Washington, D.C. — Ask most people to picture a railroad and they’ll conjure up a childhood memory, or maybe their grandfather’s old job. But as GoRail President Betsy Cantwell told attendees at the organization’s latest webinar, that picture is about 150 years out of date. Today’s freight railroads run on artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and sensor networks that can spot a hairline defect from a moving train — technology most Americans never see. 

GoRail’s webinar, “From Steam to Sensors: Rail Innovation, Then, Now, and Next”, was held in partnership with the Association of American Railroads during its Innovation Week, and against the backdrop of the nation’s 250th anniversary. Nearly 200 attendees listened as the panel traced nearly two centuries of railroading, from telegraph wires strung along the tracks to today’s AI-driven inspection systems. As Cantwell put it, the throughline connecting all of it is simple: “Every generation of railroaders has asked the same question: How do we do this better?” 

A Museum Built on Two Centuries of “Doing Better” 

Kris Hoellen, executive director of what was, until this week, known as the B&O Railroad Museum, opened the panel with a big announcement: the museum has just been renamed the National Museum of Railroad History and Innovation. The timing of the name change lines up with rail’s bicentennial — the B&O was chartered on February 28, 1827, and its founding cornerstone, laid on July 4, 1828, has never been opened. The museum plans to crack it open next year as part of the celebration. 

Hoellen walked attendees through the museum’s collection, from Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb — the first American-made locomotive — through diesel-electrics, refrigerated “reefer” cars, and the world’s first railroad air conditioning unit, developed in secret by B&O engineer Olive Dennis and Willis Carrier of the Carrier Appliance Company in 1929. 

Looking forward, the museum is opening a new Innovation Hall in January 2027 focused on where the industry is headed. “The whole goal is to be able to show the public that the railroad industry is advancing, because they don’t know that,” Hoellen said. The hall will feature a data wall built with RailPulse, an interactive railcar exhibit showing modern sensor technology, and demonstrations of maglev and hybrid propulsion. 

Sustainability Is Driving the Next Wave of Tech at Norfolk Southern 

Josh Raglin, chief sustainability officer at Norfolk Southern, framed innovation through a business lens: sustainability, he said, is “about satisfying stakeholder demands, but it’s also just good business sense.” Rail’s efficiency advantage is already massive — Norfolk Southern’s data shows rail is up to seven times more fuel efficient than trucking. The railroad’s most efficient intermodal routes move a container the equivalent of 45 miles per gallon — same as a Honda Accord — while carrying 15 to 20 tons of freight in the process. 

Raglin highlighted a pilot project with Remora, a Detroit-area startup, capturing carbon dioxide, NOx, and particulate matter directly from locomotive exhaust. The mobile unit captures over 70% of CO2 and more than 90% of NOx and PM — and Norfolk Southern can resell the purified CO2 to industries like food and beverage, medical, and concrete.  

“It’s a really creative solution,” Raglin said, noting that a mainline locomotive burns roughly 200,000 gallons of diesel a year, producing about 2,000 metric tons of CO2 that the technology could help capture and repurpose. 

On the safety side, Norfolk Southern now has 10 digital train inspection (DTI) portals in operation, capturing roughly 1,000 ultra-high-resolution images per railcar at full track speed and running them through more than 80 machine-learning algorithms. “It’s really, how do we augment what humans are already doing with technology and identify defects, prioritize those,” Raglin said, adding that the railroad hit its lowest mainline derailment rate last year since deploying the portals. A separate system, automated track geometry measurement, is now installed on 25 locomotives and can flag track maintenance needs up to five years in advance. 

An Autonomous Freight Train, Already Running in Georgia 

Guchan Ozbilgin, head of perception at Parallel Systems, introduced attendees to something that sounds like science fiction but is already operating: an autonomous, battery-electric freight vehicle that needs no separate locomotive and no new infrastructure. “This is not a concept, but something running today,” Ozbilgin said, referencing an FRA-approved pilot currently underway in Georgia. 

