Trackside RFID readers on Finland’s rail network identify freight wagons as they pass at speeds of up to 250km/h, in winter conditions that can reach -45C. The system was built by Turck Vilant Systems for VR Group and Väylävirasto, and it puts a confirmed wagon identity against movements across a network of roughly 5,900km.
Väylävirasto, the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, is the government body that owns and manages Finland’s state road, rail and waterway networks. VR Group is Finland’s state-owned rail operator, and its freight and logistics arm VR Transpoint runs the wagon fleet the system tracks. Turck Vilant Systems is an industrial RFID integrator headquartered in Espoo, Finland, formed after the German automation group Turck took a majority stake in Vilant Systems in a deal announced in 2017.
Passive tags, trackside readers, one central server
Rugged RFID tags are mounted on the sides of individual wagons. Vilant Railroad Reader units sit at chosen points along the track, with antennas specified for snow, ice, sleet and sustained cold down to -45C. Reads are fed to a Vilant Server, which holds the fleet data centrally and works out daily and cumulative mileage for each wagon.
The choice of Gen2 UHF RFID is what makes the speed figure achievable. EPC Gen2, standardised internationally as ISO/IEC 18000-63 and marketed under the RAIN RFID banner, is a passive ultra-high-frequency air interface that operates in the 865 to 868MHz band in Europe. Passive means the tag carries no battery and draws its power from the reader’s own field, so it needs no maintenance visit for the life of the wagon. UHF also delivers a read range of several metres and an inventory rate fast enough to capture a tag in the fraction of a second it spends inside the antenna’s field at line speed. Lower-frequency alternatives manage neither at that pace. There is more on the bands and the terminology in the RFID glossary.
Giving trackside safety detectors a wagon number
The more interesting part of the deployment is what it connects to. Finland’s network already carried two classes of trackside safety detector. Hot Axle Box Detection (HABD) measures the temperature of passing axle boxes to catch a bearing that is running hot before it seizes. Wheel Impact Load Detection (WILD) measures the vertical force each wheel puts into the rail, which climbs sharply when a wheel has a flat spot or has gone out of round.
Both detectors are good at spotting a fault and poor at saying whose fault it is. On their own they produce a reading for whichever wheelset has just gone past. Reading the wagon’s RFID tag at the same location supplies the missing half of the record. A temperature spike or a heavy impact reading is then attached to a specific wagon in the fleet register, which turns a trackside alarm into a scheduled maintenance job on a known asset rather than a hunt through a train consist.
What VR Group gets from it
VR Transpoint reports real-time identification and monitoring of wagons, full inventory visibility across the fleet, and simpler management of the shared wagon pool, alongside the safety gain from acting on detector faults before they become failures.
“Real-time monitoring and traceability of location and movement saves time and simplifies asset pool management,” said Mikko Särkkä, Head of IT at VR Transpoint.
Fixed trackside portals suit rail better than most industries because the assets pass the same points repeatedly and cannot leave the track. A wagon may be away from its home yard for weeks, but every section it enters can be made to record its number without anyone walking the length of a train with a clipboard. Further deployments of the same idea are collected in the asset tracking and vehicle tracking categories.
Read more at https://turckvilant.com/success-stories/running-at-250km-h/
