I miss my contract work with FRA. The onboard condition monitoring equipment was created to help the coal car owners understand the causes of wear on their cars and enable them to schedule maintenance in their own shop instead of getting fixed on the road at whatever facility was closest. The system was self powered from a generator on one of the wheels. GPS tracked location. A 1xRTT CDMA modem on Verizon's network provided connectivity. Thermal and vibration sensors on the bearing detected pending faults with details down to a set of 55 possible defects. The cars were wirelessly networked with 802.11b with an OLSR mesh network to allow a train with 255 cars wrapped around a mountain to still propagate status to the locomotive engineer.
None of the matters if the coal cars aren't running. A follow-on project added automatic control of couplers, anglecock valves, handbrakes and auto-coupling with ECP braking. A brake piston position indication allowed automatic scan of the brake state to avoid dragging a car with the brake set. All of that technology was abandoned in a yard in Joliet, IL the morning after Obama was inaugurated.
So Caliph Baraq torpedo’d “smart” rail cars.
Interesting.
What you described is basically the setup used on race cars where parameters are telemetered to the pits for analysis basically in real time.