Location of a particular train.?

Question

Location of a particular train.?

Answer 1

This is a pretty vauge query.  If you want to know if an Amtrak train is late, check their web-site or call 1-800-USA-RAIL.  If you want to watch a train, rail buffs tend to know the usual schedules and approximate timings, but it's a vauge art and science to tell exactly where a freight train is.  The railroads are only now beginning to get into GPS, although signaled systems have been more precise for 50 years.

This information is not just freely available public knowledge, although it's not a secret either.  I'm a little shy about just spitting out answers here, in view of terrorism, etc.  Although I will also say that if one wanted to derail a train, that would be a pretty poor idea for a terrorist plot because trains are pretty sturdy and while some trains might (or might not) happen to have hazzordous materiels on them, the likelyhood that any individual action you might want to plan would actually cause a big catastophe is low.  That's why the stuff is shipped by rain in the first place, instead of by a truck which is much more dangerous (as the incident in Oakland reminds us).

Answer 2

The Central Dispatch has constant locations of trains.

Answer 3

As for timetables, the private freight railroads in the U.S. no longer provide these for safety reasons.  You can, however, listen to scanner chatter to see where a particular train(s) is operating in your local area.  You can now also listen to select radio frequencies online at the website below.

Answer 4

This answer is about operations in the USA and Canada.

The dispatcher knows exactly where a train is (in CTC territory) and exactly where a train's supposed to be (in ABS and dark territory).



For the general public, it's a little harder.   The freight railroads pretty much stopped running scheduled freights in the 1980s.  Dispatching improved enough that trains could be controlled directly by the dispatcher via block signals and radio, so there was no need to "formally schedule" trains and thus invoke a bunch of archaic, restrictive rules about train movements.

Passenger trains, of course, operate on a regular schedule; they have to, otherwise the passengers wouldn't know when to show up at the station.