CSX has become the first railroad in North America to let people calling in an emergency stream live video and their location directly to its safety center, according to a report from Tri-State Alert.

Until now, members of the public reporting an incident on or near the tracks — a blocked crossing, a trespasser, a vehicle stuck on the rails — could only describe the situation by voice. Under the new arrangement, callers can transmit real-time footage and precise positioning data to the CSX safety center handling the report.

The change addresses a persistent problem for railroad emergency dispatch: a caller may know a crossing is blocked or a fire has broken out beside the line, but cannot reliably identify which of the thousands of crossings or mileposts along a network is involved. Video and automated location data shorten the gap between a first report and a coordinated response, giving CSX dispatchers and first responders a common picture of the scene before crews arrive.

No other railroad currently offers this capability to emergency callers, the report states, positioning CSX ahead of its Class I peers — Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, BNSF and Canadian National — in public-facing incident reporting technology.

Tri-State Alert did not report details on the underlying technology platform, the vendor supplying the streaming capability, or a specific rollout date. It also did not state whether the service covers the full 20,000-route-mile CSX network or is being phased in by region, and no figures on expected response-time improvements were published.

Those details will determine whether the capability becomes a template for the rest of the industry or remains a CSX-specific tool. Given the precedent now set, other Class I railroads are likely to face questions about when they will match it.