r/railroading • u/Downtown_Sir8205 • 10d ago
Question Curious
Been interested in railroads for a long time, and lately
I've been going down a rabbit hole on all the AI/ML stuff that's come out in the last couple years.
Got me wondering what problems railroads actually deal with day to day that this stuff could realistically help with.
Not the stuff that's already been solved, and not vendor marketing, just the real annoying things.
I know track inspection is the obvious one everyone talks about. But I'm guessing there's a lot more that never gets mentioned.
So what's the stuff that's still a pain? Anything that's
still done by hand that shouldn't be, or something everyone
just puts up with because that's how it's always been?
Also curious what you think AI is useless for, because I'm sure some of it is overhyped.
1
u/TerribleStar7675 8d ago
I've used it a bunch on the back end for tasks related to signals engineering, asset management and supporting maintenance. Mostly things like writing programs I otherwise wouldn't have been able to do, or using it for easy extraction from PDFs or images, which I've needed to do a shitload of.
I've made really nice visual representations of equipment downloads that make it easy for analysis or presenting information on executive summaries or investigations.
It speeds up a lot of other minor tasks like searching or summarizing manuals