One mile per hour in velocity improvement can potentially save approximately $200 million in capital and expense annually.
GE's RailEdge Movement Planner software improves railroad capacity and reliability whilst reducing transportation costs. By integrating railroad logistics with traffic control systems, the technology projects expected track usage based on train schedules, and then produces an optimised plan to get trains moving faster and more efficiently.
By maximising existing railroad resources, RailEdge also improves railroad crew management availability.
"RailEdge optimises the railroad resources that are already in place - something that only technology can truly help us achieve - by enabling railroads to move more freight faster on their existing networks," said GE Transportation's president & CEO Lorenzo Simonelli. "This technology increases the capacity of railways worldwide, without laying a single new track."
Having pioneered the implementation of RailEdge Movement Planner on a 200-mile section of its railroad in Georgia, Norfolk Southern is expanding the technology's use to its entire 22-state rail network through 2012.
"With railroads, it's about scale," said Wick Moorman, CEO of Norfolk Southern. "GE's RailEdge supports incremental routing and speed improvements down to the individual train level. That will add up to sizeable efficiency gains on a 2,500-train per day, 21,000-route mile system like ours."
