An integrated rail car tracking system (10) comprising; a plurality of fixed wayside automatic equipment identification (AEI) readers (36) spaced at predetermined locations along a railway for reading identification data from a AEI tags (33) on rail cars (22) passing along the railway; a locomotive tracking system (42) including an on-board GPS system (45) for providing data indicative of the location of the locomotive (38) and a transmitter (42) for transmitting the location data to a remote receiver (19); a rail car wireless message system (12) attached to a rail car (22) for sending periodic messages indicative of the location of the rail car (22), the message system including a GPS system (24) for generating data indicative of rail car location; and a local area network (LAN) established between the rail car (22) and an associated locomotive (38) whereby the rail car location data is transmitted to the locomotive tracking system (42) for transmission to the remote receiver (19).