Very interest presentation. In the middle 1970s, I was running a convenience store about 25 miles west of Boston. One day, a young lady parked her car in front of the store. Being an avid railfan. I noticed that she had a ACI label attached to her front door. In the process of ring up her items that she bought, I asked her why she had a ACI label on her car. She proudly exclaimed that her father had invented it. Always thought it was kind of neat. Thanks to this video, I now know how the ACI label came to be and also how the technology has grown to all the things that we all use today.
I love that you used footage of American trains AND of railroads of the period. I've seen a lot of other channels that talk about rail transportation in the US use stock footage of trains from anywhere but the US. This documentary was really well made.
Usually it's just the wrong time period though. It's not like any idiot wouldn't recognise US trains from say European ones. Those where two very different industries back in the day. I mean still are. US freight looks nothing like German freight for example.
Unless it was written by a person with that knowledge, that sort of thing happens inevitably. Just watch cartoons and play video games and you see what I mean: locomotive types in the wrong country, valve gear that would never function correctly, diesels using steam whistles and vice versa.
I hired out with the railroad in 1975 and retired in 2015. I remember all of this including the hiring of more clerks to 'Walk the Tracks' to make the train lists 'AGAIN"! Back then the car numbers were punched into IBM cards and placed in Pigeon Holes that represented an inbound train, outbound train, or a yard track. To get a list the clerks would pull out a stack of IBM cards and put them into the 'Card Reader'(they were so amazed they called it a 'Computer'). The 'Card Reader' then printed the list of cars(or IBM Cards) and that's how we got our in/out bound 'Train Lists' and 'Switch Lists'. I also remember the 'Kartrak' Colored Placards and the 'Scanners'. When the RF ID tags showed up I took one off of a boxcar, glued two magnets to the back of it, and would put it on the front of my locomotive. Occassionally I would get radio calls asking if we really were shoving a box car ahead of our locomotive for 115 miles on the Main Line ? That's why their was a .0009 % failure rate, but don't tell anyone.
I have a handful of unused IBM waybill Cards from Conrail in mint condition. They were buried in a filling cabinet with a bunch of other old paperwork that was going to be tossed. We were already into 5 years of CSX control and their fuck ups made some guys remember the Penn Central era all over again.
@@onrr1726 Thanks for the reply. My very first railroad experience was with Penn Central, Toledo, Ohio in 1975. I remember well both the 'Ex' Pennsyvania employees complaining about the New York Central employees. It was non stop bitching about the 'Other' railroad, DAILY. On top of that the 'Old Heads' still questioned whether or not our paychecks would be accepted by a bank. The third thing I remember was the blatant thievery. But I'm vary native to Southern California so I left after one year.
Same here, only I was able to find out right away. Our family's best friend was a Railroad Engineer, and so I remember asking dad when I first noticed them (abt. 1967-8)? I grew up in Terre Haute Indiana, and it is one of the larger switchyards in the US...you did not go anywhere in town w/o being railroaded at least once. We had no overpasses at the time. You always needed to add a half hour to any errand in town if there was a rr track in between! One evening, as we were heading to the south end of town, we were rr'd (like every day), I noticed something I had never seen before, the "barcodes". Dad had already asked Gene, so he told me. I was a cashier at Woolco from 76-78, and we still used regular old price tag stickers. However, I remember almost immd. after I quit, they installed scanners.
I like how the railroad companies wanted to handle maintenance themselves, proceeded to not do that, and then deemed Kartrak codes useless because they were unmaintained
It's probably more that they wanted to handle the data themselves, but weren't given the option of just doing that without also taking on the maintenance.
@@gcewing nah, i bet they just wanted to cut costs: if they really wanted to monopolize their hardware they could have shared the data without problem but restricted access to their hardware. The fact is that if you do everything in-house it must be cheaper especially if you already have employers there... and especially if you don't do it
Almost every member of my family has worked for the railroad. In the seventies my brother would tell the story of one of his crew mates who, when switching railcars, found the barcode placard from a railcar laying in the weeds. Thinking it would be a fun gag, he placed the placard on the rear step of the last loco in their consist. When they yarded their train, they unhooked the power (locos) and headed to the diesel shops. The guy took the placard off the step, put it in his bag and then went home. He did this each trip and never heard boo about it. Until one day the yardmaster, trainmaster and a host of other management were waiting for my brother's crew when they arrived at the shops. As it turns out they'd had all kinds of personnel tearing the yard apart each week, looking for this ghostly railcar (I think it was a tank car) without any luck. The crewmember got some demerits but not fired. Imagine the carload supervisor's face when, each week, the ghost car would appear on his print out.
Kartrak was actually a good idea, but the inability of printed KarTrak codes to withstand snow and dirt was its downfall. I'm glad you mentioned RFID, because it took the KarTrak idea and made it work because it could operate regardless of weather conditions.
Well, it also didnt help that the railroads wernt maintaining them. Had they gone with the original plan of being a subscription service. It would have worked out alot better
It'll be interesting to see if this type of progression (visual to radio) will happen in the autonomous vehicle space. Better yet, will technology advance so much that we see a system of RFID tags embedded in the road evolve into relying back on just visual processing?
@@realpillboxer you know what’s crazy is that the model railroad community has their own version of RFID tags, they attach to the bottom of the car and as they roll through the scanner, which is just a device under the ties, can scan the RFID tag which can tell a person the initials, car number, even the owners name and address if they choose. It’s used mainly on automated club layouts or where they run “ops” sessions and a person is designated as a dispatcher and he can keep a live track of the cars in the trains running
Not surprised you wouldn't have known seeing as unless you were a railroader or a railfan of a certain age and was in use not all that long relatively that the ACI labeling faded from sight by the early 80s
Nice to find you her , They are many technologies that we didn't know them especially in data storage field . Imagine how they manage to make a color scanner with no transistor or ccd.
It will get there, but sadly most people aint interested in the small details in life, what a shame, so much around us we take for granted today but there decades if not hundreds of years of history behind it. Like the calculator, everyone has a calculator today in their life but think about the deep and complex history around the calculator goes back thousands of years.
My dad was a model railroad hobbyist, and when I was about 5 years old in the early 1970s, I saw a freight car with one of those colored bar codes on it and I asked my dad what that was, and he explained to me a computer scanned those striped colored lines on it so that it could keep track of what was in the car and where it was going.
There is no reason for a film about old railway technology to be that good. Amazing work put into this piece and I am so glad to have stumbled across it. Bravo!
