One hundred years ago, railroad police were mostly focused on the security of railyards, preventing robberies of trains en route and keeping "non paying" passengers off their trains. Today, while many of those responsibilities remain, the job of keeping the rails secure has multiplied many fold, especially since 9/11.
Today, rail operations and security teams must not only protect rail assets and the public, they must defend against unknown and unseen threats from terrorists. After 9/11, the rail industry established industry standards for rail security and the sharing and reporting of threats. The key mantra of that initiative was "Recognize, Record and Report". CSX has taken that industry standard and built upon it.
As a class 1 railroad, CSX operates 1000 trains a day over 21000 miles of track. If it moves from Chicago eastward in the United States, there's a good chance its moving on a CSX train. To protect the rail network, CSX has developed a web based workstation application called SecureNOW. SecureNOW stands for Secure Network Operations Workstation.
Using SecureNOW, rail operations teams can see, in real time, the location of every train and every rail shipment on the CSX network. Further, they can isolate hazmat shipments within the train consist to determine geographic location, shipment details, rail car type and class as well as hazmat emergency information.
SecureNOW also uses GoogleMaps type technology to allow zoom in geographic mapping to allow operations teams to see exactly where a rail car is relative to cities, towns, shipper plants and facilities etc. Suppose there is a fire at a shipper rail facility. Also suppose that there is a tank car of hazardous toluene on the rail siding. CSX can immediately see where that car is located and report the threat to local fire and police authorities.
The beauty of SecureNOW is that this system is designed to share information. CSX has made it available to state and federal authorities in many states with intent to share with all agencies across its network. For law enforcement authorities this is great technology for understanding both potential and actual risk in their communities. The railroad has SecureNOW active in 5 states within the CSX network
Future versions of SecureNOW will allow display of information on intermodal and ocean containers. With the TSA focused on 10+2 and other information transparency initiatives, the railroads will have to develop this capability in order to show hazardous or high risk shipments within ocean containers. For doublestack train consists, the ocean carrier is the shipper of record as far as the railroad is concerned, but the manifest for the container and shipping information will need to be available to systems like SecureNOW in due course.
Eric
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