Environmental Solutions

Environmentally Focused Technology

For more than 30 years, ZTR has led the industry in environmental impact reductions with its Automatic Engine Shutdown/Start-up (AESS) system, SmartStart®. While SmartStart IIe has been a significant part of our environmental commitment to reduce locomotive idling, we offer a wide range of other products and initiatives to lower emissions and save fuel worldwide.

Our SmartStart IIe system delivers consistent fuel management and remote reporting of fuel and emissions reductions. The system also offers documented reduction verification through its Emissions Report. In addition, the compact design of SmartStart makes it easy to install on almost any locomotive, regardless of manufacturer, model, age, or usage. Extra features like the Extended Fuel Saver option pay for themselves in the additional fuel savings they offer. The Battery Saver option also reduces the excessive drain on the locomotive batteries when shut down and unattended for long periods.

ZTR’s focus on reducing fuel usage, increasing locomotive availability, implementing enhanced remote monitoring, and cutting emissions and waste extend beyond our SmartStart Locomotive AESS. ZTR has a long legacy of developing solutions that extend the life of aging locomotives up to 20 years or more, evident by expert engineering and software development that results in minimal customer investment but significant ROI.

That means our products and services can save you money and prepare your fleets for the future. Our approach includes flexible options for future upgrades, including remote monitoring and connectivity, tractive effort analysis studies, expert consulting and engineering, and fuel usage studies.

 

Maximizing the environmental benefits of existing technology.

The ZTR KickStart product is a game-changer for the rail industry's commitment to reducing environmental impact. As fuel prices rise, increased fuel consumption is a significant challenge. Reducing operating expenses is crucial for staying competitive. Legislative requirements and shareholder expectations demand lower emissions. KickStart is designed to meet these needs by reducing fuel usage and minimizing idle time. By maximizing the effectiveness of an AESS, including battery systems and manual shutdown policies, KickStart can save up to 5000-8000 gallons of fuel and reduce emissions by nine tonnes of CO2e per locomotive, depending on usage.

KickStart addresses the central issue of Dead-Won’t Starts, improving locomotive availability and minimizing disruptions and penalties for missed delivery targets. It also reduces the risk of accidents and eliminates field trips while reducing exposure to high-amp current. In addition, KickStart uses supercapacitor technology, providing several advantages over traditional batteries, including high power density, long lifespan, and fast charging and discharging. Overall, KickStart is an innovative solution that meaningfully improves the rail industry's environmental impact while addressing critical operational challenges.

Sustainability through Control Systems

Our BOA and NEXSYS products profoundly contribute to environmental remediation by improving the performance, reliability, and availability of existing locomotive fleets at a fraction of the cost of buying new locomotives. These solutions are designed to reduce emissions, increase traction, enhance performance, and extend fleet life for 15-20 years, resulting in fewer locomotives being decommissioned and fewer resources being used to produce new locomotives. What’s more, our products have onboard diagnostic displays with health information and GPS location tracking, advanced diagnostics, reporting, and remote communication. This allows for efficient performance management and troubleshooting, reducing maintenance needs and minimizing environmental impact. Using BOA and NEXSYS products helps promote sustainability and responsible resource management within the railway industry.

 

Looking to the Future

Renewing a fleet of locomotives with our products and services can significantly improve efficiency and reliability, locomotive tractive effort, information management, fuel conservation, starting reliability, and locomotive control systems. It’s important to ZTR to keep innovating and developing solutions that supplement our legacy environmental products so we can continue to offer ways to reduce emissions, save fuel, and extend the life of aging locomotives.

Our environmental commitment is clearly evident in our products and initiatives. We offer customers flexible options for future upgrades that can prepare their fleets for the future while reducing the environmental impact of locomotive idling. We are working on today's problems with tomorrow's technology, ensuring a brighter, more environmentally friendly future for everyone.

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Green Energy Blue Locomotive

Harness the power of green energy

Just one locomotive can haul a tonne of goods more than 210 kilometres on a single litre of fuel, effectively replacing almost 300 trucks from congested roadways. In Canada alone, railways move 70% of all intercity freight while producing just 3.5% of the country's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Renewing a fleet of locomotives with our products and services can significantly improve efficiency and reliability, locomotive tractive effort, information management, fuel conservation, starting reliability, and locomotive control systems. It’s important to ZTR to keep innovating and developing solutions that supplement our legacy environmental products so we can continue to offer ways to reduce emissions, save fuel, and extend the life of aging locomotives.