Nice show, I enjoyed learning who invented the bar code system. As an apprentice In the mid 70's I used to sharpen bar code readers for Plessey Communications in Australia, because if they weren't sharpened right they would not work properly. We also used to repair fax machines that burnt the paper to make a duplicate of what was transmitted over the phone line and we used to fix telephone answering machines and all sorts of equipment. I loved the technology back then, learning how to repair microwave ovens and fix almost everything electronic, it's a shame that now if it breaks you just throw it away and get another one? So now I just program stuff and if it breaks, which it does, we just replace it. They call it an advancement in technology, but I'm still not convinced. Thanks again for this story, really enjoyable, and bought back some great memories, when electronics was new and exciting.
This is the first time I heard Sylvania was a cutting edge tech company at one time. All I know them for is in 2021 is budget electronics, kinda like RCA. Oh how the giants have fallen
From my perspective Sylvania has fallen even more as I literally only heard about them in the last year or so and only on Amazon where I assumed they were just some Chinese knockoff company. My parents used to have a nice RCA CRT TV (from back when it was actually RCA and not whoever currently owns them). Technology Connections actually did a series on RCA that's worth the watch if you haven't seen it already.
Sylvania back in the day was big in radio. Often making scores of the tubes used in them. Sylvania was also involved in the development of COBOL. Which is still in use today.
When I was growing up we had a Sylvania console TV in our living room, one of those big TVs that sits on the floor and is also a piece of furniture. It had lots of tubes in it and when it was acting up we'd hire a TV repairman to come out to the house and fix it. Those things weigh a ton so you ain't casually throwing in the car to take to a shop. (Also, we used to fix our electronics back in the 70s/80s, not just throw them out like you do now). Later on I found out that Sylvania had a lot of defense contracts to build electronic equipment for the military. They were never as big as RCA, but they were pretty much a household name.
As a railfan, that certainly was an interesting look at something I had no idea about. I especially like the part of the video where you visualize different cars passing and their codes popping up as it contained many railroads that are no longer (known as fallen flag railroads).
Penn Central's 1970 bankruptcy was the biggest American business bankruptcy to date, and the catalyst for a major shake-up of the American railroad industry. Results were: Conrail (later split mostly between NS and CSX), Amtrak, and various commuter train authorities like MTA-LIRR and Metro-North, MBTA, NJT, SEPTA, MARC, and others.
I actually have two of these labels: one from DMIR 31838 (an ore car), and the other from DMIR 163 (an engine). They were one of the few companies that kept using ACI labels long after most railroads stopped, partly because they ran an almost fully captive fleet. Most of the surviving DMIR-era ore cars still have ACI labels on them, though CN doesn't use them anymore. It's great to hear the backstory. I also know that I did in fact find a reader still in place, also on ex-DMIR trackage
That's really sweet! My grandpa was one of the freight schedulers for DMIR from the 50s until he retired (late '70s?) which was after USS had bought them of course. He grew up in Two Harbors and both sides of my family had many DMIR employees, although he was in Duluth most of his life. His father had lost a hand (had a hook) in a coupler accident way back in the day, and apparently died on VE day while out hunting birds. One of my grandpa's brothers went into electrical engineering and worked on electric rail programs across the US, and apparently some submarine propulsion as well. One of my grandma's brothers had been a boilermaker for DMIR, but he turned into one of the town drunks (do you happen to remember "Chuckie" from Two Harbors?) and had a really fat pension for a guy who apparently was a town fixture. It's odd when you go to college and your new friends actually knew your great uncle - at least his "habits" lol. Anyways, I have some old DMIR maps from my grandpa and a couple of other doodads with their logo on it - but what really rocked was a few years ago there is a hobby shop up in Duluth that had a DMIR boxcar (HO scale). I'm not even into model railroads but I just had to get it. :D
@@chouseification That's some pretty awesome history! I'm not actually from the area (about 50 miles north of the Cities), but my family's hunted North of Fairbanks since the '20s (they took the train up to scout the area in 1921 and hunted the next year). Oddly enough, we lost a guy hunting in 1970 - got a big ol' buck and a heart attack got him. Not a bad way, really
@@ebnertra0004 sounds like a nice place to hunt, and yes... if you've gotta go, not a bad place to have it happen. It's funny when you say you're ~50 miles north, as the other side of my family had a cabin on Pokagema (by Pine City) for decades. No good railroads around there, but the cabin a few down from us had one of those old red Mobil gasoline pegasus signs on his boathouse, so it was a great landmark to find your way home. Back to railroads though - I was down in Red Wing by the waterfront park with a couple of college friends and one of their hordes of younglings. Trains would go past and the kids asked what was in the cars, so I showed them how to google the train's car identifier (I forget the formal name) which would let you know who owned it, then by hazmat tags and type of car what it _could_ be holding... they got good. That's right by the big canola oil plant and after doing some "hmmm"ing, they correctly deduced that the cars on one track carried in fresh beans to be processed, one over carried finished product ready to be shipped, and the third one contained husks or whatever was left over - likely going to be used in livestock feed. It's fun that they were able to do that. Also, Dakota oil shipments kept passing every 15 minutes or so - long trains blasting through. They got to smash a bunch of pennies, and recovered most. :D
@@peterdibble I'm late to the party but when I saw that my first thought was: "Oh, I hope he left an Easter egg." Yes! That attention to detail shows us that you truly care about the viewers.
I don't know how I ended up here, but I'm sure glad I did. What an amazing production and a fascinating look at Kartrack. Thank you for making this documentary. Amazing work!
The quality of your work is amazing. Can I strongly suggest that you take it to Documentary Film Festivals and look to sell it round the world. If I saw this from BBC horizon I would have thought it was made by them. Truly astonishing broadcast grade quality. Truly inspiring at the quality of product that can be achieved
Thank you for producing and presenting this video documentary, very well done! I've always wondered how the Kartrak barcodes came to be, having been somewhat familiar with them, being a casual railfan ever since I was a kid. The last time I ever saw a railcar that still had a Kartrak barcode on it was about 2-3 years ago, it was on an empty coal car at an Montana Dakota Utilities (MDU) coal-fired power plant in North Dakota. I was there on a service call for work, and right as I was leaving the plant after finishing the call, there was a rather well-weathered coal car (with the old green Burlington Northern livery and logo, IIRC) parked on the rails going into the plant with a faded but mostly intact Kartrak ACI barcode on it. Surprising to still see it there after all of these decades (or a coal car that old still in service). I've barely seen the barcodes anymore on most railcars recently, especially looking at those passing by at the railroad crossings when I'm out driving in town or elsewhere. They were a much more common sight on railcars back in the 80s, and even into 90s and 2000s. I remember spotting for cars that had them (and interesting graffiti tags too :) ) as they passed by at the crossing. But the barcodes started to become less common as the new millennium began. I imagine with the railroads upgrading and changing out their rolling stock over the years, most of these older barcoded cars have probably gone away to scrap (or rebuilt) as a result.
