They say there’s romance in train travel. And I’ve certainly caught some beautiful sights through the eyes of my train-traveling coworker, Susie Gidseg and her personal Long Way Home blog.
But, many people ride trains simply to get from home to work and back. Their travel often looks more like this:
Man talking constantly on the phone on the train: “One call after another. You know how it is.”
Yes, we all know.
— John Dickerson (@jdickerson) February 9, 2018
What’s worse? A loud train ride or a quiet train ride but some guy decides to eat a bag of chips.
— kiwi🥝 (@Laurenk0ala) February 9, 2018
Girl on this train has been makin eyes at me the whole ride pic.twitter.com/IgYlbGCIXi
— The Corgi Corner (@TheCorgiCorner) February 9, 2018
Ok, so maybe that last one was not your typical commuter, but their owner very well could be one of the 475,000 riders our customer Rio Grande Pacific Corporation (RGPC) supports every year. The privately-owned holding company for regional freight railroads & support services is also responsible for an average of 120,000 carloads of freight each year.
And whether it’s commuters or freight, downtime is not really an option for them. Modern technology can make all the difference, but this 150-year-old industry has been traditionally slow to change.
“It has been a bane of existence of railroads to be able to get the information that they need to make rapid decisions,” says Robert Bach, president and COO, RGPC. “If you’re going to adapt for the future, you have to have the data at your fingertips.”
You can hear more from him and other members of the RGPC team in this video where they explain how Dell is helping them take on digital transformation.
In an industry where being on time isn’t actually that easy to define, success is measured in seconds. And while measuring those seconds on their own lines, RGPC’s Technology Group also is developing products for others. Dell’s Unity All-Flash has put them in a position to continue such growth.
“By choosing the [Dell] Unity platform we solved several needs. One is performance. The second is scalability,” said Jason Brown, chief information officer, RGPC, in this second video. “The platform has allowed our mission-critical safety signal systems to run on a robust redundant system.”
That’s vital when their team is providing crucial operations and maintenance offerings, including third-party dispatching, signaling and communications, technology solutions and maintenance-of-way (MOW) services, to commuter transit agencies and short line railroads.
Deploying technology has allowed them to move from being a cost center to being a revenue center, and create their railway internet of things pulling together systems that were once separate into one dashboard for all of their customers to see.
We’re proud that all those systems are being developed on Dell Unity All-Flash, enabling RGPC to speed deployment, streamline management and seamlessly tier storage to the cloud. Visit Dell.com/Unity to learn more about what it can do for your organization.
