Rail transport is commonly used to convey passengers, goods, other materials, etc., from one location to another. To do so, two or more locomotives form a consist to push or pull freight and/or passenger cars along the rails. Locomotives also generally include network components that communicate with each other and facilitate user interaction via one or more wired and/or wireless networks to monitor and/or control the locomotive.
When a plurality of locomotives are connected to each other to form a consist, it may be desirable for the network components within one locomotive to communicate with network components in one or more other locomotives. This may enable coordinated control of all of the locomotives within the consist, for example. However, when network components within multiple locomotives try to communicate simultaneously, the communications must be properly synchronized, or else the different communications may interfere with each other, creating unnecessary network congestion and low data transfer rates between the network components of the locomotives.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2011/0093144 (the '144 patent application) to Goodermuth et al. is directed to a system for communicating data in a locomotive consist. In particular, the '144 patent application discloses transmitting data within a locomotive consist between two or more locomotives. The system described by the '144 patent application, however, does not properly synchronize communications among different locomotives, thus causing some of problems discussed above.
The disclosed methods and systems are directed to solving one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems of the prior art.