I learned a loose history of Kartrak many years ago and found it interesting but this is way more detailed and goes into way more of the entire story than I knew about. The video was extremely well written, paced, and produced! Thank you so much for making this!
Well, every technology is connected in a way and one fail, will give birth to a new one. There is even a Channel revolving around this idea called... "Technology Connections" (who would have guessed it)
Nearly 50 years ago, I remember a guy said he was part of some startup who made a color bar code for trains, but he said a large company got the contract after they saw their color bar code prototype.
As a child, I remember sitting in the car waiting for a train to pass. Even then I recognized the bar code as some sort of identification tag. Being so young I thought that is just the way it was without understanding the technology. Great video.
I have to say, the presentation as a whole, especially the calm manner of narration and the melancholy background music is perfect. Just the way I like my history documentaries. Felt like watching a top level TV documentarie. A very talented creator.
I've been working as a contract train operator at Wyoming coal mines for 20 years now. Somehow I learned about the railroad barcode history very early on. Back then you would still see steel hoppers from the 60s and 70s and some of them had the bar codes on them, although even then they were deteriorated. The only ones that still looked good then, were the oldest aluminum cars, the flat bottom gondolas that Detroit Edison controlled, made in 1985. These 1985 cars soon became the first large scale "lease return" that I remember seeing over the years, as suddenly these cars started showing up on non-DE trains with freshly applied FURX 961xxx (First Union Rail Leasing) identifiers. Of course, the bar codes never got changed, they are still there, sort of. I still see these cars today. But no one has equipment that reads them, it's all AEI now. Oh, and I find it rather amusing that at Coal Creek Mine, on the exit side of the silo, are relics of the past, a set of unused track scales plus an empty trackside housing that clearly once held an ACI reader. These must date to 1982 or so, which is when the track was built. So I guess someone was still using the optical ACI system into the 1980s.
This was cool to watch. My father was into all this stuff back in the 60s and 70s. He used scanners to set the timing on huge conveyers used in commercial food production and packaging. Nice to see these unsung innovators remembered.
You can still see these on older cars and locomotives to this day. One of the yards I used to work out of in Portland OR still has the readers in place as of 2018.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s I always remembered seeing these on rail cars and they've held a special place in my heart ever since. I've done a fair bit of research on them as I've gotten older and your documentary here is by far the best presentation of the information. Thanks for putting it together.
I hate to wait for a freight train to pass at the rail crossing. Now this is a game changer. Can't wait to see if I can coincidentally see any old carts with those colored barcodes.
The production and quality of this video is immensely high. From start to finish you had me into the story. You do deserve a bigger audience then you have right now. Keep it up!
Excellent documentary! I played this via home stereo system while cleaning the house. The narration is so well done I did not need to watch the video at all. And, because this is so well done, I will watch the video too. Thank you.
Very well done! Another company to look into is a subsidiary of Guilford Transportation Industries. I forgot the name of the company, but it was something along the lines of StarTrak or something similar. They were based in New Hampshire and used a state of the art (for the 80's) space satellite to track cars. What set it apart was it had sensors which could monitor the temperature of reefers and tank cars. Guilford used it on their home network and expected it to be used nation wide, had they been successful in buying Conrail and Southern Pacific, making Guilford into the only transcontinental Class 1. However, those plans never panned out and the project fizzled. Ultimately the company was shut down and AEI scanners were adopted.
I was in elementary school in the early 1970’s and we learned about these in a lesson for some reason (we had a Long Island Railroad station in the community so that may have been why we had other lessons on railroads too). I also recall these symbols at some New York State rest stops. Not sure what the state used them for. One that comes to mind was near Parksville, NY on NY-17.
Thank you for this very interesting documentary about an obscure, yet important part of the evolution of technology that enables daily life today without our even thinking about it.
Great documentary! I remember reading about Kartrak when I was a kid. I still look for those old barcodes on rolling stock, it's amazing how many are still out there today.
At beginning of my RR career I remember the ACI labels on freight cars very well and there were scanners placed on inbound tracks to the main yard I worked at. When a train approached, the scanner would light up and record the ACI labels.
I remember noticing those Kartrak panels on GO Trains, (in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada region) when I was a kid, and wondering what they were. My parents didn't know, and when I was older, and had developed my research skills, those Kartrak panels were gone.
Very cool docu! As a 1970's railroad modeler, KarTrak is a featured detail of my freight car fleet. Nice to finally have the whole story on ACI labels!
A bit sad for the gents who proposed the idea earlier on, but didn't have the tech to back it up. Sometimes things in life pan out like that. A very interesting video overall. Thanks for uploading 👍
In 1968 I was working for Lenkurt Electric Company in Red Wood City California as a parts control expediter. We were a subsidiary of Sylvania/GTE. We were manufacturing the scanner circuit boards for the rail car trackside scanners along with other electronic equipment. We were frantic to cure the problem of the circuit boards failing due to the vibration caused by the rail cars passing the scanners. We refurbished a batch of failed PC boards and then had a company in Oakland, California fill the can that contained the board with resin, to help hold the parts to the boards. So, maybe a part of the ultimate failure of the system was the scanners themselves unable to withstand the harsh conditions next to the tracks? I later worked on a project to send microwave systems to South Vietnam for use by our troops for communications relays. Interesting times. Thanks for you video. None of us at Lenkurt knew the background of what we were manufacturing.
As a kid growing up along Conrail in the 80's, it wasn't unusual to find old weather-beaten boards that had just fallen off random cars lying trackside with the other usual litter. You could tell from the bleaching of the tape that they'd stopped being actively cared for long before that.
I grew up as a railfan kid when these were being tried (and we modelers bought sheets of bar code decals even). Keep an eye out for the old paint schemes from the Fallen Flag railroads, for you can still find these bar codes on the occasional car out there.
Excellent short documentary. As I was checking your channel before subscribing I noticed another of your offerings that I had queued up to watch. :) Kudos!
Wow. I was never too much interested in stuff like this but your video!? Your video was incredibly interesting and very refreshing! I subscribed right away because I need more!
See these from time to time on my model railroad rolling stock. Had an inkling they were used for tracking, but I didn't know the full story until watching these. Many thanks indeed for all your hard work making this.
I lived in a city, where they added, in the 1990s infrared transcievers on each tram that interfaced with alot of base stations in the city, to give arrival estimates for the billboards at each station.
Thank you so much for a very good and interesting revelation about the development of barcode systems. Your small team produced a highly professional and polished production!
