Most rail shippers have some form of tracking: a login to the railroad's customer portal, a car location feed, a dashboard from a tracking provider. And most still find out about problems from the customer. That is because railcar tracking and shipment management are two different things. This guide explains how railcar tracking actually works, what each source of data gives you, what the data cannot tell you, and the daily work that turns location reports into on-time deliveries.
How Railcar Tracking Works
Railcar tracking is built on events the railroads report as cars move: arrived at a yard, departed, interchanged to another railroad, placed at the customer, released empty, bad-ordered, held. Those events are combined with waybill data so a shipper can see where each car is in its trip.
The basic unit is the car location message (CLM): a record of a car's location and status at a point in time. Railroads send them to customers on a schedule the customer sets. One Class I railroad's implementation guide, for example, offers anything from every half hour to once a week. Status codes in those messages tell you more than location: bad order, bad order release, equipment delayed or held, storage.
Because many shipments cross more than one railroad, the industry also maintains cross-railroad tracking. Railinc, the AAR's data subsidiary, runs RailSight, which includes Track and Trace across more than 560 carriers, along with monitoring, exception reporting and messaging. Only parties named on the bill of lading can receive a shipment's location data.
Where Shippers Get Railcar Tracking Data
| Source | What it gives you | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Railroad customer portals (for example UP's Customer Portal, CSX's ShipCSX, BNSF's Trace tool, CPKC Customer Station) | Shipment status, ETAs and, on some, exception views for that railroad | One railroad's view; you log in to each one |
| Car location messages | Event feed of location and status for your cars | Update frequency you set; needs a system or person to read it |
| Railinc RailSight | Cross-railroad tracking, monitoring and exception reporting | Paid; one reseller cites a $1,000 monthly minimum for direct access |
| Tracking resellers and software | Combined feeds, dashboards, alerts | Only as useful as the person acting on the alerts |
| GPS devices on private cars | Position between railroad reports | Location only; no railroad status or reason |
For most shippers, the data is not the hard part. The railroad portals cover their own lines, and cross-railroad data is available at a cost that is small next to one week of a delayed car.
Reading a Car's Trip History: An Example
Here is what a typical loaded trip looks like as a series of events, and where trouble shows up. The trip is illustrative; real event names and timing vary by railroad.
| Event | What it tells you | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Released loaded at shipper | The car is ready for pickup | Long gaps before pickup mean it is sitting on your track or the serving track |
| Pulled from industry | The local crew has it | |
| Arrived at origin yard | It is being built into a train | Time in the yard compared with normal for that yard |
| Departed yard | It made a train | |
| Arrived and departed intermediate yards | It is making connections | An arrival with no departure in the usual window means a missed connection |
| Interchanged to another railroad | The handoff happened | No report from the receiving railroad after the handoff |
| Bad order, held or storage status | Something is wrong | Any of these: act the same day |
| Arrived at destination yard, constructively placed or actually placed | It is at or near the customer | Placement starts the demurrage clock at most customers |
| Released empty | The trip is over, the car heads back | Time from placement to release is your customer's unloading time |
Every gap between those events has a normal length for your lane. Knowing it is what lets you spot a problem before the ETA does.
What Railcar Tracking Data Can't Tell You
- Why a car stopped. “Held” and “bad order” are statuses, not explanations. The reason, and what the railroad needs from you, usually takes a call.
- What is about to happen. Industry reporting rules say bad orders may not be reported in advance. You see the event after it happens.
- A reliable ETA when things go wrong. Estimates assume the car makes its connections. A missed connection at a yard can push a car back days, and the ETA catches up later.
- How long a stopped car will sit. Published railroad dwell averages generally exclude bad-ordered and stored cars, the cars that sit longest.
- Whether anyone has noticed. The data shows the problem; it does not call the railroad, the customer or the contractor.
From Railcar Tracking to Shipment Management
Shipment management is what turns the data into on-time freight. It looks like this every day:
- Pull every active car from the portals or feed.
- Compare each car to its plan: where it should be by now on that lane, not just where it is.
- Flag the exceptions: no movement past a set number of hours, any bad-order or held status, a car at an interchange too long, a car that will miss the customer's need-by date.
- Work each one the same day: call the railroad, find the cause, fix what is on your side, such as forwarding instructions, load adjustments or embargo permits. Our exception management guide covers each type.
- Update customers proactively with revised arrival estimates.
- Plan empties. Use the same data to know when cars will be released and back for loading, so production does not wait on equipment.
- Keep the record for claims, demurrage disputes and railroad service reviews.
None of that is technically difficult. It is daily, it never stops, and it is the first thing to slide when the person responsible has another job. That is the gap a managed service fills; see our comparison of an outsourced rail department vs an in-house rail manager.
