Case Study: Norfolk Southern Corporation achieves real-time operational visibility and improved customer service with TIBCO Software

Norfolk Southern Railway and TIBCO

Norfolk Southern, a North American Class I railroad, faced a shift from bulk to fast-growing intermodal traffic and intense competition from trucking and service-sensitive customers. Managing 170,000 railcars, 4,200 locomotives and hundreds of yards required real-time visibility and tighter asset stewardship, but legacy siloed systems and non‑real‑time data left planners and customers without a single, accurate source of truth.

The company built a Transportation Event Processor on a TIBCO stack (BusinessWorks, BusinessEvents, ActiveSpaces, Spotfire) to ingest IoT, legacy and partner feeds into a canonical state model and streaming analytics layer, powering apps and APIs including a real‑time customer portal. The platform improved terminal and empty‑car operations, enabled predictive maintenance, captured 3.2M events/day (60M generated), and delivered faster delivery of new apps with ~25% quicker time‑to‑market and an estimated 30–40% reduction in development time.

Norfolk Southern Corporation

Robert Miller

Manager of Enterprise Architecture