What!? No sponsor!? I love it! Totally buying this guy a coffee. I will now like and subscribe and thumbs up and hit the bell and and ...share with everyone I know I tell ya 😃
Superbly produced and factual. I enjoyed this documentary greatly. As a kid, I remember seeing those "modern" ACI placards on railroad equipment, and even on hub-to-hub trailers used by the USPS. Well done! Oh, and I thought the soundtrack was appropriate for this story. Thanks!
Thanks very much! I'm glad some people still have memories of this system. While putting this together I couldn't track down anyone who had even heard of it.
I also remember seeing the placards on rail cars many years ago and wondering what they meant. I recently asked my nephew, who is a conductor for CN Rail and he had never heard of them, but I was able to Google them and find out some of what is mentioned in this interesting video. Thanks for doing it.
@@peterdibble ... may I (old lady railfan) suggest heading to your local coffee shop or MacDonalds. Head over to where you see a bunch of older retired men sitting together drinking coffee and just ask if they ever worked at the RR (works for any profession) Boy, do they like to talk!
Not sure how this came into my feed, but pretty cool. I work for CN on the DMIR and I regularly see these on the ore cars we run out of Proctor (most of which are from the 50's, a few date back to the 20's and are still running!) to take Taconite pellets from the mines in Virginia, MN down to the Duluth, MN docks. Always wondered what they were. None of the Oldheads could tell me and I'm not a former, so I figured I'd just always wonder about them. lol Thanks for sharing, saw that cover pic and instantly recognized it.
I remember reading about the first system in Popular Science Magazine in the mid sixties. It’s funny how somethings stick with you. I’m 67yo now. As I continue to comprehend how history unfolded right in front of me I am more and more convinced my father’s decision to make and keep that subscription to PS made a remarkable impression in my young life. My dad was born in Alva Oklahoma in 1925. His early life included no running water. No predictable home. He grew up in the dust bowl and depression of 1930’s Oklahoma. My father died seven years ago, my mother two weeks ago. (97yo). My parents were married 72 years. They had a successful marriage and careers. I am humbled and embarrassed with my youthful lack of understanding of the great gift I received relative to my parent’s challenges. I am resolved to accept that this is a potentially inevitable path. All of this has nothing to do with barcodes….. and everything to do with barcodes for me. I’m content with my good fortune of the last seven years being able to stay close with my mom and having the opportunity to tell my mother almost daily how much I loved her. All, and I mean all of my parents friends and contemporary relatives died before them. Only their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren were in their lives at the end. Life is one continuous enlightenment after another if we allow it to be. Thanks for reading my completely off topic scrawl. TH-cam didn’t have a video with an introduction for my life.
This is some amazing content! I'm happy to be with you almost from the beginning, I'm certain that your channel will grow immensely in the near future.
Nice job on the documentary. I had no idea that barcodes were used on trains! It's funny to think that UPCs were still a novel thing when I was a kid. The grocery store and other shops in town were still using price stickers and the checkout clerk's memory to ring up the bill well into the 80's.
Not all. 3 of 9 is a popular barcode that doesn't require one. Whenever I can, I do add a check digit, because I've seen 3 of 9 give wrong data without it.
Usually it's the "modulo of 10" - the difference between last digit of the sum of the others and the next higher even multiple of 10. If the sum of the other digits is an even multiple of 10, the check digit is zero.
I work in retail and barcodes are an everyday thing. It's impressive how the scanning is instant, accurate, and depending on the scanner's laser, it can scan from a sizeable distance and through glass, transparent plastic etc. And QR code scanning is even crazier considering the complexity. We sometimes get things right :D
Very interest presentation. In the middle 1970s, I was running a convenience store about 25 miles west of Boston. One day, a young lady parked her car in front of the store. Being an avid railfan. I noticed that she had a ACI label attached to her front door. In the process of ring up her items that she bought, I asked her why she had a ACI label on her car. She proudly exclaimed that her father had invented it. Always thought it was kind of neat. Thanks to this video, I now know how the ACI label came to be and also how the technology has grown to all the things that we all use today.
How cool is that! Great story, thanks for sharing.
Nice lady to love her father like that.
Ahead of its time now every car has an barcode for the VIN on it.
3:34 - You met the daughter of David Collins?
> 7:32 < A C I label
I love that you used footage of American trains AND of railroads of the period. I've seen a lot of other channels that talk about rail transportation in the US use stock footage of trains from anywhere but the US. This documentary was really well made.
The correct period of American railroads to fit the narration too.
Usually it's just the wrong time period though. It's not like any idiot wouldn't recognise US trains from say European ones. Those where two very different industries back in the day. I mean still are. US freight looks nothing like German freight for example.
Very true. It was emotionally moving seeing all those fallen flags roll by.
Agreed. This is the second of Peter's videos I have seen, and both have very high production value. Great work!
Unless it was written by a person with that knowledge, that sort of thing happens inevitably. Just watch cartoons and play video games and you see what I mean: locomotive types in the wrong country, valve gear that would never function correctly, diesels using steam whistles and vice versa.
I hired out with the railroad in 1975 and retired in 2015. I remember all of this including the hiring of more clerks to 'Walk the Tracks' to make the train lists 'AGAIN"! Back then the car numbers were punched into IBM cards and placed in Pigeon Holes that represented an inbound train, outbound train, or a yard track. To get a list the clerks would pull out a stack of IBM cards and put them into the 'Card Reader'(they were so amazed they called it a 'Computer'). The 'Card Reader' then printed the list of cars(or IBM Cards) and that's how we got our in/out bound 'Train Lists' and 'Switch Lists'. I also remember the 'Kartrak' Colored Placards and the 'Scanners'. When the RF ID tags showed up I took one off of a boxcar, glued two magnets to the back of it, and would put it on the front of my locomotive. Occassionally I would get radio calls asking if we really were shoving a box car ahead of our locomotive for 115 miles on the Main Line ? That's why their was a .0009 % failure rate, but don't tell anyone.
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Yooooo thanks for sharing I just had an amazing laugh!!
I have a handful of unused IBM waybill Cards from Conrail in mint condition. They were buried in a filling cabinet with a bunch of other old paperwork that was going to be tossed. We were already into 5 years of CSX control and their fuck ups made some guys remember the Penn Central era all over again.
@@onrr1726 Thanks for the reply. My very first railroad experience was with Penn Central, Toledo, Ohio in 1975. I remember well both the 'Ex' Pennsyvania employees complaining about the New York Central employees. It was non stop bitching about the 'Other' railroad, DAILY. On top of that the 'Old Heads' still questioned whether or not our paychecks would be accepted by a bank. The third thing I remember was the blatant thievery. But I'm vary native to Southern California so I left after one year.
Hahaha. That's evil AND genius.
I remember seeing these codes on rail cars as a child and wondering what they where. Fifty years later I finally get the answer. Good job on the vid.
