Transnet Freight Rail ups asset tracking

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 08 Aug 2008

Transnet Freight Rail can now track every one of its trains and locomotives anywhere along a network of 22 000km in real-time, from a new R90 million National Operations Centre (NOC), in Johannesburg.

Transnet Freight Rail - formerly Spoornet - owns 2 500 locomotives and 100 000 wagons.

Spokesman Sandile Simelane says the NOC employs newly-deployed tracking technology to give a 100-strong dayshift and 65 night workers a continuously updated view of every freight and passenger train's location against plan.

NOC chief architect Riaan Oosthuizen says the centre runs a number of systems to track trains, locomotives and rolling stock.

The integrated asset tracking and monitoring system (IATMS) tracks each locomotive individually and displays the location on a portion of a large screen in the NOC. This relies on information updates from a central main data centre that in turn is fed by a "Triton unit" in the locomotive.

Oosthuizen says the unit contains a global positioning system (GPS), as well as a general packet radio service (GPRS) card, WiFi and a high-frequency radio. "As the locomotive moves, the GPS takes readings and sends this via MTN GPRS to a back-end database in the main data centre," he says. "The NOC queries this on an ongoing basis."

Railway wagons are tracked using RFID wayside readers that record the passing of rolling stock and transmit the data to the same database using the same GPRS network. As a backup to the IATMS, locomotives are also tagged.

The train management system is "similar to Triton", but is used to monitor train - as opposed to locomotive - movements for safety and scheduling purposes - as opposed to asset management.

Simelane says having this "seamless link between the consignment, the wagon, the train and its location on the network will demonstrate to customers that the organisation takes the notion of on-time delivery seriously". For this reason, the NOC will also serve as a client contact centre.