KarTrak, sometimes KarTrak ACI (Automatic Car Identification) or just ACI was a colored barcode system designed to automatically identify railcars and other rolling stock. KarTrak was made a requirement in North America in 1967, but technical problems led to the abandonment of the system in the late 1970s.
Railroads have struggled with the tracking of railroad cars across their vast networks, a problem that became worse with the increased growth of systems and movement of rail cars from network to network via interchange. A railroad's car could end up a thousand miles away on another companies tracks. This didn't factor the ever growing fleet of privately owned railroad cars, from companies such as TrailerTrain and Union Tank Car Company, who owned massive fleets of railroad cars, but were not actually railroads. A missing car took time to track down, often requiring workers to walk rail yards looking at cars until it was located.
In 1959 David Jarrett Collins approached his employer GTE Sylvania to use a newly developed computer system in conjunction with scanners to track railroad cars. [1] The idea was inspired by Collins summers in college where he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. [1] During the early portion of the 1960s, Sylvania's Applied Research Lab team met with representatives of various railroads to gain insight into their needs and wants for a car tracking system. Features and design aspects desired by the railroads included: [1]
KarTrak's development testing occurred in 1961 on the Boston & Maine Railroad, using passenger trains and a gravel train that did not leave the Boston & Maine railroad network. [1] Using trains that were always confined to Boston & Maine enabled easy testing, refinement and demonstration the KarTrak system, as cars fitted with the system were always around and their movements known. [1]
Sylvania early on moved to sell KarTrak to smaller, 'captive' railroad systems. [1] Captive railroads [lower-alpha 1] , such as those used to supply coal to a power station on a isolated system were a prime environment, as issues caused by cars not equipped by KarTrak wouldn't occur due to the lack of cars entering or leaving the railroad, and all cars being owned by the railroad in question and thus able to be equipped with labels. In three years, 50,000 railroad cars were equipped KarTrak labels. [1] This severed a dual purpose, allowing Sylvania to generate money to invest in further development of the system, while also denying a foothold to competing car tracking systems.
KarTrak was also be advertised to railroads in publications such as Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal in large, full page ads pushing the monetary and efficiency benefits. [2] [3]
By the mid to late 1960s, railroads in North America began searching for a system that would allow them to automatically identify railcars and other rolling stock. Through the efforts of the Association of American Railroads (AAR), a number of companies developed automatic equipment identification (AEI) systems. The AAR selected four systems for extensive field tests:
All those systems, except the RFID system, had labels that were mounted on each side of the railcar, and a trackside scanner. [1]
Following disagreements with Sylvania regarding the future potential of KarTrak, Collins departed in 1968 to form his own company to continue research and development into scanners and barcodes. [1] [5]
After the initial field tests, the ABEX, Wabco, and GTE KarTrak ACI systems were selected for a head-to-head accuracy test on the Pennsylvania Railroad, at Spruce Creek, Pennsylvania. The KarTrak system was declared the winner and selected by the AAR as the standard. [1]
Starting in 1967, all railcar owners were required by the AAR to install ACI labels on their cars. By 1970, roughly 86% of the 2 million railroad freight cars were carrying an ACI plate, with some railroads having completed labeling of their freight cars. Twelve railroads had completed installation of approximately 50 ACI trackside scanners. [6]
In 1972, GTE Sylvania decided to exit the railcar tracking field, and sold KarTrak to Servo Corporation of America. [7]
By 1975, 90% of all railcars were labeled. The read rate was about 80%, which means that after seven years of service, 10% of the labels had failed for reasons such as physical damage and dirt accumulation. The dirt accumulation was most evident on flatcars that had low-mounted labels.
The AAR had recognized from their field tests that periodic inspection and label maintenance would be requirements to maintain a high level of label readability. Regulations were instituted for label inspection and repair whenever a railcar was in the repair shop, which on average happened every two years. The maintenance program never gained sufficient compliance. Without maintenance, the read rate failed to improve, and the KarTrak system was abandoned by 1977.
Even towards the end of and after the demise of KarTrak, development of improvements based on the system did continue, with three patents being issued in 1976, 1977 and 1982 that were based on the KarTrak technology, one for a variable label that could signal an issue with car, like a refrigerator car that was too warm, a self cleaning ACI label, and a three-dimensional 'optical target' as another attempt to eliminate the known issue with dirty labels. [8] [9] [10]
In November 1977, the Association of American Railroads released a short white paper that flagged several problems with KarTrak: Frequent inaccuracies in data, ACI labels reaching the end of their life span and requiring replacement, and lack of universal adoption within the railroad industry. A weighted ballot would be conducted of all interchange railroads, weighted based on ownership of railcars, to if the ACI requirements would be eliminated. [11] The result of this ballot was to eliminate the requirement to install ACI labels. The decision was overwhelming, with a 5 to 1 margin. [12] Despite claiming in their white paper that the dissatisfaction with ACI "would not mean the railroad industry was taking a step backward in car utilization, or operating efficiency or in the adoption of modern technology." of this failure, the railroad industry did not seriously search for another system to identify railcars until the mid-1980s. [12] [3]
KarTrak ACI tags consisted of a plate with 13 horizontal labels put in a vertical arrangement that are also understood as data lines, which could have 13 different forms. These labels, or symbols, stand for the single digits 0-9, the number 10 as an extra feature for the checksum line, and the "START" and "STOP" labels that gave reference to the vertical line position of the tag. [13] Present day available depictions of the labels do often name the upper color first and then the lower color.