Same here, only I was able to find out right away. Our family's best friend was a Railroad Engineer, and so I remember asking dad when I first noticed them (abt. 1967-8)? I grew up in Terre Haute Indiana, and it is one of the larger switchyards in the US...you did not go anywhere in town w/o being railroaded at least once. We had no overpasses at the time. You always needed to add a half hour to any errand in town if there was a rr track in between! One evening, as we were heading to the south end of town, we were rr'd (like every day), I noticed something I had never seen before, the "barcodes". Dad had already asked Gene, so he told me. I was a cashier at Woolco from 76-78, and we still used regular old price tag stickers. However, I remember almost immd. after I quit, they installed scanners.
I remember the transit system BART Bay Area Rapid Transit had a bar code scanner
@@frankdenardo8684 share la one
I like how the railroad companies wanted to handle maintenance themselves, proceeded to not do that, and then deemed Kartrak codes useless because they were unmaintained
Pretty typical corporate behavior.
It's probably more that they wanted to handle the data themselves, but weren't given the option of just doing that without also taking on the maintenance.
This is even more relevant after Palestine, Ohio.
@@gcewing nah, i bet they just wanted to cut costs: if they really wanted to monopolize their hardware they could have shared the data without problem but restricted access to their hardware.
The fact is that if you do everything in-house it must be cheaper especially if you already have employers there... and especially if you don't do it
15:50 Better systems were developed.
Almost every member of my family has worked for the railroad. In the seventies my brother would tell the story of one of his crew mates who, when switching railcars, found the barcode placard from a railcar laying in the weeds. Thinking it would be a fun gag, he placed the placard on the rear step of the last loco in their consist.
When they yarded their train, they unhooked the power (locos) and headed to the diesel shops. The guy took the placard off the step, put it in his bag and then went home. He did this each trip and never heard boo about it. Until one day the yardmaster, trainmaster and a host of other management were waiting for my brother's crew when they arrived at the shops.
As it turns out they'd had all kinds of personnel tearing the yard apart each week, looking for this ghostly railcar (I think it was a tank car) without any luck. The crewmember got some demerits but not fired. Imagine the carload supervisor's face when, each week, the ghost car would appear on his print out.
That's great! Haha
Kartrak was actually a good idea, but the inability of printed KarTrak codes to withstand snow and dirt was its downfall. I'm glad you mentioned RFID, because it took the KarTrak idea and made it work because it could operate regardless of weather conditions.
Well, it also didnt help that the railroads wernt maintaining them. Had they gone with the original plan of being a subscription service. It would have worked out alot better
@@trainfan4449 The cost of the system with all those cameras didn't help, either.
Conductor or fireman?
It'll be interesting to see if this type of progression (visual to radio) will happen in the autonomous vehicle space. Better yet, will technology advance so much that we see a system of RFID tags embedded in the road evolve into relying back on just visual processing?
@@realpillboxer you know what’s crazy is that the model railroad community has their own version of RFID tags, they attach to the bottom of the car and as they roll through the scanner, which is just a device under the ties, can scan the RFID tag which can tell a person the initials, car number, even the owners name and address if they choose.
It’s used mainly on automated club layouts or where they run “ops” sessions and a person is designated as a dispatcher and he can keep a live track of the cars in the trains running
Really interesting look at a system that I never knew existed. Thanks!
Hey Benjamin
@@twistle his names Ben, the guy who runs "applied science"
Not surprised you wouldn't have known seeing as unless you were a railroader or a railfan of a certain age and was in use not all that long relatively that the ACI labeling faded from sight by the early 80s
Nice to find you her , They are many technologies that we didn't know them especially in data storage field . Imagine how they manage to make a color scanner with no transistor or ccd.
This deserves a much bigger audience.
Yeah, I'm amazed it was suggested to me. Usually TH-cam doesn't suggest videos that aren't monetized because they don't make money on them.
Why is his sub count hidden?
It will get there, but sadly most people aint interested in the small details in life, what a shame, so much around us we take for granted today but there decades if not hundreds of years of history behind it. Like the calculator, everyone has a calculator today in their life but think about the deep and complex history around the calculator goes back thousands of years.
He needs to make more videos. Maybe if he broke this into 10 videos TH-cam would like it. The algorithm give and takes.
@@TheNextext Accurate.
My dad was a model railroad hobbyist, and when I was about 5 years old in the early 1970s, I saw a freight car with one of those colored bar codes on it and I asked my dad what that was, and he explained to me a computer scanned those striped colored lines on it so that it could keep track of what was in the car and where it was going.
There is no reason for a film about old railway technology to be that good. Amazing work put into this piece and I am so glad to have stumbled across it. Bravo!
Nice show, I enjoyed learning who invented the bar code system. As an apprentice In the mid 70's I used to sharpen bar code readers for Plessey Communications in Australia, because if they weren't sharpened right they would not work properly. We also used to repair fax machines that burnt the paper to make a duplicate of what was transmitted over the phone line and we used to fix telephone answering machines and all sorts of equipment. I loved the technology back then, learning how to repair microwave ovens and fix almost everything electronic, it's a shame that now if it breaks you just throw it away and get another one? So now I just program stuff and if it breaks, which it does, we just replace it. They call it an advancement in technology, but I'm still not convinced. Thanks again for this story, really enjoyable, and bought back some great memories, when electronics was new and exciting.
This is the first time I heard Sylvania was a cutting edge tech company at one time. All I know them for is in 2021 is budget electronics, kinda like RCA. Oh how the giants have fallen
From my perspective Sylvania has fallen even more as I literally only heard about them in the last year or so and only on Amazon where I assumed they were just some Chinese knockoff company. My parents used to have a nice RCA CRT TV (from back when it was actually RCA and not whoever currently owns them). Technology Connections actually did a series on RCA that's worth the watch if you haven't seen it already.
Sylvania back in the day was big in radio. Often making scores of the tubes used in them. Sylvania was also involved in the development of COBOL. Which is still in use today.
I heard from Technology Connections
They made good light bulbs until the government fucked it up.
When I was growing up we had a Sylvania console TV in our living room, one of those big TVs that sits on the floor and is also a piece of furniture. It had lots of tubes in it and when it was acting up we'd hire a TV repairman to come out to the house and fix it. Those things weigh a ton so you ain't casually throwing in the car to take to a shop. (Also, we used to fix our electronics back in the 70s/80s, not just throw them out like you do now). Later on I found out that Sylvania had a lot of defense contracts to build electronic equipment for the military. They were never as big as RCA, but they were pretty much a household name.
As a railfan, that certainly was an interesting look at something I had no idea about. I especially like the part of the video where you visualize different cars passing and their codes popping up as it contained many railroads that are no longer (known as fallen flag railroads).
