Natural disasters cause major disruptions to the railways, leaving shippers without insight into the overall impact to the rail network. When the washouts hit British Columbia, shippers lacked real-time data. They couldn’t see where slow-downs had occurred, which of their trains were being prioritized (if at all), and how pre- and post-crisis production differed. They were in the dark as their trains and wallets suffered.
We had requests from several customers to send breakdowns of our daily data, so they could better understand what was happening to the network as a whole, as well as their individual shipments. RailState’s comprehensive, real-time data on rail operations is generated using our own proprietary system, completely independent of the railways. For the shippers affected by this crisis — and any other crisis — RailState’s data served as a crucial management tool.