Railway networks run on tens of thousands of assets — components, tools, fixtures and infrastructure parts — spread across yards, depots and worksites. Identium has supplied RFID hardware and identification systems to support asset and infrastructure tracking work for Indian Railways, one of the largest railway operators in the world.
The challenge
Railway assets move constantly between stores, maintenance bays and the field. Tracking them on paper or with line-of-sight barcodes is slow and error-prone: components get misplaced, audits take days, and there is no reliable, time-stamped record of where a part has been or which stage of inspection it has passed. Many assets are metal, exposed to weather, vibration and rough handling — conditions that defeat ordinary labels.
What Identium deployed
Identium’s approach centred on giving each asset a unique, scannable RFID identity that survives the rail environment:
- Rugged, on-metal UHF tags — see our RFID metal tags and rugged RFID tags, built to stay readable on metal surfaces exposed to weather and vibration.
- Handheld readers for field verification, audits and exception handling — our portable UHF readers let crews scan components without line of sight.
- Fixed and gate readers at stores and movement points to log assets automatically as they enter and leave — see fixed UHF readers.
All hardware operates on India’s licence-exempt UHF RFID band, and Identium is BIS certified and WPC approved. The deployment draws on the same building blocks as our RFID asset tracking and RFID infrastructures solutions, with active RFID reader tracking available where real-time location of high-value plant is needed.
The outcome
By replacing manual, line-of-sight checks with automatic RFID reads, the deployment supports faster physical audits, fewer misplaced assets and a time-stamped trail of asset movement that inspecting staff can rely on. Crews spend less time searching for components and more time on the work itself, and stores teams gain a clearer picture of what is on hand. These are qualitative gains reported in the context of the work; we do not publish hard percentage figures.
Read-point engineering, channel budget and the asset register
Frequency choice on a site like this is settled by two things at once: how far a read point has to reach, and how many tags it has to resolve in one pass. Passive UHF is the only family that does both at doorway and lane distances, which is why the air interface here is EPC Gen2 — standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63 and marketed as RAIN RFID, all three names for the same passive UHF protocol and for nothing else. HF at 13.56 MHz and LF at 125/134 kHz are inductive, short-range technologies with separate jobs; staff ID and door access at a depot usually stay HF, and stay a separate tag population with its own readers.
Two details in the 2021 rules matter more to a yard design than the band number itself. G.S.R. 853(E) of 10 December 2021 was made in supersession of the 2005 rules that set 865-867 MHz, so a specification still quoting the older figure is out of date; procurement should read 865-868 MHz.
The second is Table IV. Within that band, full 2 W e.r.p. reader power is permitted only in four channels of up to 200 kHz, centred at 865.7, 866.3, 866.9 and 867.5 MHz, with no more than four seconds of continuous transmission on a channel and at least 100 ms between bursts; the tag’s own reply sits at about -20 dBm e.r.p. Where several read points sit within radio range of each other, those four channels are the entire budget. The usual engineering answer is to allot readers across the plan and trigger each read point on an event rather than leave it transmitting all day — which also reduces the chance of an asset parked near a gate antenna being logged as a movement.
Rule 1(3) of the same notification preserves type approvals issued under the 2005 rules for their service life, so readers commissioned years ago may be lawfully in service while new procurement is written to 865-868 MHz. Rules change: confirm the current position with WPC before the radio clause is finalised.
Worth settling before an order of this kind:
- Encoding scheme. Whether tags must interoperate with a wider railway programme — zonal railway and CRIS tenders have called for GS1 GIAI-202 encoding per the CRIS specification — or simply carry your own asset numbers. Treat the live tender or project document as authoritative, and fix this early: it drives artwork, numbering and pre-encoding.
- Surface classes, not departments. Group the asset list by what each tag mounts on rather than by who owns it. A mixed population usually needs a small family of tag types, each trialled in its real mounting position.
- Trigger and direction at each read point. Dwell time, direction logic or a hardware trigger, settled at design rather than patched later in software.
- Commissioning discipline. A tag fitted but never entered in the register is invisible. The register is the system of record; the tag is only the sensor.
- Reconciliation. Handheld audits and fixed read points will not return identical counts. That is usually read geometry and timing rather than a fault, so decide in advance which figure the register trusts.
Related reading
- Writing the radio clause: BIS and WPC compliance guide for RFID buyers in India.
- Planning portal geometry: UHF antenna gain and polarization explained.
- Turning it into procurement: how to write an RFID tender and BoQ specification.
Planning RFID for a railway, transit or large infrastructure operation? Request a quote and our team will map read points and recommend tags tested on your actual assets.
Deployment details shared with client permission; specifics available on request.
Interested in trackside RFID? Read how Kavach uses RFID tags for railway safety.