Image courtesy Railcar Tracking Co., a Division of Savage Services Corp.
Picture a customer who receives a hefty invoice from an auto repair shop with several additional charges and no details regarding the nature of these fees. The customer is left facing the question of whether to dispute the bill, and if so, how. Such has been the experience of U.S. rail shippers in recent decades when receiving invoices from the railroads for demurrage charges, which are applied by railroads for costs incurred when shipments are held up beyond a reasonable time.
However, a new rule finalized by the Surface Transportation Board (STB) in April 2021 has brought a welcome change for U.S. freight rail shippers, who previously had been subject to frequent and ambiguous demurrage charges from the railroads amounting to billions of dollars. In 2020 alone, Class I rail carriers levied almost $1.4 billion in demurrage fees on rail shippers.
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Which of the big seven U.S. railroads could make 2021 the year of railroad advanced cargo visibility thus introducing a real game changer for railroad cargo shippers?
Something more than just a cheap, small, smart communicating sensor indicating whether the rail car doors are closed.
Shippers need something more robust. And rail shippers want it now, not in 10 to 12 years.
Rail customers want to have usable logistics intelligence in an open-architecture API integrator software application a service that delivers carload freight location and condition information into a meaningful, easy-to-understand status report message. They do not care about the device used.