KarTrak
KarTrak was made a requirement in North America in 1967, but technical problems led to the abandonment of the system by around 1977.
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] 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.
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.
[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.
[6] In 1972, GTE Sylvania decided to exit the railcar tracking field, and sold KarTrak to Servo Corporation of America.
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.
[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.
[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."
[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.
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.
[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.
[17] They consisted of a collimated 100-200 watt xenon arc light source arranged co-axially with red and blue sensing photo tubes.
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.
[18] The scanner's analog video signals were passed to a nearby rail equipment hut where the processing and computing electronics were located.
[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 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.
