Word: rails
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, of course--but so far we haven't tried very hard. The Federal Government is spending $4.5 billion on aviation security this year but only $65 million on rail security--even though five times as many people take trains as planes every day. And if we understand one thing about terrorists, it's that they stick to what they know. Since 2000, bombs have gone off (or been defused) on railways in India, Russia, France, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Israel and Germany. Iyman Faris, a truck driver from Ohio...
Beginning in December, AZF sent the President and Interior Ministry letters grousing about the state of French society and warning that it had planted bombs along the nation's rail lines and at two other unidentified vulnerable targets. Officials say they were instructed to communicate with the group via personal ads in a newspaper, using the code name "Big Wolf" for AZF and "Suzy" for the ministry. A day after officials posted one such ad, they received the GPS coordinates of a sophisticated bomb that had been planted along a line in central France, which ballistics experts detonated...
...locomotives haven't changed in two decades," he says, "most people have not seen an ops center like ours, not even at NASA in Houston." Automated readers, located every 30 miles along the 33,000-mile system, scan the bar codes of passing cars and locomotives--basically the rail version of a toll tag--and wirelessly transmit that information. Customers can log on to the company's website to track shipments in near real time or get the data sent to their BlackBerries...
...take the system to the next level, even if that means tagging every piece of lumber it hauls. "Whatever interests Wal-Mart fascinates the hell out of me," says Campbell. But BNSF is taking the technology beyond the Wal-Mart initiative to use RFID to identify deterioration in rail equipment--eliminating mechanical accidents before they happen...
...Rail's Big Comeback Rising imports from China and improved technology spell a boom for railroads like BNSF...