If you see one on a car that looks like it's changed hands, you can actually use the ACI label to find out who previously owned it
Penn Central's 1970 bankruptcy was the biggest American business bankruptcy to date, and the catalyst for a major shake-up of the American railroad industry. Results were: Conrail (later split mostly between NS and CSX), Amtrak, and various commuter train authorities like MTA-LIRR and Metro-North, MBTA, NJT, SEPTA, MARC, and others.
Hi fellow railfan but yes it is very cool
I actually have two of these labels: one from DMIR 31838 (an ore car), and the other from DMIR 163 (an engine). They were one of the few companies that kept using ACI labels long after most railroads stopped, partly because they ran an almost fully captive fleet. Most of the surviving DMIR-era ore cars still have ACI labels on them, though CN doesn't use them anymore. It's great to hear the backstory. I also know that I did in fact find a reader still in place, also on ex-DMIR trackage
Wow, that's awesome! I'd love to see one of the old scanners someday. I have a pretty well preserved barcode from the Southern Railway.
That's really sweet! My grandpa was one of the freight schedulers for DMIR from the 50s until he retired (late '70s?) which was after USS had bought them of course. He grew up in Two Harbors and both sides of my family had many DMIR employees, although he was in Duluth most of his life. His father had lost a hand (had a hook) in a coupler accident way back in the day, and apparently died on VE day while out hunting birds. One of my grandpa's brothers went into electrical engineering and worked on electric rail programs across the US, and apparently some submarine propulsion as well.
One of my grandma's brothers had been a boilermaker for DMIR, but he turned into one of the town drunks (do you happen to remember "Chuckie" from Two Harbors?) and had a really fat pension for a guy who apparently was a town fixture. It's odd when you go to college and your new friends actually knew your great uncle - at least his "habits" lol.
Anyways, I have some old DMIR maps from my grandpa and a couple of other doodads with their logo on it - but what really rocked was a few years ago there is a hobby shop up in Duluth that had a DMIR boxcar (HO scale). I'm not even into model railroads but I just had to get it. :D
@@chouseification That's some pretty awesome history! I'm not actually from the area (about 50 miles north of the Cities), but my family's hunted North of Fairbanks since the '20s (they took the train up to scout the area in 1921 and hunted the next year). Oddly enough, we lost a guy hunting in 1970 - got a big ol' buck and a heart attack got him. Not a bad way, really
@@ebnertra0004 sounds like a nice place to hunt, and yes... if you've gotta go, not a bad place to have it happen. It's funny when you say you're ~50 miles north, as the other side of my family had a cabin on Pokagema (by Pine City) for decades. No good railroads around there, but the cabin a few down from us had one of those old red Mobil gasoline pegasus signs on his boathouse, so it was a great landmark to find your way home.
Back to railroads though - I was down in Red Wing by the waterfront park with a couple of college friends and one of their hordes of younglings. Trains would go past and the kids asked what was in the cars, so I showed them how to google the train's car identifier (I forget the formal name) which would let you know who owned it, then by hazmat tags and type of car what it _could_ be holding... they got good. That's right by the big canola oil plant and after doing some "hmmm"ing, they correctly deduced that the cars on one track carried in fresh beans to be processed, one over carried finished product ready to be shipped, and the third one contained husks or whatever was left over - likely going to be used in livestock feed. It's fun that they were able to do that.
Also, Dakota oil shipments kept passing every 15 minutes or so - long trains blasting through. They got to smash a bunch of pennies, and recovered most. :D
DMIR = The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway, northern Minnesota and Wisconsin
You literally made a TV-quality documentary. Hats off.
I was 200% sure the qr code was generic stock footage. I was wrong. :)
😂
@@peterdibbleHmm well let's take a look then... YOU SONOFA-
Hahahahaha
You were Rick-Rolled too..?
@@peterdibble I'm late to the party but when I saw that my first thought was: "Oh, I hope he left an Easter egg."
Yes!
That attention to detail shows us that you truly care about the viewers.
I don't know how I ended up here, but I'm sure glad I did. What an amazing production and a fascinating look at Kartrack. Thank you for making this documentary. Amazing work!
The quality of your work is amazing. Can I strongly suggest that you take it to Documentary Film Festivals and look to sell it round the world. If I saw this from BBC horizon I would have thought it was made by them. Truly astonishing broadcast grade quality. Truly inspiring at the quality of product that can be achieved
Thank you for producing and presenting this video documentary, very well done! I've always wondered how the Kartrak barcodes came to be, having been somewhat familiar with them, being a casual railfan ever since I was a kid. The last time I ever saw a railcar that still had a Kartrak barcode on it was about 2-3 years ago, it was on an empty coal car at an Montana Dakota Utilities (MDU) coal-fired power plant in North Dakota. I was there on a service call for work, and right as I was leaving the plant after finishing the call, there was a rather well-weathered coal car (with the old green Burlington Northern livery and logo, IIRC) parked on the rails going into the plant with a faded but mostly intact Kartrak ACI barcode on it. Surprising to still see it there after all of these decades (or a coal car that old still in service).
I've barely seen the barcodes anymore on most railcars recently, especially looking at those passing by at the railroad crossings when I'm out driving in town or elsewhere. They were a much more common sight on railcars back in the 80s, and even into 90s and 2000s. I remember spotting for cars that had them (and interesting graffiti tags too :) ) as they passed by at the crossing. But the barcodes started to become less common as the new millennium began. I imagine with the railroads upgrading and changing out their rolling stock over the years, most of these older barcoded cars have probably gone away to scrap (or rebuilt) as a result.
I learned a loose history of Kartrak many years ago and found it interesting but this is way more detailed and goes into way more of the entire story than I knew about. The video was extremely well written, paced, and produced! Thank you so much for making this!
I love how every little object has it's own story
I love fact that every object/item/invention I can read about have far far far more complex history than you anticipate
"So this scratch on my Nintendo 3DS was when I got knocked off a cliff by a bear after I punched it for stealing my copy of Mario 3D Land"
Checkout 99 invisible
its own
Well, every technology is connected in a way and one fail, will give birth to a new one.
There is even a Channel revolving around this idea called... "Technology Connections" (who would have guessed it)
Nearly 50 years ago, I remember a guy said he was part of some startup who made a color bar code for trains, but he said a large company got the contract after they saw their color bar code prototype.
As a child, I remember sitting in the car waiting for a train to pass. Even then I recognized the bar code as some sort of identification tag. Being so young I thought that is just the way it was without understanding the technology. Great video.
I have to say, the presentation as a whole, especially the calm manner of narration and the melancholy background music is perfect. Just the way I like my history documentaries. Felt like watching a top level TV documentarie. A very talented creator.
