Its time we had "Smart Boxcars and Smart Railroad cars" - Trains Magazine

Look at it from this point of view...
I am sure you have seen the Microsoft commercial where the 18 wheeler is stopped on the road, and the lady from the help desk tells the driver "the boxes told her they were lost"...?

All we do when switching cars is take them off of one shelf (track) and put them on another shelf (track) in a specific order.

Once we fill that shelf up, we put it on the truck (train)...

Now, for us, the truck (train) tells us where it is and when it went by a particular point, as do each of the boxes (cars) in the truck.

If the customer wants to know where his box is, all he has to do is go on line and ask the system, it already tracks the cars...as for maintenance issues, they are on a scheduled inspection system, and every time they enter a yard, the get looked over pretty well, including things a electronic device cant see of inspect....how will a chip tell me the A end side stirrup is damaged, or a hand rail rusted through at a weld?
There are things the human eye will see that no device would or could.

When you see a train out on the road, you don’t realize how many people have already inspected every part of it just hours ago, all you see are the cars going by....but when it enters our yard, it gets inspected by the car department, then the switchmen look it over again while they switch it, then the car men get another shot at it when they lace up the air hoses, and again when they do a initial terminal brake test and inspection, then a crew will give it a roll by some where along the line...

And the current computer tracking system is getting better all the time.

When I hired out 9 years ago, having a "lost car" or a stranger in a switch cut was common on every train...now, finding a stranger in the cut happens less and less, I didn’t find one all last week.

Ed