small 'package' attached to the rail car.  BN started developing the system(based on container tracking) around 1988.  It was implemented very fast by the AAR the following year.

Jim

[henry6]

Yes it was a bar code system for electronic read.  But it had such limited capacity it had to be abandoned as a new code and system has taken its place.  There was also a bruhaha about the various placements of the bars made reading difficult. The new system has a uniform and universal height and width for its bar.

[mersenne6]

  No, the barcode idea was developed for inventory control in retail stores.  The first version was patented in 1952 and was in the form of a bullseye - issues with printing and not smudging (with the resultant error in code reading)  the bullseye resulted in a change to the simple linear form. 

[Victrola1]

Is it true that the railroad bar coding system inspired what today is universal on packages for inventory control and scanned when you purchase?

[CShaveRR]

The first digit was "9" on locomotives, "8" on cabooses, and different digits denoted non-revenue equipment, trailers, intermodal equipment, and so on.  The only things that had "0" as place markers were freight cars owned by railroads.  The "1" at the beginning in Eric's list always was used for privately-owned cars.

[ericsp]

If I am reading the label correctly, it translates to 9022 100304, which makes no sense. I would think it should be 0022 000304. However, according to the information, the locomotive is ATSF 304A. I guess the 1 in the hundred-thousand place is to signify the A. But why does the reporting mark code begin with 9?

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=113871&nseq=0 

[Lyon_Wonder]

videomaker

Lyon Wonder,

This logo was typical on passenger units in the 50, 60's when ATSF got out of the passenger bzns they diconinued this and Little Chico on advertising... If your taking about the bar code it was a way to keep track of where equipt was....

 

Yes, I was referring to the ACI label.  I understand  the railroads now have a newer/updated system that uses tags.
 

[videomaker]

Lyon Wonder,

This logo was typical on passenger units in the 50, 60's when ATSF got out of the passenger bzns they diconinued this and Little Chico on advertising... If your taking about the bar code it was a way to keep track of where equipt was....

[ericsp]

ACI Label 

http://eaneubauer.ipower.com/aci.pdf

[Lyon_Wonder]

I’ve seen these quite often on 70s-era pics of locos and rolling stock.  What were there purpose?

This one in on an ATSF F7B silverbonnet in 1973, to the right of Chico.