In practice people found that there was a significant number of cases where the label set was not done correctly or the label application had errors such as a 180° rotation of it - whilst as a rule of thumbs the blue stripes of START and STOP would have been needed to point to the left with a to-the-middle-of-the-tag orientation. Especially the color selection and sequence ordering of STOP seems to be the subject of such errors leading to decoding errors and needs for decoder workarounds for the field that effectively weakened the system. Even some early times advertisement materials exposed such flaws. Also its said that checksum labels had been wrong sometimes, and even the label set itself had some variations in respect to the imprinted number.
| Upper Stripe | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lower Stripe | blue | white | red | black |
| blue | 9 | 0 | 10 / center of STOP | 5 / left STOP |
| white | 6 | 1 | 2 | 8 |
| red | center of START | 7 | 4 | 3 / right START |
| black | - / left START | - | - / right STOP | - |
- = not used / reserved
white = white/black checker pattern aka checkered
The labels, also understood as data lines, each had two horizontal stripes that together represented a single symbol of information. The used colors for the stripes were blue, white, red and black. This does make up a total of 16 combinations where only 12 were used in the center area by just excluding black to be the lower color. For sensor reasons the white color was dimmed down by a black checkerboard so that they roughly met with the intensity of red and blue that were light sensed via a color filters.
| Sensing element | blue | white | red | black |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| for red | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| for blue | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
The labels each are 5+3⁄4 inches (15 cm) wide and 1 inch (2.5 cm) high. With a 3⁄8 inch (0.95 cm) vertical gap between the labels realized a total height of 17.5 inches (44 cm). Labels could be affixed directly to the car side, but usually were applied to dark plates, which were then riveted to each side of the car. [14]
The labels were made from retroreflective plastic sheet that was coated with red or blue dye to provide distinguishable color filters. The retroreflective material gave a clear optical signal that could be read from a 9-to-12-foot (2.7 to 3.7 m) distance and easily distinguished from the other markings on the railcar. The white areas provided both a red and blue optical response to the reader, and were patterned with dots so that their brightness would be about the same as a red or blue stripe.
The start and stop labels were partially filled, so that the reader scanning beam would be centered on them before they were recognized. This ensured that the entire label was centered and had the best chance of being read accurately.
The labels are to be read from bottom to top:
The first digit of the equipment owner (line 2) marks the type of equipment: 0 for railroad-owned, 1 for privately-owned, or 6 for non-revenue equipment.
The car number is left-padded with zeroes if necessary. For locomotives, line 6 is the type of unit and line 7 the suffix number.
The check digit is calculated as follows: Each number digit is multiplied by two to the power of the labels's position minus two. Thus, the first digit (line 2) is multiplied by 1, the second by 2, the third by 4, the fourth by 8 and so on, until the 10th, which is multiplied by 512. The sum of all these numbers modulo is the check digit. [13]
The code on the caboose in the picture at top can be decoded as Start 8350199918 Stop 5. This means a car with equipment code number 8, ownership code 350, which lists this as a car of the Illinois Central Railroad, [15] car number 199918, with a check digit of 5.
