The Advanced Train Control System (ATCS) is a radio communication network, including a network protocol that is used in support of the Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) system. An Advanced Train Control System (ATCS) is a system of railroad equipment designed to ensure safety by monitoring locomotive and train locations, providing. If you're in the US, this as close as you can get: There's a huge network of guys who've placed antennas around to monitor this data and relay it over the web; as such, you can monitor traffic on quite a few mainlines; where I live (Minnesota) there's particularly good coverage; you can monitor where trains are on a majority of Class I mainlines here - makes photography much easier when you can see where everything is. If you're technically oriented, you can set it up to run at home and upload a JPG image via FTP to a server, so you can easily view it on your phone. This won't show you precisely where trains are, or what the power is, but, a schematic of signal blocks showing occupancy and desired route is pretty helpful. In the US, there are four things I know of that you could potentially use to track trains; three of them could be done without involving the railroad. All US freight trains will have an EOT device (the blinking red light), a pusher locomotive, or a caboose on the end. Both the EOT device and the pusher locomotive are linked by radio to the lead locomotive, and it's possible to receive these transmissions on a scanner and decode them with your PC. If the train has a caboose and no EOT, which I think is fairly rare, then you won't be able to pick up anything from it. Look for the SoftEOT and SoftDPU groups on Yahoo! If you are interested. Cxbx emulator tutorial. Both of these programs have the ability to feed data to a central server, and I think you can get another program that will pull data from that server and draw you a map. I'm not 100% sure about the map, though. ![]() ![]() The EOT transmissions will only tell you the brake air pressure and (sometimes) whether the train is stopped or moving, but won't tell you the speed. The EOT radio is fairly weak (a few watts), so you can be pretty sure the train is close to your receiving antenna if you can pick up signals from it. The pusher locomotive data stream has more information, I think including the speed, and I think it has a little more power behind it. Neither one will give you the train symbol, though. You get a serial number from the EOT and I think maybe the locomotive number from the pusher, but you have to apply your own knowledge of the schedule and/or inspection of the train to know that it is the eastbound grain train, or westbound intermodal train, or whatever. If you have a location with line-of-sight to the tracks, you could always set up a camera and know when a train is going. A little bit of image processing would let you approximate the speed, at least during the day. On a double-track line, you wouldn't be able to see the far train unless you had multiple cameras. Finally, some freight cars have RFID tags on them, for a system called Automatic Equipment Identification. For this to work, the car has to roll by a box that first transmits a signal to 'wake up' the tag, and then listens for the signal from the tag. This box has to be fairly close to the side of the rail car, so it would probably need to live on railroad property.
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