Help & support

The built-in guides for volunteers, and how to reach the people who build RailCompliant.

Help & Guides

Click Help & Guides in the sidebar for short, plain-language guides written for the people who actually do the work — a Saturday volunteer who needs to log a repair, not a compliance officer who reads the CFR for a living.

Help & Guides page with cards for how RailCompliant works, your locomotives and cars, service days and staying inspected, work orders and parts and labor, excursions and crews and fuel, the 6180.49A annual report, and the 49 CFR reader

The set covers:

How RailCompliant works — the big picture in two minutes: staying legal on one side, running the railroad on the other, and how the two connect.
Your locomotives & cars — add the fleet once; inspections, work, fuel, and the annual report all hang off each machine.
Service days & staying inspected — how using an engine counts down its inspection clocks, and how the app tells you what is due.
Work orders, parts & labor — tracking a repair start to finish, who did what, which parts were used, and what it cost.
Excursions, crews & fuel — putting a train together, crewing it, logging hours and fuel, and watching it feed the records.
The 6180.49A annual report — how the yearly federal report builds itself from your records, and what certifying means.

These are guides to the app. For the regulations themselves — the text of 49 CFR Part 230 and Part 229, searchable, with citations you can link to — use the Regulations library. The help pages link across to it wherever a rule is involved.

The support desk

Click Support in the sidebar. Tickets go straight to the people who build RailCompliant, and you can normally expect a reply within one business day.

Support & Feedback page with an empty Your tickets list beside an Open a ticket form offering a type, subject, message, and attachments

Opening a ticket

Fill in Open a ticket:

Type — Question, Problem / bug, or Feedback / idea.
Subject — a short summary.
Message — what happened, what you expected, and where you were in the app.
Attachments — up to three files of 10 MB each. Screenshots say more than words.

Click Send. The ticket is listed under Your tickets with a reference (RC-1001 and up), its type, status, and when it was last updated. Open it to read the thread, add a reply, or close it once the matter is settled. Replying to a closed ticket reopens it.

Tickets are visible to everyone at your railroad, not only the person who opened them. If a volunteer reports something on Saturday, the shop foreman can pick up the thread on Monday without re-reporting it.

Writing a report worth answering

For a problem, include the page you were on, what you clicked, what you expected, and what happened instead. If a number looks wrong, say which number and what you believe it should be. A screenshot of the screen as you found it is usually enough on its own.

For a security concern, open a ticket the same way and say so in the subject.

New to the app? Start with Navigating the app.