Norfolk Southern Monitors Trailer Tires

Norfolk Southern Railway Company has selected The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company’s TPMS Plus (Tire Pressure Monitoring System) technology for its trailer fleet across North America.

TPMS Plus is a part of Goodyear’s complete Tire Management Program, designed to help fleets save time and money by alerting them to developing tire situations. The solution’s on-vehicle sensors monitor tire conditions in real time, allowing fleets to quickly identify and triage issues like air leaks, low pressure and abnormal temperature.

Once a potential issue is detected, Goodyear Fleet HQ can assist in routing the driver to a Goodyear service network location or dispatch roadside assistance to perform preventative maintenance.

After a successful TPMS Plus pilot with Norfolk Southern’s intermodal operations, Goodyear began to deploy the solution at the Norfolk Southern Fairburn, Ga., facility earlier this year.

Installations will be expanding to additional facilities in Illinois, Indiana, and Florida over the next several months.

“The Norfolk Southern TPMS Plus deployment is the largest fleet installation to date for Goodyear,” said Johnny McIntosh, director, Integrated Solutions & Tire Management for Goodyear. “Our collaboration with Norfolk Southern showcases Goodyear’s ability to develop adaptable technology solutions that meet our customers’ needs. TPMS Plus allows fleets like Norfolk Southern to more efficiently protect and maintain their tires, preventing costly tire-related roadside breakdowns and time off the road.”

TPMS Plus also includes GPS-enabled theft detection, battery back-up for hardware and integrations into existing fleet maintenance systems. With this range of features, Goodyear’s TPMS Plus product is one of the most versatile and comprehensive tire monitoring solutions on the market today, according to Goodyear.

“TPMS Plus has already provided insight into our tire program that we otherwise did not have, resulting in immediate improvements to our maintenance processes,” said Andrew Knouse, group manager, Road Equipment Maintenance and Planning, Norfolk Southern. “In a sample of 20 chassis during the initial weeks of installs, we collected over 10 occurrences that prevented further failures. For example, TPMS Plus helped Norfolk Southern provide a new level of customer service by providing an alert that a tire was losing air and required attention. We, in turn, notified the driver of the problem, and the driver was able to pull over and have the tire addressed, preventing further damage to the tire and delay in his route.”