(Norfolk Southern and GE issued the following on June 7, 2010.)
NORFOLK, Va. — Norfolk Southern and GE Transportation today announced the success of a technology that could change the rail industry by increasing the average network speed of trains by 10-20 percent or two-to-four miles-per-hour. One mile per hour in velocity improvement has the potential to save approximately $200 million in capital and expense annually.
GE’s RailEdge(R) Movement Planner is breakthrough software that improves railroad capacity and reliability while 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 optimized plan to get trains moving faster and more efficiently. By maximizing existing railroad resources, RailEdge also improves railroad crew management availability.
“RailEdge optimizes 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. This technology increases the capacity of railways worldwide, without laying a single new track,” said GE Transportation’s President and CEO, Lorenzo Simonelli. “A two-to-four miles-per-hour increase might not sound like a lot but in freight rail it is a big leap forward.”
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. In the Georgia application, Movement Planner will help Norfolk Southern increase the average network speed train velocity of its trains by 10-20 percent, representing a significant opportunity for cost savings and train delay reductions.
“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. When we make the best use of our existing transportation infrastructure, that’s a competitive advantage for our customers and for the country.”
GE’s RailEdge Movement Planner is the latest example of how GE’s $4 billion-a-year software and solutions services are helping customers improve productivity and efficiency worldwide. GE looks to deploy RailEdge internationally to meet the growing challenges of rail capacity constraints.