I've been working as a contract train operator at Wyoming coal mines for 20 years now. Somehow I learned about the railroad barcode history very early on. Back then you would still see steel hoppers from the 60s and 70s and some of them had the bar codes on them, although even then they were deteriorated. The only ones that still looked good then, were the oldest aluminum cars, the flat bottom gondolas that Detroit Edison controlled, made in 1985. These 1985 cars soon became the first large scale "lease return" that I remember seeing over the years, as suddenly these cars started showing up on non-DE trains with freshly applied FURX 961xxx (First Union Rail Leasing) identifiers. Of course, the bar codes never got changed, they are still there, sort of. I still see these cars today. But no one has equipment that reads them, it's all AEI now. Oh, and I find it rather amusing that at Coal Creek Mine, on the exit side of the silo, are relics of the past, a set of unused track scales plus an empty trackside housing that clearly once held an ACI reader. These must date to 1982 or so, which is when the track was built. So I guess someone was still using the optical ACI system into the 1980s.
Very well made, I've been hoping for so long that someday there would be a documentary about KarTrak ACI and you did a perfect job! Thumbs up!
Thank you so much!
This is an extremely well made video, I'm genuinely astonished at the quality of this video, it felt like a documentary. Nice Job.
This was cool to watch. My father was into all this stuff back in the 60s and 70s. He used scanners to set the timing on huge conveyers used in commercial food production and packaging. Nice to see these unsung innovators remembered.
You can still see these on older cars and locomotives to this day. One of the yards I used to work out of in Portland OR still has the readers in place as of 2018.
Do you know the yard where this reader is still standing?
@@BNoakvilleAs of 2018 it was at Barnes, but it’s not accessible to the public.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s I always remembered seeing these on rail cars and they've held a special place in my heart ever since. I've done a fair bit of research on them as I've gotten older and your documentary here is by far the best presentation of the information. Thanks for putting it together.
Well now I'm going to be looking for old bar codes whenever I see trains pass by...
I hate to wait for a freight train to pass at the rail crossing. Now this is a game changer. Can't wait to see if I can coincidentally see any old carts with those colored barcodes.
The 50-year rule will quickly eliminate these. Let’s see them while we can!
there are some left but they have all but been eliminated from railcars today
Esoteric history is so cool. I've seen these barcodes before, but didn't know their history. Thanks for the video :)
The production and quality of this video is immensely high. From start to finish you had me into the story. You do deserve a bigger audience then you have right now. Keep it up!
I look forward to spotting a Kartrak code.
I’m impressed by the quality of his video. Nice work! Thank you!
Fascinating. I love that some cars still have the barcodes on them, even after all this time
Excellent documentary! I played this via home stereo system while cleaning the house. The narration is so well done I did not need to watch the video at all. And, because this is so well done, I will watch the video too. Thank you.
The locomotive at 4:04 is a Fairbanks-Morse opposed piston locomotive.
thank you!
Similar engine to what FM built for submarines?
I remember seeing Kartrak barcodes on train cars as a kid, but never knew what they were for or their history. Well done sir!
Finally, somebody talks about these things! They're such an interesting detail, a relic of a specific era of railroading. Good vid!
Very well done! Another company to look into is a subsidiary of Guilford Transportation Industries. I forgot the name of the company, but it was something along the lines of StarTrak or something similar. They were based in New Hampshire and used a state of the art (for the 80's) space satellite to track cars. What set it apart was it had sensors which could monitor the temperature of reefers and tank cars. Guilford used it on their home network and expected it to be used nation wide, had they been successful in buying Conrail and Southern Pacific, making Guilford into the only transcontinental Class 1. However, those plans never panned out and the project fizzled. Ultimately the company was shut down and AEI scanners were adopted.
I love that you used the bars from the codes in the section titles. Very nice touch, you have great aesthetic taste.
I was in elementary school in the early 1970’s and we learned about these in a lesson for some reason (we had a Long Island Railroad station in the community so that may have been why we had other lessons on railroads too). I also recall these symbols at some New York State rest stops. Not sure what the state used them for. One that comes to mind was near Parksville, NY on NY-17.
Thank you for this very interesting documentary about an obscure, yet important part of the evolution of technology that enables daily life today without our even thinking about it.
So well produced! I watched it to the end very satisfied!
Thanks Peter! The piece of wisdom right at the end is one to remember!
Superb production & presentation.
Thank you.
Great documentary! I remember reading about Kartrak when I was a kid. I still look for those old barcodes on rolling stock, it's amazing how many are still out there today.
Pretty tall feat these days with all the graffiti.
I doubt this would work today because of that.
At beginning of my RR career I remember the ACI labels on freight cars very well and there were scanners placed on inbound tracks to the main yard I worked at. When a train approached, the scanner would light up and record the ACI labels.
I've been fascinated with barcodes for years but never knew about their use on rail cars... Thanks for this informative video!
Every once in a while I still see those bar codes on freight trains. Glad to know the history of it.
Your presentations are amazing! Hope to see the numbers increase as more folks find you.
I remember noticing those Kartrak panels on GO Trains, (in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada region) when I was a kid, and wondering what they were. My parents didn't know, and when I was older, and had developed my research skills, those Kartrak panels were gone.
Watched a couple of vids now and have decided your careful work is worth a subscription. Thankyou.
Very cool docu! As a 1970's railroad modeler, KarTrak is a featured detail of my freight car fleet. Nice to finally have the whole story on ACI labels!
A bit sad for the gents who proposed the idea earlier on, but didn't have the tech to back it up. Sometimes things in life pan out like that. A very interesting video overall. Thanks for uploading 👍
Ideas are a dime a dozen, implementations lead to unicorn startups valued at multiple billions.
If their patent was still active, if it had broad enough claims it probably "read on" the later invention, and its inventors benefited as well.
@@goodmaro obviously not, though, because of the timing.
In 1968 I was working for Lenkurt Electric Company in Red Wood City California as a parts control expediter. We were a subsidiary of Sylvania/GTE. We were manufacturing the scanner circuit boards for the rail car trackside scanners along with other electronic equipment. We were frantic to cure the problem of the circuit boards failing due to the vibration caused by the rail cars passing the scanners. We refurbished a batch of failed PC boards and then had a company in Oakland, California fill the can that contained the board with resin, to help hold the parts to the boards. So, maybe a part of the ultimate failure of the system was the scanners themselves unable to withstand the harsh conditions next to the tracks? I later worked on a project to send microwave systems to South Vietnam for use by our troops for communications relays. Interesting times. Thanks for you video. None of us at Lenkurt knew the background of what we were manufacturing.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing!
Extremely well researched and well made. I've been into trains for years and didn't notice ANY errors. Lovely work.
