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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I’d kind of like real-time tracking of freight trains. There’s a BNSF grade crossing between my home and my parents’ and it would be nice to know whether I should take the 1 mile detour to get to the tunnel beneath the rail yard if there’s a train going to be blocking (I suppose it would also help to have info on the length of the trains so I’d know if the train in front of me is almost clear or if there’s another mile of train behind it).

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It'd be great. My understanding is that there's basically no live data for freight trains unfortunately

Since the implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC) there is live data but the RRs don't make it publicly available. Real time GPS data is transmitted to the Computer Aided Dispatching (CAD) system and combined with consist data they can determine where any one car is located at any time.

By the time I left the company several years ago that data was being restricted to only certain employees. As noted below, hasmat is likely the reason this kind of data is not publicly accessible. It is shared in a limited fashion with shippers, etc.

Speaking of consists, I was impressed a few months ago when I saw a mid-train locomotive for the first time, then last week I saw a BNSF train that was a mile long¹ with a single locomotive at the front and a second at the back which I’ve never seen before.

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1. Assuming average car length of 40'

there definitely is, but the roads aren't going to share it.

and tracking trains ain't like tracking planes, where they're easy to see up in the sky and constantly transmitting -- train X takes a turn around a mountain and it's in a radio/cell deadzone and that's it.

plus unless you have high-end SAMs you're not able to impact most planes overhead, but shady individuals could certainly impact trains.

Train tracking in dead zones has approximately zero consumer-facing utility. Train tracking in urban areas would be very helpful for route mapping around grade crossings.

There has to be data because often passenger rail shares railway with freight rail and have to schedule things to avoid accidents.

Live data would be great, but I'd be interested even in historic data. Not like 1880s but a timeseries of 15-minute granularity of train positions for last year. It'd be interesting to see what the bottlenecks were and what other routing possibilities there could have been.

That sounds like something a three-letter agency would get all stuffy about.

If it's ok to see real time location of planes and cargo ships, how come it wouldn't be ok for trains?

way more attack surface?

Perhaps, but at the same time, it probably wouldn't be hard to research what sorts of trains would be good targets, and then physically go check them out.

If you want to blow up a train it's already pretty easy. Find a track and wait.

don't even need a bomb, its not hard to cause derailments. a shovel and some time is enough

Also hazardous chemicals

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