Abstract
The safety of rail transportation has always been the top priority for the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). Legacy technology is still largely relied upon for detection of faults. Modern technology is mostly used to detect a particular railcar rather than to monitor it for problems. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is being evaluated by the railroads for real-time or near real-time monitoring of the railcar status for timely response to problems and for trend analysis. In this chapter the authors first highlight the importance of freight rail transportation, followed by briefly discussing specific wireless technologies of interest. In particular, the authors present the shortcomings of the ZigBee protocol in the application domain of railcar monitoring. The authors then introduce hybrid technology protocol. Finally, the authors discuss HTNMote, a hardware platform to implement hybrid technology network and present the results of tests showing the benefits of the new protocol and hardware.