Labels were placed on both sides of all railroad equipment, including locomotives, passenger cars, and cabooses. Labels were required to be unobstructed, and couldn't have anything such as ladders, railings, grab iron between them and the scanner. When placed on rail cars with external [16] For curved surfaces of tank cars, an oversized ACI label was available, known as a 'extended-range panel' The retroreflective stripes on these panels were 3.5 inches (89 mm) taller than standard stripes. [16]
 |
The readers were optical scanners, somewhat like the barcode scanners used for retail store barcode items today. The scanning distances and speeds meant that the processing electronics needed to be state-of-the-art for its day. They were placed along the rail lines, often at the entrance and exit of a switchyard and at major junctions, spaced back from the tracks so that the labels would pass in the reading zone, 9 to 12 feet (2.7 to 3.7 m) from the scanner and with the scanner aperture at 9 feet 6 inches (2.90 m) above the railhead. [17]
The scanners were housed in metal boxes typically about the size of a mini-refrigerator, 24 by 24 by 12 inches (610 by 610 by 300 mm). [17] They consisted of a collimated 100-200 watt xenon arc light source arranged co-axially with red and blue sensing photo tubes. The coaxial optical arrangement provided optimum sensing of the retroreflective labels. This optical source and sensing beam was directed to a large (8–14 in or 20–36 cm) mirrored rotating wheel that provided the vertical scanning of the railcar. The movement of the train provided the horizontal scanning. Although the system could capture labels at 60 miles per hour (97 km/h), often the speeds were much lower. [18]
The scanner's analog video signals were passed to a nearby rail equipment hut where the processing and computing electronics were located. [19] [20] The first systems were discrete circuits and logic and only provided an ASCII-coded list of the labels that passed the scanner. These were forwarded to the rail operators for manual tracking or integration with their computer systems. Later reading systems were coupled with era minicomputers (Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8s), and more elaborate tracking and weighing systems were integrated. Sometimes these included many railyard input sensors, for rail switch position, car passage, and hot wheel bearing sensors. Some of the more productive and thus longer-lived systems were installed in captive rail applications that carried bulk goods from mines to smelter, where the weight of individual cars loaded and unloaded tracked the bulk inventory.
The KarTrak system proved to need too much maintenance to be practical. Up to 20% of the cars were not read correctly. Further, ACI did not have any centralized system or network, even within railroad companies. The information collected from wayside scanners was printed out with little means of searching for information beyond going through piles of paperwork. Clerical personal became frustrated by the increasing error rate. These issues would lead to the abandonment by the ARR who discontinued the requirement for rail cars to have KarTrak labels. Between 1967 and 1977, the railroad industry spent $150 million on KarTrak, and up to 95% of cars were barcoded. [3]
Railroad cars that were in service prior to 1977 would go on to carry KarTrak labels, with labels being still observed on freight cars into the 2000s. [21] These labels have vanished in time due to a combination of repainting, major overhaul, and the retirement of cars, particularly due to the AAR Rule 88 and 90, which restrict use of rail cars built prior to July 1, 1974 to a 40 life, which ran out for most cars in the mid-2010s. Cars built on and after 1 July 1974 are subject to a 50 year life, with mandatory retirements to start in 2024. [22] [23]
Versions of KarTrak technology were trialed in other fields. In the late 1960s, the New Jersey Turnpike explored the system as a way of billing vehicles using the toll road, as well as identifying the vehicle. A computer would calculate the toll due and a bill would be sent to the driver. [24] Like the original version of KarTrak, vehicles would be fitted with a label approximately 3 by 7 inches (76 by 178 mm) that would be scanned by a camera at toll booths.
In the 1984, Computer Identics Corporation, Collins' company following his departure from GTE Sylvania, would sue Southern Pacific Transportation, along with three other companies, alleging they'd acted in a conspiracy to intentionally undermine KarTrak, in favor of a system Southern Pacific had been working on called TOPS. The lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful, with the jury having found there was no evidence of a conspiracy, which was then upheld on appeal. [25]
GTE Corporation, formerly General Telephone & Electronics Corporation (1955–1982), was the largest independent telephone company in the United States during the days of the Bell System. The company operated from 1926, with roots tracing further back than that, until 2000, when it was acquired by Bell Atlantic; the combined company took the name Verizon.
The Universal Product Code is a barcode symbology that is widely used worldwide for tracking trade items in stores.
A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly referred to as linear or one-dimensional (1D), can be scanned by special optical scanners, called barcode readers, of which there are several types.
DX encoding is an ANSI and I3A standard, originally introduced by Kodak in March 1983, for marking 135 and APS photographic film and film cartridges. It consists of several parts, a latent image DX film edge barcode on the film below the sprocket holes, a code on the cartridge used by automatic cameras, and a barcode on the cartridge read by photo-finishing machines.
A barcode reader or barcode scanner is an optical scanner that can read printed barcodes, decode the data contained in the barcode on a computer. Like a flatbed scanner, it consists of a light source, a lens, and a light sensor for translating optical impulses into electrical signals. Additionally, nearly all barcode readers contain decoder circuitry that can analyse the barcode's image data provided by the sensor and send the barcode's content to the scanner's output port.
An image scanner—often abbreviated to just scanner—is a device that optically scans images, printed text, handwriting or an object and converts it to a digital image. Commonly used in offices are variations of the desktop flatbed scanner where the document is placed on a glass window for scanning. Hand-held scanners, where the device is moved by hand, have evolved from text scanning "wands" to 3D scanners used for industrial design, reverse engineering, test and measurement, orthotics, gaming and other applications. Mechanically driven scanners that move the document are typically used for large-format documents, where a flatbed design would be impractical.
