SCHAUMBURG, In poor health. — The facility of knowledge, or extra precisely, of well-used information, could not have explicitly been the subject of BNSF Railway CEO Katie Farmer’s presentation on the Midwest Affiliation of Rail Shippers Winter Assembly. However it was a recurring theme of a number of topics she touched on as a part of her keynote deal with Wednesday on the convention’s first day.
Knowledge performed a component in Farmer’s sit up for BNSF’s Barstow Worldwide Gateway intermodal and logistics undertaking; in discussing the railroad’s program of automated observe inspection; and in efforts to enhance info on arrival occasions for shippers.
“I’m actually enthusiastic about what we’re doing in Barstow,” Farmer mentioned. “And never simply due to the capability. … What I’m actually enthusiastic about is the conversations we’re having with our prospects, ocean carriers, drayage corporations, the most important importers within the nation. … What we’re speaking about just isn’t solely capability, however how we’re going to be interchanging information with one another.
“To provide you an instance, if I’m a big importer and I’ve a field on a vessel, wouldn’t it’s cool if whereas we’ve got a field on the vessel, we’ve got all the data coming to us and we are able to make selections, the shopper could make the choice whereas that field is on the vessel about, do I need to go IPI [inland point intermodal]? Do I need to keep native? Do I need to transload it? Now we have that info, we [can] plan to work in our intermodal hub round that.
“That’s the sort of conversations that we’re having, and that’s how we’re going to proceed to adapt and evolve the logistics park idea,” she mentioned.
Relating to observe inspection, BNSF has been working to increase a Federal Railroad Administration waiver for its automated inspection program — an effort slowed by the FRA’s want to make these waivers harder to acquire. [See “FRA aims to tighten rules …,” Trains News Wire, Oct. 28, 2024.] However on the similar time, Farmer mentioned, it has been working to develop an inspection system mounting cameras and lasers on locomotives in income service.
“It permits us to look, actual time, at foot by foot by foot of observe for any structural integrity points. … It permits us to take that info, ship it to [company headquarters] Fort Value, and rapidly use machine imaginative and prescient and synthetic intelligence to determine, extra rapidly than ever, if there’s a difficulty with that piece of observe. That permits us to take our observe inspectors and transfer them from finders to fixers, and to have the ability to remediate that observe subject and never take massive home windows of time that interrupt that service,” Farmer mentioned.