Railroad Train Location Tracking with GPS

John C. Wauer

Abstract:	Several major railroads have a strong interest in increasing control over freight traffic thus improving efficiency and safety through digital communications with the trains and digital processing on board the locomotive with an automatic positioning device installed on the locomotive. GPS offers many advantages as the positioning source. Position accuracy requirements and the challenges for GPS are discussed. Train location is used for safety critical functions and so integrity of the GPS solution is of concern. Methods of transforming GPS ECEF vectors into the one dimensional coordinate frame used by the railroads are presented. Experience gained from testing GPS for three years on an operational railroad are discussed.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1990) June 26 - 28, 1990 Atlantic City, NJ
Pages:	57 - 61
Cite this article:	Wauer, John C., "Railroad Train Location Tracking with GPS," Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1990), Atlantic City, NJ, June 1990, pp. 57-61.
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