Setting Alert Thresholds for Your Lanes
The most useful single alert is “this car has gone quiet longer than normal.” To set it, you need history, not guesses:
- Export a few months of car events for one lane from your railroad portal or car location feed into a spreadsheet.
- For each car, calculate the hours between consecutive events.
- For each segment of the trip, such as origin yard to departure, or interchange to the next report, find the typical gap and the slow end. The median and the 90th percentile are good choices.
- Set the alert at about the slow end. A car past the 90th percentile gap is unusual enough to check, but not so tight that you chase normal variation.
- Add a hard rule for statuses: any bad order, held or storage status alerts immediately, regardless of time.
- Review the thresholds every quarter. Railroad performance changes, and STB service data shows terminal dwell moves from year to year.
A spreadsheet can do all of this. The formula for “hours since last event” is just the current time minus the last event time, times 24. The discipline is checking it every day.
Choosing a Tracking Setup for Your Fleet
| Your situation | A sensible setup |
|---|---|
| A few cars a month on one railroad | That railroad's customer portal, checked daily, plus car location messages by email |
| Steady volume across two or more railroads | Cross-railroad tracking through RailSight or a reseller, so one view covers every handoff |
| A private or leased fleet | Cross-railroad tracking plus fleet records for empties, cycle time and storage; GPS devices if you need position between railroad reports |
| Any of the above with no one available daily | A managed service that watches the data and acts on it |
Questions to ask any tracking provider: which railroads and events it covers, how often data updates, whether it alerts on statuses and on quiet cars, whether you can export history, and who, if anyone, acts on an alert.
Tracking Empties, Not Just Loads
Most shippers watch loaded cars because the customer is waiting. The empty trip back matters just as much if you run private or leased cars, because production waits on empties.
- Released empty is the start of the next trip. The time from release at the customer to arrival back at your plant is half your car cycle, and it is the half nobody watches.
- Empties get stored, misrouted and forgotten. An empty with no load waiting for it has no one asking about it, so it drifts.
- Empties drive fleet size. Cars needed is roughly loads shipped per day times days in the full round trip. Shave days off the empty return and you need fewer cars. Our guide to the true cost of leasing a railcar shows how that flows into cost per load.
- Empties tell you what is coming. Empties in transit today are the cars you can load next week. Matching that to your production schedule avoids both idle cars and a short supply on a heavy week.
Common Railcar Tracking Mistakes
- Watching the ETA instead of the movement. The ETA updates after a problem; the missing movement shows it first.
- Checking weekly. A weekly look finds problems that are already a week old.
- Ignoring statuses. A bad order or held status is the most valuable line in the feed.
- Tracking only one railroad. Problems cluster at handoffs, where a single railroad's portal goes blind.
- No owner. Data sent to a shared inbox is data nobody reads.
- No history. Without past trips you cannot tell normal from late, or show a railroad that service has slipped.
What to Measure From Your Tracking Data
- Transit time by lane: average and the slow end, not just average. The slow end decides how much inventory or safety time you need.
- Car cycle time: loaded out to back empty. It sets how many cars you need, which drives the true cost of a leased fleet.
- Exceptions per hundred cars, by type, by lane and by railroad.
- Time at your facility and the customer's: the driver of demurrage.
- On-time delivery against the customer's date.
Those numbers turn a service conversation with a railroad from a complaint into a case. For more on the technology side, the rail technology course module covers where tracking is headed, and our rail services page covers how we handle monitoring.
Sources: Railinc product descriptions and TRAIN II User Manual (April 2026); CN car location message implementation guide; Union Pacific, CSX, BNSF and CPKC customer tool pages; Railcar Tracking Co. RailSight pricing notes; BNSF glossary. Product names and features change; check with each provider.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I track a railcar?
Through the railroad's customer portal for its own line, through car location messages the railroad sends you, or through cross-railroad tracking such as Railinc's RailSight or a reseller. You need to be a party on the bill of lading to receive a shipment's location data.
What is a car location message?
A car location message, or CLM, is a record a railroad sends showing a car's location and status at a point in time, such as arrived, departed, interchanged, placed, held or bad order. Customers choose how often they receive them.
What is RailSight?
RailSight is Railinc's rail shipment visibility suite. It includes Track and Trace across more than 560 North American carriers, plus monitoring, exception reporting and messaging tools.
Why is my railcar ETA wrong?
ETAs assume the car makes its planned connections. If a car is held, bad-ordered or misses a train out of a yard, the estimate can be days off until the railroad updates it. Watch for cars that stop moving, not just the ETA.
Is railcar tracking free?
Railroad customer portals are available to their shipping customers, and car location messages come from the railroads. Cross-railroad tracking through Railinc or resellers is a paid service, with pricing that varies by provider and volume.