Optical mark recognition (OMR) collects data from people by identifying markings on a paper. OMR enables the hourly processing of hundreds or even thousands of documents. For instance, students may remember completing quizzes or surveys that required them to use a pencil to fill in bubbles on paper. A teacher or teacher's aide would fill out the form, then feed the cards into a system that grades or collects data from them.
PDF417 is a stacked linear barcode format used in a variety of applications such as transport, identification cards, and inventory management. "PDF" stands for Portable Data File. The "417" signifies that each pattern in the code consists of 4 bars and spaces in a pattern that is 17 units (modules) long. The PDF417 symbology was invented by Dr. Ynjiun P. Wang at Symbol Technologies in 1991. It is defined in ISO 15438.
A QR code is a type of two-dimensional matrix barcode, invented in 1994, by Japanese company Denso Wave for labelling automobile parts. A QR code consists of black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background, including some fiducial markers, which can be read by an imaging device, such as a camera, and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted. The required data are then extracted from patterns that are present in both the horizontal and the vertical components of the QR image.
Interleaved 2 of 5 (ITF) is a continuous two-width barcode symbology encoding digits. It is used commercially on 135 film, for ITF-14 barcodes, and on cartons of some products, while the products inside are labeled with UPC or EAN.
A reporting mark is a code used to identify owners or lessees of rolling stock and other equipment used on certain rail transport networks. The code typically reflects the name or identifying number of the owner, lessee, or operator of the equipment.
Automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) refers to the methods of automatically identifying objects, collecting data about them, and entering them directly into computer systems, without human involvement. Technologies typically considered as part of AIDC include QR codes, bar codes, radio frequency identification (RFID), biometrics, magnetic stripes, optical character recognition (OCR), smart cards, and voice recognition. AIDC is also commonly referred to as "Automatic Identification", "Auto-ID" and "Automatic Data Capture".
Automatic equipment identification (AEI) is an electronic recognition system in use with the North American railroad industry. Consisting of passive tags mounted on each side of rolling stock and active trackside readers, AEI uses RF technology to identify railroad equipment while en route.
Smart Label, also called Smart Tag, is an extremely flat configured transponder under a conventional print-coded label, which includes chip, antenna and bonding wires as a so-called inlay. The labels, made of paper, fabric or plastics, are prepared as a paper roll with the inlays laminated between the rolled carrier and the label media for use in specially-designed printer units.
Forms processing is a process by which one can capture information entered into data fields and convert it into an electronic format. This can be done manually or automatically, but the general process is that hard copy data is filled out by humans and then "captured" from their respective fields and entered into a database or other electronic format.
David Allais is an American expert and inventor in the fields of bar coding and automatic identification and data capture. As vice president and later president and chief executive officer of Everett, Washington-based Intermec Inc. (NYSE:IN), he built the company from a small startup into the leading manufacturer of bar code and printing equipment. Prior to Allais' role at Intermec, he served as a manager for IBM. Most recently, Allais founded PathGuide Technologies, a Bothell, Washington-based developer of warehouse management systems for distributors.
The GS1 Databar Coupon code has been in use in retail industry since the mid-1980s. At first, it was a UPC with system ID 5. Since UPCs cannot hold more than 12 digits, it required another bar code to hold additional information like offer code, expiration date and household ID numbers. Therefore, the code was often extended with an additional UCC/EAN 128 bar code. EAN 13 was sometimes used instead of UPC, and because it starts with 99, it was called the EAN 99 coupon barcode, and subsequently GS1 DataBar. After more than 20 years in use, there is now a need to encode more data for complex coupons, and to accommodate longer company IDs, so the traditional coupon code has become less efficient and sometimes not usable at all.
Barcode technology in healthcare is the use of optical machine-readable representation of data in a hospital or healthcare setting.
Barcode library or Barcode SDK is a software library that can be used to add barcode features to desktop, web, mobile or embedded applications. Barcode library presents sets of subroutines or objects which allow to create barcode images and put them on surfaces or recognize machine-encoded text / data from scanned or captured by camera images with embedded barcodes. The library can support two modes: generation and recognition mode, some libraries support barcode reading and writing in the same way, but some libraries support only one mode.
David Jarrett Collins was an inventor and businessman whose career was focused on bringing barcode technology into the mainstream. While at Sylvania in 1960, he led a team that developed the first functional barcode system for tracking railroad cars, and subsequently worked on developing laser barcode systems.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link) (Additional weblink: ACM Digital Library - Computers in transportation.Rule 88 and 90
Cars more than 40 years old as measured from the year of original construction...
| Linear barcodes | ||
|---|---|---|
| Post office barcodes | ||
| 2D barcodes (stacked) | ||
| 2D barcodes (matrix) | ||
| Polar coordinate barcodes | ||
| Other | ||
| Technological issues | ||
| Other data tags | ||
| Related topics | ||
