Washington, DC — If you picture America’s freight rail industry, you might imagine the iconic steam engines that shaped our early economic landscape. But as Betsy Cantwell reminded attendees during GoRail’s first webinar of 2026, today’s railroads are “quietly high tech.” Behind the scenes, automation, AI, digital inspection tools, and advanced data analytics are reshaping how freight moves across the country — and making it safer than ever.

GoRail’s latest webinar, The Modern Railroad: Technology Driving the Future of Freight Rail, brought together experts from across the industry to explain how innovations are improving safety, reliability, and the customer experience. The discussion made one point especially clear: the railroads’ digital transformation is not a distant prospect; it is already underway.

High-Tech Inspections at Track Speed

Kicking off the technical deep dive, Brian Yeager, Senior Director of Mechanical Operations and Support at Norfolk Southern, walked participants through the railroad’s cutting-edge autonomous inspection systems. Since 2022, Norfolk Southern has developed nine digital train inspection portals designed to analyze railcars as they pass through at full track speed.

“These systems use a 360-degree view using 38 different high-resolution cameras,” Yeager explained. The portals capture roughly 1,000 images per train and process them instantly using artificial intelligence (AI) housed on-site through edge computing, which brings computation and data storage closer to where the data is generated.

From there, the alerts move to the railroad’s 24-hour wayside help desk, where human expertise meets machine precision. “That’s where the human intervention occurs,” Yeager said. “Images are verified, marked as non-actionable, or flagged as maintenance or critical defects.”

In late 2025, Norfolk Southern added another breakthrough: a wheel-specific inspection system called the Wheel Integrity System (WIS). Within its first month, the technology detected a wheel with a hidden crack.

“This was a new wheel… just placed on the car four days prior,” Yeager said. “Identifying it prevented a very significant derailment.” After NS issued industry-wide alerts, the manufacturer located seven additional compromised wheel sets and removed them from service — a clear indication of how digital tools can strengthen safety across the entire ecosystem.

Technology as a Catalyst for Growth

For Dan Anderson, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Trinity Industries, the future of railroading hinges not only on safety but also on competitiveness.

“Rail has a mandate to grow,” he said. “It is the safest, most efficient, most sustainable mode of land-based transportation — and it deserves to be winning a greater share.”

Anderson emphasized equipment availability as a key barrier for shippers. In a recent survey, the top reason customers moved freight from rail to truck was equipment issues — from getting the right railcar at the right time to ensuring quality.

Technology, he argued, is the bridge. Trinity is currently working with innovation partners to develop autonomous or automated railcar technologies — such as a hopper car with a ground-operated hatch that removes the need for workers to climb to unsafe heights. “It eliminates the safety risk,” he said, while improving loading efficiency.

Real-time data and telematics are also transforming how shippers interact with the network. Trinity now has visibility into “one in every two carloads generated in Canada,” Anderson said, allowing shippers to reroute, avoid bottlenecks, and make informed decisions during disruptions.

During the fires in northern Manitoba, Canada, last year, analytics showed a customer that diverting traffic through the U.S would move their product faster than waiting out congestion, even though the route was longer. “In this instance, we were able to help the customer utilize rail better, be more efficient, and serve their customers better as well,” Anderson noted.

Automated Track Inspection: A Path Toward a Safer System

While some innovations focus on equipment, others target the track beneath it. Todd Kuhn, VP and Chief Engineer of Maintenance and Planning at BNSF, described the railroad’s rapidly expanding automated track inspection (ATI) program.

Geometry cars, essentially rolling laboratories, have existed for decades — but recent advancements have multiplied their reach. “We’ve gone from testing around 250,000 miles a year to exceeding 600,000 miles,” Kuhn said. This year, BNSF expects to surpass 1 million.

Modern systems that are designed, maintained and owned by BNSF like ODIN (Onboard Defect Identification & Notification; an onboard geometry system), THOR (Track Health Optical Recogition; an optical inspection tool for rail joints), and LiDAR sensors capture minute defects humans are unable to see.

“These automated means of inspection are much, much better at finding the needles in the haystack,” Kuhn said.

The results speak for themselves: since the mid-2010s, BNSF has seen a significant reduction in track-caused derailments, even achieving its safest year ever in 2025. “We are definitely on the path to zero,” Kuhn emphasized. This trend is echoed throughout the freight rail industry, with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announcing in early March that railroads achieved record safety performance in 2025. In particular, human factors–related accidents declined nearly 20 percent year over year, reflecting the expanded deployment of innovation technologies.

The FRA’s Railroad Safety Board recently approved a new five- ‑year waiver that enables U.S. railroads to broaden their field testing of automated track inspection technology. This expanded authority allows the industry to collect essential data, strengthen inspection practices, and continue advancing rail safety through ATI.

Industry-Wide Research Powering What’s Next

Zooming out to the industry level, Scott Cummings of MxV Rail described how shared research is accelerating innovation across North America. As he put it, MxV Rail serves as “the research and testing ground for the North American railways,” bringing together a team of more than 100 engineers, scientists, and technical specialists focused on advancing safety and performance.

From their Pueblo, Colorado campus, researchers combine laboratory analysis with full-scale testing on nearly 20 miles of dedicated track. This setup allows them to replicate real world conditions and study how equipment behaves under continuous stress.

Cummings highlighted projects that are already moving the industry forward, including flexible eddy current array (ECA) technology that can detect microscopic bearing flaws and new laser-based tools designed to identify cracks in the base of a rail before they cause problems in the field.

Underscoring the purpose behind this work, Cummings noted that MxV’s research is rooted in three priorities shared across the industry: “safety, reliability, and efficiency.”

Regulations Must Evolve with Technology

Closing the panel, Melissa Connolly of the Association of American Railroads emphasized a critical point: innovation can only scale if regulations keep pace.

“Railroads are one of the oldest regulated industries in this country,” she said. “A lot of our regulations are still based on a time period of railroading that no longer reflects how railroads operate today.”

Track-caused accidents are down nearly 50% since 2005, but while safety has dramatically improved, the rules governing inspections and technologies remain highly prescriptive. Connolly argued for a shift to performance-based, data-driven standards that allow railroads to adopt better tools as they emerge.

One example is the federal framework governing track inspections, which was originally written in 1971—long before modern tools like GPS, advanced sensors, or automated inspection technologies existed. While railroads today deploy sophisticated systems that can detect track issues quickly and with greater precision, the rules still largely reflect an era when inspections were conducted entirely by manual visual checks. Updating these regulations to reflect modern capabilities would allow railroads to better integrate new technologies.

“We want to measure safety outcomes,” she said. “And give railroads the ability to find the best way to achieve that safety goal.”

With Congress preparing for the next surface transportation reauthorization, she noted that modernization of these rules will be a top priority.

The Bottom Line

Freight rail is entering a new era — one defined not by horsepower, but by processing power. Across the industry, leaders are deploying tools that see more, learn faster, and respond instantly, all while strengthening safety and efficiency.

And as the panelists made clear, the potential is enormous. With updated regulations, continued investment, and a focus on growth, freight rail can deliver more of the goods America depends on — more safely, more sustainably, and more reliably.