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December 2025
Compiled by Michael Popke
The IQ Series™ gateway from Amsted Digital Solutions® is a next-generation, freight-rail onboard telematics device that delivers real-time rail-car intelligence through a single, self-contained package, company officials said in an email. The IQ Series gateway leverages an edge AI-enabled microcontroller and integrated sensors to replace the need for external add-ons.
Mounted on one or both of a rail car’s trucks, the IQ Series gateway continuously monitors critical health and status indicators, including wheel condition, braking anomalies, load status and real-time GPS location with geofence entry and exit alerts. This enables car owners and shippers to detect issues early, reduce unplanned downtime, and shift from time- to utilization-based maintenance strategies that improve reliability and lower lifecycle costs, company officials said.
Built for harsh rail environments, the device delivers six to 10 years of service life and supports instant over-the-air updates, enabling new features to be deployed to existing hardware without replacements or site visits, they said.
Data integrates seamlessly into the company’s Supply Chain Visibility™ platform or into existing third-party systems, with support for both European ITSS and North American RailPulse data standards.
Progress Rail offers the PR Uptime™ Suite, a robust, end-to-end platform that leverages IoT, predictive maintenance and advanced analytics to optimize locomotive performance. Designed for real-time health monitoring and proactive asset management, the suite empowers railroads to reduce unplanned downtime, extend asset life and drive operational efficiency, company officials said.
Uptime IQ is Progress Rail’s next-generation intelligent decision engine. Built on the latest advancements in artificial intelligence/machine learning, cloud computing and software engineering, Uptime IQ is designed to deliver enhanced analytics that go beyond traditional monitoring. By synthesizing historical and real-time data, it enables railroads to increase fleet availability, reduce shop dwell time and prioritize repairs based on severity and operational impact, company officials said.
Supporting this intelligence layer is Uptime IQ Cloud, a secure and scalable environment that aggregates vast volumes of operational data. The data is processed by Uptime IQ Analytics, which delivers actionable insights through intuitive dashboards, KPIs and diagnostic tools. From fault detection and prognostics to repair recommendations, the system empowers operators to address issues before they escalate, company officials said.
Uptime Connect is designed to ensure seamless data transmission from locomotives and fleets to the cloud, enabling mobile access and remote monitoring. The platform supports condition-based maintenance, helping railroads shift from time-based servicing to predictive, data-driven strategies.
Sno-NET® is a remote asset-monitoring system developed by Railway Equipment Co. (RECO) for snow melters and related winter-protection devices used in rail operations. RECO offers a range of products, including hot-air blowers, switch heaters and snow detection systems.
With Sno-NET, railroads can monitor key operating parameters of their snow-melting infrastructure in real time from a centralized, web-based interface. The system collects telemetry information including heater status, fuel consumption, fault conditions and environmental triggers, then transmits the data securely to RECO’s portal. Operators also can receive alerts when units are operating out of spec, fuel usage is unusually high or weather-driven winter protocols need to change.
By combining continuous remote monitoring with data analytics, Sno-NET enables a predictive maintenance model: Instead of reacting only after a blower fails, maintenance teams can forecast potential problems, optimize melter run-times and schedule servicing before breakdowns occur. This approach helps railroads reduce unnecessary fuel use, prevent emergencies in extreme winter conditions and extend the useful life of heaters, company officials said.
While wheelset repairs account for more than 50% of most rail-car owners’ maintenance spend, most owners have little control over how and when repairs happen, TransmetriQ officials said.
Trained on millions of wheelset lifecycles logged by Railinc’s Component Tracking Program, Wheelset Intelligence predicts the probability that a wheelset will receive an AAR A2-level WILD alert or above, providing rail-car owners advance notice to repair their car before having it pulled by the carrier for receiving an actionable alert.
WILD dynamic vertical force readings, mileage data and rail-car type (along with signal processing techniques) are used to create time-sequence datasets that are fed into a temporal neural network model. The model learns patterns between historical readings for each car type to determine which cars are likely to receive an alert.
Wheelset Intelligence provides a relative ranking of cars, enabling owners to prioritize cars among their fleet based on repair capacity. With the knowledge of when a wheel is likely to need replacement, equipment owners can choose to route cars to a private shop of choice instead of paying for more expensive running repairs, company officials said.
Trilogical delivers an end-to-end telematics and diagnostics suite for rolling stock that is designed to turn raw data into operational intelligence on both locomotives and rail cars.
For locomotives and MUs, Control FREAK shifts maintenance from late-stage detection to proactive prediction. The platform continuously collects rich sensor streams and operational context so engineers can see not only what failed, but why, Trilogical officials said.
Advanced analytics generate subsystem health indicators, surface anomalies and forecast issues before they become incidents; teams across operations, maintenance and engineering work from the same information base, investigating top-down (fleet to component) or bottom-up (sensor to system) and “capturing every learning into a persistent data lake,” company officials said. The result is a practical path from incident review to failure prevention, embedded in daily workflows.
For rail cars, RailBlazer is a second-generation telematics platform designed for precision and endurance. Proprietary energy management supports long service life, and DGPS/RTK positioning provides track-level accuracy within feet for yard and terminal operations, company officials said. A three-axis accelerometer captures and processes impact events within milliseconds for rapid analytics.
RailBlazer also estimates load state and weight to enable revenue/efficiency analysis, and its mesh-based Intra-Train Connectivity underpins long-train integrity and event awareness. An AI-powered vibration-analytics capability detects wheel flats with high detection accuracy and zero false positives, company officials said. High reporting frequency and BLE sensor connectivity support mileage- and condition-based maintenance.
As rail officials seek ways to increase reliability and efficiency, connected ecosystems are becoming central to how they manage their operations. ZTR’s IOT platform, Vision, brings together data from across the rail network — including locomotives, rail cars and maintenance-of-way equipment — to provide operators a unified view of fleet health, performance and maintenance needs.
By linking these traditionally separate asset groups, Vision helps railroads see the bigger picture of how their systems interact and identify opportunities for proactive action, ZTR officials said.
Vision can integrate information from solutions such as NexSys locomotive control systems, SmartStart AESS, KickStart starting assist supercapacitors, rail-car remote monitoring and MOW telematics solutions. The result is an end-to-end ecosystem that spans key functions of rail operations: traction and control, energy management, telematics and trackside asset monitoring, company officials said.
ZTR is rolling out Vision in phases; the first release is live, and subsequent versions will introduce deeper analytics, condition-based maintenance capabilities and expanded integration across asset types, company officials said.
Railroads, shippers, MOW operators and lessors using Vision can reduce unplanned downtime, extend component life and improve fleet utilization by aligning maintenance activities with real-time data, company officials said. The system’s insights also support sustainability goals by improving energy efficiency and minimizing waste from unnecessary servicing, they added.
Michael Popke is a Madison, Wisconsin-based freelance writer.
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