Traditionally, freight wagon technology has lacked digitalization and advanced monitoring capabilities. This article presents recent advancements in freight wagon digitalization, covering the system’s definition, development, and field tests on a commercial line in Sweden. A number of components and systems were installed on board on the freight wagon, leading to the intelligent freight wagon. The digitalization includes the integration of sensors for different functions such as train composition, train integrity, asset monitoring and continuous wagon positioning. Communication capabilities enable data exchange between components, securely stored and transferred to a remote server for access and visualization. Three digitalized freight wagons operated on the Nässjo–Falköping line, equipped with strategically placed monitoring sensors to collect valuable data on wagon performance and railway infrastructure. The field tests showcase the system’s potential for detecting faults and anomalies, signifying a significant advancement in freight wagon technology, and contributing to an improvement in freight wagon digitalization and monitoring. The gathered insights demonstrate the system’s effectiveness, setting the stage for a comprehensive monitoring solution for railway infrastructures. These advancements promise real-time analysis, anomaly detection, and proactive maintenance, fostering improved efficiency and safety in the domain of freight transportation, while contributing to the enhancement of freight wagon digitalization and supervision.

Railway applications are in continuous evolution with the aim of offering a more efficient, sustainable, and safer transportation system for the users. Generally, these applications are constantly exchanging information between the systems onboard the train and the trackside through a wireless communication. Nowadays, Global System for Mobile communications-Railway (GSM-R) is the technology used by European Train Control System (ETCS), but it is becoming obsolete. Therefore, alternatives for this technology have to be found for the different railway applications. Its natural evolution is to move forward with the latest technology deployed: Long-Term Evolution (LTE), which the Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN) have already deployed. Therefore, testing the performance of this communication technology in the railway environment could be useful to assess its suitability and reduce the cost of railway network dedicated deployment. In order to do that, a methodology to characterize the communication environment is proposed. The main goal is to measure geolocated impairments of any communication channel in a railway environment being able to determine its behavior of the different communication technologies and find out possible coverage issues. Moreover, it could help in the selection of suitable communication technology for railway. This paper presents a brief description of the communication for railways and its QoS parameters for performance measuring. Afterward, the testing methodology is described, and then, the communication channel measurement campaign on a real track in Spain where the railway environment is variable is presented (tunnels, rural/urban area…). Finally, the measurements and results on this real track in Spain are shown. The results provide suitability of the 4G technologies based on the delay requirements for the implementation of ETCS over it.