CSX Smart Crossing

CSX maintains more than 10,600 highway-rail grade crossings, and at the start of the program only about a quarter of them could report their status to a central data center. Federal regulation (49 CFR Part 234) requires a schedule of periodic crossing tests, many of which send a signal employee to the site to take the crossing out of service and physically activate it. CSX's Highway Crossing Enhanced Operation program set out to change that: continuously monitor each crossing's equipment so periodic physical tests can become data-driven inspections, trouble calls and downtime drop, and failures are caught before they happen.

The equipment at a modern crossing already produces the data the program needed: the ElectroLogIXS VPM3 crossing controller, the RECO smart battery charger, and the DAU event recorder. The problem was getting at it. Each device speaks a different protocol, and there was no software at the crossing to collect that data, apply railroad-specific alarm logic, and feed it into CSX's back-office Crossing Alarm Management System (CAMS). CSX needed an edge software stack that could sit at the crossing, unify those devices, and bridge them, in both directions, to the back office.

OEG built the complete edge software stack for the CSX enhanced crossing: a set of containerized services that all run on a single device, the Knorr-Bremse (KB) WSDMM Wayside Edge Gateway, installed at the crossing site. An MQTT broker sits at the center of the design as a common message bus, keeping the field devices decoupled from the back-office integration. Every component OEG built runs on that gateway; nothing OEG wrote runs in CSX's back office.

To collect from the field, OEG built services that read each device in its native protocol — SNMP v2c traps from the ElectroLogIXS VPM3 crossing controller, SNMP polling of the RECO charger for voltage, current, temperature and fault data, and a TCP collector for DAU recorder alarms — using custom SNMP MIBs OEG authored for the ElectroLogIXS and RECO hardware. A rules engine evaluates that data against configurable, railroad-specific conditions: low battery, AC power loss, DC ground faults, recorder heartbeat loss, and crossing-controller low-phase and high-signal faults, converting qualifying events into CAMS-format alarms.

To carry that data to CSX, OEG built the ATCS and CAMS integration: an ATCS network bridge and an OCG connector that run on the WSDMM gateway and exchange ATCS/CAMS traffic, bidirectionally, with CSX's back office. CAMS is an evolution of a legacy Siemens system called WAMS: outside of Siemens itself, OEG is the only company that has built software able to communicate with CAMS/WAMS natively and completely. The stack also closes the control loop — a Genisys controller issues control commands back to the VPM3 crossing controller in response to monitored conditions — and ships as Docker containers with a pre-configured Portainer instance for managing the deployment on the gateway.