HisWay Labs · Industrial IoT
TrackView is a small unit fixed beside the track. It sends low power pulses along the rail and uses what comes back to locate trains and find broken rails, on any line, with no trackside power.
Simulation · one unit, an ore train and a rail break
01 · The product
TrackView is a monitoring device about the size of a shoebox. It is bolted to a railway sleeper, wrapped in steel and connected to the rail with two short cables. It sends very low power electrical pulses along the rail and listens for what comes back. From that it can tell where trains are, how fast they are moving and whether the rail is broken. Alarms reach the operator within minutes.
It is built for heavy haul and freight lines, such as the routes that carry iron ore, manganese and coal from mines to ports, and for remote lines where power and fibre are not available.
Broken rails
Train position and average speed
Rail to rail bonds
Rail temperature
Dragging equipment and abnormal impacts on the rail
Eight monitoring functions in one device, as listed by TrackView.
02 · How it works
What the unit does, one step at a time.
01The unit at the start of a section sends a short, very low power pulse down the steel every few seconds. The rail itself carries the signal, so there is no cable running along the track and nothing to power along the way.
02As a train enters the section the unit picks it up and follows it along the line, reporting where it is and how fast it is moving, continuously, on any line, with no other trackside equipment.
03If the rail cracks or is cut, the pulse cannot get past the gap. The unit notices straight away, works out where the break is to within 50 metres and raises an alarm in under three minutes, so traffic can be stopped before the next train reaches it.
Figures as published by TrackView on trackview.io, September 2026.
03 · Designed for hard places
TrackView was designed for railways where cable theft, vandalism and a lack of power along the track are the normal conditions, not the exception.
The housing is wrapped in steel and fixed to the sleeper. There is no copper cable running along the track and no power line feeding it. On its own the unit has no resale value, which removes the reason to take it.
Each unit runs on very little power and reports over GSM, WiFi or LoRaWAN, whichever is available where it stands. It works on signalled lines, on unsignalled lines and in remote territory with no infrastructure at all.
A unit is installed in under an hour, between trains. A faulty one is swapped in ten minutes. Data goes to the TrackView dashboard or straight into the operator's own systems through an API, and every unit is monitored and updated remotely.
04 · The company
HisWay Labs is the engineering company behind TrackView. It was founded in 2019 in Somerset West, South Africa, to deal with a local problem: rail lines where cable theft and vandalism had stripped conventional monitoring systems of their cables, batteries and solar panels, leaving broken rails undetected. The team set out to build a unit that could survive that environment and still report reliably.
TrackView is patented in South Africa, the European Union and the United States. In 2025 HisWay Labs introduced it to European operators at Rail Live in Madrid, as part of a delegation led by South Africa's Department of Trade, Industry and Competition.
HisWay Labs is one of the companies Octoco Group backs, in its industrial IoT holdings.
Portfolio
HisWay Labs' TrackView sends micro electric pulses into the rail to watch roughly 2 km of track for breaks, so operators get earlier warning of a broken rail before it causes a derailment.
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