Environmentally focused products

Our environmental commitment is clearly evident in our products and initiatives. We offer customers flexible options for future upgrades that can prepare their fleets for the future while reducing the environmental impact of locomotive idling. We are working on today's problems with tomorrow's technology, ensuring a brighter, more environmentally friendly future for everyone.

NEXSYS III-i Control System

Improving locomotive adhesion, performance, diagnostics, and overall efficiency with this advanced, proven and reliable control system.

SmartStart IIe Automatic Engine Start Stop (AESS)

The industry-leading locomotive automatic engine start/stop system because of proven results on thousands of locomotives. With an ROI of less than 12 months, it saves railways 1.5 million gallons of fuel every month!

KickStart Starting Assist

Uses supercapacitor technology to offload the starting current required from batteries to start the locomotive. This results in more reliable locomotive starts and extended battery life.

InteLevel Fuel Management

Makes it easy to remotely connect to your fuel management data, so you can better manage fuel levels fleet wide.

Telematics and Diagnostics

The ZTR SAVER™ is a remote communication device that, when added to a system like SmartStart®, gives you wireless information about the performance of your system.

Locomotive Battery Saver System

The Locomotive Battery Saver System improves reliability by opening automatically after a pre-set time to prevent inopportune delays caused by dead batteries.

 

 

Yard Assets

Rental Equipment

We work with some of the largest rental houses in the world. They depend on our solutions to streamline, simplify and optimize their day to day operations. We make it easy. And as your rental fleet grows, we grow with you. You can always count on us to connect your equipment, your customers, and your organization.

Combining business data and equipment data will transform your rental company by generating new growth opportunities and cost efficiencies.  The challenge is pulling all the pieces together into one seamless solution. Partnering with ZTR will allow for a successful deployment at a lower cost with measurable benefits within months. In addition, ZTR will handle the ever-changing Industrial IoT world, so you can focus on your core business.

Benefits:

Simplify

  • Proven factory installation with dozens of OEMs
  • Integrates with existing business systems
  • View all equipment in one system
  • Same user interface on any device (computer, tablet, mobile)

Streamline operations and reduce costs

  • Know where your equipment is at all times
  • Complete more work orders and capture additional services.
  • Optimize fleet equipment purchase selection based on utilization trends

Increase uptime and utilization of equipment

  • Use equipment health data to get it ready for rent faster
  • Give field techs information in advance to be more effective
  • Improve fleet health with proactive repairs

Increase revenue and customer loyalty

  • Get alerts on run hour overages and proactively contact your customer
  • Uses data to respond faster and more accurately to issues
  • Retain profitable customers with usage analysis and loyalty programs
  • Add new service offerings based on usage and failure data analysis
  • Contract management will be data-driven

Private Fleet

No matter the size, no matter the industry, when you need to know where your equipment is and what it’s doing, we deliver. And when our telematics give you the data from a big project, it makes bidding for the next job effortless. We assess your needs and customize each solution to work for you.

Combining business data and equipment data will transform your company by generating new growth opportunities and cost efficiencies.  The challenge is pulling all the pieces together into one seamless solution. Partnering with ZTR will allow for a successful deployment at a lower cost with measurable benefits within months. In addition, ZTR will handle the ever-changing Industrial IoT world, so you can focus on your core business.

The ZTR ONE i3 Solution provides all the elements of the Industrial IoT together in one solution, tailored to fit your needs, allowing you to connect to suppliers, partners, and customers. As a complete end-to-end solution, it includes telematics hardware, equipment integration, platform, user interface with GeoZone® adaptive reporting, wireless management, and support.

