Railroad Wayside Telemetry Standard™

RWTS is the open IoT standard for railroad wayside equipment. It unifies grade crossings, signals, switches, detectors, and power systems under one common language, regardless of vendor — defining not just the message format but device behavior, transport requirements, and conformance profiles.

Historically, wayside monitoring meant vendor lock-in: each manufacturer's equipment speaks its own protocol, so multi-vendor deployments require custom translation at every seam. RWTS closes that gap with a single open contract any vendor can implement.

Key Features

• 800+ standard alarm codes spanning 100+ equipment families — consistent semantics across vendors, with defined room for vendor-specific and custom codes
• 10 message types covering registration, heartbeat, telemetry, alarm lifecycle (raise / clear / acknowledge), configuration, and server commands
• Transport flexible — runs over MQTT, SNMPv3, or both at once for redundancy
• Four conformance profiles — every device declares which one it implements, so mixed fleets interoperate without special cases
• Self-describing devices — plug-and-play with zero pre-configuration
• RWTS Expanded — a defined, lossless human-readable form of every message, so SCADA systems, historians, and dashboards that don't implement RWTS can still ingest it
• Geographic addressing — milepost-based (MARK-SUB-MP-HOUSE-UNIT)
• Efficient encoding — CBOR binary by default, roughly half the bandwidth of JSON, with JSON available for debugging

Figures describe RWTS v1.0.0, currently in pre-release and in final development. Counts may grow before public release; the transports, addressing scheme, and security baseline are settled. Last checked against the specification September 2026.