The vehicles couple electronically rather than mechanically, forming platoons of up to 50 units, each carrying a 40-foot container rated up to 80 tons. They communicate with each other in real time to coordinate braking, which Ozbilgin said allows the platoon to stop in roughly a fifth of the distance a conventional freight train needs. A remote command center oversees the whole fleet, with every vehicle streaming full camera coverage, LiDAR data, and telemetry back to human operators — precise enough, Ozbilgin said, to place a vehicle within centimeters of where it needs to stop. 

The system leans on both AI and physics-based models to interpret what the sensors are seeing — is a switch aligned correctly, is the track clear — and to decide whether to stop, slow, or continue. But a person always  makes the decision: “AI decides very fast, a person still has final say for this,” Ozbilgin explained. Every mile the fleet drives feeds back into training the next generation of perception models, creating what Ozbilgin called a continuous “data flywheel.” 

Detecting Broken Rails Before They Become Derailments 

Dominika Dubinsky, Assistant Director of Operations Technology at CPKC, presented the railroad’s approach to catching broken rails in territory that lacks traditional signal-based detection. CPKC operates more than 780 mechanical detectors and over 2,400 rail-integrity overlay systems across its network. In the roughly 40% of the network that runs through unsignaled “dark territory” — where high-risk and dangerous-goods trains still travel — CPKC engineered a low-cost broken-rail detection system that Dubinsky said is 80% less expensive than a traditional signal-based solution. 

The setup is simple: a helical pile, mast, solar panel, and communications box wired to each rail, spaced at one-mile intervals so that if one unit goes down, its neighbors still cover the gap. When a train’s axles complete the circuit and a rail later breaks, the system detects the change and automatically alerts CPKC’s operations center, which holds approaching trains until a track inspector confirms it’s safe to proceed. The system currently catches broken rails at about a 90% success rate, and CPKC has since adapted the same hardware to monitor switch positions, rail and bearing temperature, and even detect fire near the track. 

Regulations Need to Keep Pace With What Technology Can Already Do 

Closing the panel, Devon Lidz of the Association of American Railroads made the case that policy hasn’t caught up to the pace of railroad innovation. Automated track inspection (ATI) technology is a case in point: a decade of pilot programs has shown that machine inspectors can find certain defects at far higher rates than manual walking inspections, freeing up track workers to focus on repairs instead. But Lidz noted that regulatory support for the pilots has been inconsistent, with some FRA administrations blocking waivers and some congressional proposals seeking to lock current visual-inspection requirements into law. 

“The rail regulatory system should be based on performance rather than specific operations,” Lidz said, arguing that regulators should set clear safety and outcome goals and let railroads determine the best technology to meet them — rather than mandating specific inspection methods written decades before AI, GPS, or automated sensors existed.  

He pointed to provisions in the U.S. House’s draft surface transportation reauthorization bill that would lock in current visual-inspection practices as a step in the wrong direction. “These provisions would just drive-up costs for railroads and our customers without any corresponding safety benefit,” he said. 

The Bottom Line 

From Peter Cooper’s wood-burning Tom Thumb to an autonomous freight platoon running today in Georgia, the throughline of freight rail’s story hasn’t changed: an industry constantly asking how to move goods more safely and efficiently.  

What has changed is the speed of that progress — sensors that see what human eyes can’t, AI that processes a thousand images per railcar in real time, and detection networks that catch a broken rail before it ever causes a derailment. 

As the panelists made clear, the next chapter depends on regulation keeping pace with the technology already in the field. With the industry’s bicentennial approaching and a new wave of innovation already running on the rails, freight rail’s next 200 years look a lot more like Silicon Valley than the era of Casey Jones. 

Want to help keep that innovation on track? GoRail’s Rail Champions network makes it easy to weigh in with your members of Congress as they finalize the surface transportation reauthorization bill this year. Visit the Action Center to send a message in support of policies that let freight rail keep innovating.