Wifi Revolution

Canadian National Railway Company (CN), which operates the largest railway network in Canada, will be expanding the deployment of Wi-Tronix’s suite of locomotive remote monitoring solutions to all GEVO locomotives currently in service. Wi-Tronix is an Illinois-based company, providing wireless remote monitoring solutions for tracking the mobile assets used in rail, marine and other industrial operations.

CN currently has a fleet of 90 GEVO locomotives; these being part of the low-emission Evolution series of locomotives built by General Electric (GE). Wi-Tronix’s suite has already been deployed on 55 of these, and the rest which form a batch of 35 locomotives delivered to CN in 2006, will also shortly be equipped with the remote monitoring capability. 

Wi Tronix has been CN's preferred remote monitoring solutions provider since 2007 and has already implemented the monitoring suite on other CN locomotive models, with more than 180 systems having been installed on CN's EMD SD70M-2, GE ES44DC and GP38-2 locomotives.

Wi-Tronix’s monitoring solutions consist of a suite of applications communicating with the Wireless Processing Unit (Wi-PU) installed on board the mobile assets; in this case the locomotives. The Wi-PU has an integrated Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) built in, which provides sub-three meter accuracy in locating the current position of the locomotive. It is capable of both cellular and WiFi (News - Alert) communication, thus enabling seamless tracking throughout the U.S. and Canada. Wi-Tronix’s system uses Mobile IP, an open standard high-mobility routing protocol, to ensure communication without packet loss, even when the locomotive is moving at high speeds.

One of the applications within the Wi-Tronix suite is the Wi-Tracker, which provides information relating to utilization statistics and engine shut down and duty cycle. Fuel monitoring can be performed using geo-fencing with safe zone marking, and locomotive fault and exception-based alerting can also be configured.

The monitoring suite also has another application called Wi-DownloadER that allows for the locomotive on-board data to be downloaded to the servers in the back office whenever required.

Wi-Tronix officials said that the remote monitoring solutions have helped CN to achieve greater operational efficiency and service reliability; with increased asset utilization, fuel conservation monitoring and improved fleet productivity.

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