As a kid growing up along Conrail in the 80's, it wasn't unusual to find old weather-beaten boards that had just fallen off random cars lying trackside with the other usual litter. You could tell from the bleaching of the tape that they'd stopped being actively cared for long before that.
I grew up along the Conrail line in Massachusetts and found one of these and hung it in my parent's garage. I don't know what happened to it.
Thoroughly enjoyed watching this documentary. Thank you!
Excellent video! This is exactly what I was looking for!
I grew up as a railfan kid when these were being tried (and we modelers bought sheets of bar code decals even). Keep an eye out for the old paint schemes from the Fallen Flag railroads, for you can still find these bar codes on the occasional car out there.
Excellent short documentary. As I was checking your channel before subscribing I noticed another of your offerings that I had queued up to watch. :) Kudos!
Wow. I was never too much interested in stuff like this but your video!? Your video was incredibly interesting and very refreshing! I subscribed right away because I need more!
Wow! I love the documentary. I've never known I could be emotionally moved with such a topic. Keep up the good work!
Awesome video thank you. I always love learning about different random things. And this was great.
Nice video. Well narrated. Beautiful graphics.
See these from time to time on my model railroad rolling stock. Had an inkling they were used for tracking, but I didn't know the full story until watching these.
Many thanks indeed for all your hard work making this.
NIce work. How quickly we forget the way things used to be.
Beautiful documentary, very professionaly made.
A really well-researched and informative video on what was revolutionary in North American railroad operations. Thank you.
Amazing video! And truly fascinating history, never knew that this happened! I learn something new every time I watch your videos!
I am so glad I finally got to this on my watch later list.
Fantastic presentation! Thank you.
This is so much better than docs from big media. Please never stop!
I'm glad this found it's way into my recommendations.
Interesting story. Nice job putting this together. Closing with the Kartak label next to the RFID tag was an appropriate touch.
I lived in a city, where they added, in the 1990s infrared transcievers on each tram that interfaced with alot of base stations in the city, to give arrival estimates for the billboards at each station.
I just recently came across your channel, and I find every video so far to be about something I never knew I would find fascinating until I saw it.
Thank you so much for a very good and interesting revelation about the
development of barcode systems. Your small team produced a highly
professional and polished production!
What!? No sponsor!? I love it! Totally buying this guy a coffee. I will now like and subscribe and thumbs up and hit the bell and and ...share with everyone I know I tell ya 😃
Superbly made video, thanks!
Awesome work Peter. Fascinating presentation! Instant subscribe. I read about Kartrak ages ago on Wikipedia. Great to see the story in more depth!
Superbly produced and factual. I enjoyed this documentary greatly. As a kid, I remember seeing those "modern" ACI placards on railroad equipment, and even on hub-to-hub trailers used by the USPS. Well done! Oh, and I thought the soundtrack was appropriate for this story. Thanks!
Thanks very much! I'm glad some people still have memories of this system. While putting this together I couldn't track down anyone who had even heard of it.
I also remember seeing the placards on rail cars many years ago and wondering what they meant. I recently asked my nephew, who is a conductor for CN Rail and he had never heard of them, but I was able to Google them and find out some of what is mentioned in this interesting video. Thanks for doing it.
@@peterdibble ... may I (old lady railfan) suggest heading to your local coffee shop or MacDonalds. Head over to where you see a bunch of older retired men sitting together drinking coffee and just ask if they ever worked at the RR (works for any profession) Boy, do they like to talk!
Not sure how this came into my feed, but pretty cool. I work for CN on the DMIR and I regularly see these on the ore cars we run out of Proctor (most of which are from the 50's, a few date back to the 20's and are still running!) to take Taconite pellets from the mines in Virginia, MN down to the Duluth, MN docks. Always wondered what they were. None of the Oldheads could tell me and I'm not a former, so I figured I'd just always wonder about them.
lol Thanks for sharing, saw that cover pic and instantly recognized it.
Excellent documentary on a system I hadn't known about, & the genius behind it!
I remember reading about the first system in Popular Science Magazine in the mid sixties. It’s funny how somethings stick with you. I’m 67yo now. As I continue to comprehend how history unfolded right in front of me I am more and more convinced my father’s decision to make and keep that subscription to PS made a remarkable impression in my young life. My dad was born in Alva Oklahoma in 1925. His early life included no running water. No predictable home. He grew up in the dust bowl and depression of 1930’s Oklahoma. My father died seven years ago, my mother two weeks ago. (97yo). My parents were married 72 years. They had a successful marriage and careers. I am humbled and embarrassed with my youthful lack of understanding of the great gift I received relative to my parent’s challenges. I am resolved to accept that this is a potentially inevitable path. All of this has nothing to do with barcodes….. and everything to do with barcodes for me. I’m content with my good fortune of the last seven years being able to stay close with my mom and having the opportunity to tell my mother almost daily how much I loved her. All, and I mean all of my parents friends and contemporary relatives died before them. Only their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren were in their lives at the end. Life is one continuous enlightenment after another if we allow it to be. Thanks for reading my completely off topic scrawl. TH-cam didn’t have a video with an introduction for my life.
I’m in love with this story ❤❤ thank you for sharing it with me
Very interesting. Video was very well made.
This is some amazing content! I'm happy to be with you almost from the beginning, I'm certain that your channel will grow immensely in the near future.
That was very informative and beautifully produced.
How does this video only have 60k views??? This is a very well researched and written piece! Great job! New sub!
Nice job on the documentary. I had no idea that barcodes were used on trains!
It's funny to think that UPCs were still a novel thing when I was a kid. The grocery store and other shops in town were still using price stickers and the checkout clerk's memory to ring up the bill well into the 80's.
Thanks for this well put together video. Great production. Very watchable and informative, even though I'm a Brit', across the pond in England . 👍🙂
The last digit in any bar code equals the last digit of the sum of the others--"sum check." If there is a disagreement, the scanner rejects it.
Not all. 3 of 9 is a popular barcode that doesn't require one. Whenever I can, I do add a check digit, because I've seen 3 of 9 give wrong data without it.
Usually it's the "modulo of 10" - the difference between last digit of the sum of the others and the next higher even multiple of 10. If the sum of the other digits is an even multiple of 10, the check digit is zero.
Well done, I loved the documentary feel!
The use of Kartrak bars in the credits was such a sweet touch
I work in retail and barcodes are an everyday thing. It's impressive how the scanning is instant, accurate, and depending on the scanner's laser, it can scan from a sizeable distance and through glass, transparent plastic etc. And QR code scanning is even crazier considering the complexity. We sometimes get things right :D
Excellent video that must have taken hours of research + writing
These videos are amazingly put together, really under appreciated