Everything about trains and railroads
I just moved and I live literally window to a freight train line, unfortunately it scares the crap out of my cats and so I'm trying to find out what the schedule is so that I can close the windows for them, and maybe put a little raspberry pi display screen saying something like "next train arriving in...." Next to my window
I'm a freight conductor. There is no schedule, unless you notice them happening at around the same time every day, you won't find a pattern. We pretty much get a call and hour and a half before we need to go in at any random time of day or night and that's when the train moves.
I don't know what it's like where you live, but as rule, who knows? There are scheduled trains which are notoriously unreliable, but also unscheduled trains. Basically whenever there is enough cargo to justify a train it gets put out on the tracks and they move it when they can. Caveat: this is for Canada and is largely based on info from some former neighbors who were conductors and brakemen.
My sympathy to your cats.
So real shit they don't track freight trains? That seems kind of inefficient if I'm honest.
Then again I'm not a train professional so what do I know
Freight is definitely tracked but not necessarily scheduled in regular intervals. This is true for both trains and ships. Like it costs so much and the world isn't always that consistent.
But yeah like cp/cn/CSX/ns/BNSF etc all know what's on their lines and where.
However these lines are fully private unlike aviation so there is no requirement to publically provide any data.
For planes position data doesn't even come from the airline but a govt mandated transponder that communicates on public frequency on the aircraft and private websites use a network of recieving radios donated or not spread across the world to provide the public with a service they also try to profit off of. This doesn't exist for trains as far as I know. And I don't think for ships either.
Well that puts a wrinkle in my train heist.
They track them, but they're not all scheduled. If there is enough cargo there they put on a "special" and they will move it between the scheduled trains. Train scheduling and tracking is an art unto itself.
There's a facebook group for that line, perhaps they could help you: https://www.facebook.com/groups/upbelvideresub/
There are groups out there that monitor train routes. And some publish to the Web.
In theory you could hook up an software defined radio and listen to train transponders yourself and give yourself a warning if one is nearby.
Hey coding nerds, I know you're nearby, do you think I'd be able to use tensorflow or something to identify an incoming train with this view?
You could, but if this is taken from another window in the same building you’ll likely only get ~10 seconds of warning.
If you could put a couple cameras a mile or so down each direction on the track you could get an earlier warning system
This is taken from my window, and I'm not sure how I feel about leaving expensive equipment out in a suburban area for anyone to pick up and run off with