Benefits:

Simplify

  • Proven factory installation with dozens of OEMs
  • Integrates with existing business systems
  • View all equipment in one system
  • Same user interface on any device (computer, tablet, mobile)

Streamline operations and reduce costs

  • Know where your equipment is at all times
  • Eliminate maintenance paperwork
  • Complete more work orders and reduce field service trips
  • Reward and keep your best Project Managers based on asset utilization
  • Optimize equipment purchase selections based on utilization trends

Increase uptime and utilization of equipment

  • Give field techs information in advance of a truck roll
  • Improve fleet health with proactive repairs
  • Optimize equipment purchase sections based on utilization trends
  • Improve project bids based on actual equipment usage

Locomotives

Insights to meet your goals

Industry goals continue to evolve and expand at breakneck speeds. More than ever, the focus is on addressing emission reductions and meeting science-based goals without sacrificing availability. It is a fine line and a challenge that we tackle head on.

At ZTR, our goal is to help Railroads meet these ambitious and important goals. With our services, we ensure Railroads get the most out of our products and their locomotives by gathering the right data and turning it into meaningful insight.

Benefits

Through data collection and analysis, ZTR offers many opportunities for improvement including: procedural corrections, maintenance requirements, hardware or software configurations as well as technology advancements that can make a significant difference. 

ZTR Fuel and Energy Management products such as SmartStart, work to reduce emissions and offer quick ROI through fuel savings. Insights include:

  • How systems are being maintained
  • How much fuel is being saved and, just as importantly, what is not being saved and why?
  • Fleet and individual performance
  • “Quick wins” for fuel savings
  • Utilization

Locomotive uptime and operational efficiencies are critical in today’s supply and demand environment. ZTR control solutions improve locomotive availability by raising performance standards and facilitating data driven actions to quickly and proactively resolve locomotive issues. You can get immediate alerts and notifications concerning:

  • Location
  • Locomotive component faults
  • Items that require immediate attention or shopping
  • Historical information to aid in proactive maintenance
  • Periodic transmission of locomotive performance metrics
  • Fuel management information

ZTR industry leading support can be improved even further through technology; we're onboard with you. More visibility for our expert team leads to quick resolution, less time in the shop and higher availability.

By utilizing data available through ZTR cloud based solutions, we can provide:

  • Collaborative and periodic reviews
  • Baseline system configuration and health
  • Recommendations for troubleshooting and potential parts replacement
  • Fleet-wide locomotive performance analysis reports with focus on Emission reductions and opportunities for improvement

Health and Performance Data

Diagnostics

Our diagnostic software provides access to reports and real-time data. You can easily view large data files and snapshots, as well as useful troubleshooting instructions.  This offers the same diagnostic capabilities as laptop-based software, but on a small operator interface display mounted in the cab of a locomotive. We can also work with a variety of third-party interfaces to integrate all equipment.

 

Connectivity

Keep all of your locomotive assets connected. Diagnostic information can be viewed remotely on any device, as long as it has a web browser and an internet connection. This locomotive health and diagnostic information can be further enhanced with location data, customized reports, automatic fault, alarm notifications and fleet-wide reporting.

 

Data Acquisition

We create solutions that collect the information you need and integrate it with your business systems to improve operational performance.

 

Information Integration

We offer customizable solutions that can integrate data and diagnostic systems into a locomotive information hub and add additional processing and remote connectivity options to optimize the information.

Questions?

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Control Systems

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Whether you need to pull more with less or improve the performance of your existing fleet, we have specifically designed systems with diagnostics and remote connectivity, so you can enhance your fleet efficiency and manage it from anywhere.   

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Blue Locomotive in the Mountains

Options for every need

At ZTR we understand the need for cost effective and flexible locomotive modernization options and we provide many alternatives depending on your needs.

  • Thousands of systems installed globally
  • Installations with many of the North American Class 1 railways
  • Options and a design approach that ensure your system meets your needs
  • Integrated with SmartStart® IIe, the most trusted AESS on the market
  • Advanced solutions include tractive effort analysis, installation and commissioning, training, and 24/7 technical support 

Flexibility

ZTR designs custom control systems solutions for many types of applications including GE locomotives, ALCO, electric locomotives and multi-engine Genset locomotives.

  • Replace older parts with solid-state electronics
  • Replace old replay logic or modules with proven microprocessor technology
  • Easy to read, on-board diagnostic displays with health information and GPS location tracking
  • Advanced diagnostics, reporting and remote communication

Fuel and Energy Management

Fuel and Energy Management Green Technology Logo

ZTR offers AESS and tank measurement solutions that provide significant fuel savings, accurate fuel measurements and advanced diagnostic information, all available remotely through our proven connectivity solutions.