I've seen this sort of multi-colored barcode looking thing in some various prototype boxcar photos. Does anyone know what it is. Found this on a NS MW box today. Thanks.
It's the old "ACI" label. It was supposed to work like the bar code that you find on items in stores. Only these were color coded. But they quickly got covered in grime and the cameras couldn't read them. They weren't a success.
That's an ACI plate for identifying cars when they pass a scanner. That way you don't have to manually record every car that enters the yard or passes on the mail line. OTOH, it didn't work and isn't used anymore. :teeth: I am not sure of the details, but it was around in the 1970's? Some engines have/had them, too. It is a nice detail I sometimes put on my models to establish that they are "older." I have taken the liberty of posting the picture of the ACI plate Micro Scale decal product from their website:
"ACI" stands for Automatic Car Identification. As Flash said, it was for recording what cars were where.
Did anything ever replace it? Seems to me a chip with a short range transponder could emit a code with the car ID.
Locally, we had a reader along side the mainline between Holland and Zeeland. At night, a sensor would trigger trackside lights that would come on so that the sensor could read the "bar" code. Now we are seeing the use of radio frequency identification systems (RFID) where the information is encoded on a tag on the car, and read by sensors along side the track. We have a set of sensors a couple miles north of us that CSX installed about a year ago.
