Importing & exporting data

Bring an existing fleet list in from a spreadsheet, and take every record back out as CSV.

Out of the box, importing and exporting are for administrators: Import Data and Export Data appear in the sidebar only for people whose role can use them. An administrator can open either to general members on Settings & permissions.

Importing

Click Import Data in the sidebar. If your fleet already lives in a spreadsheet, this brings it in without retyping.

Import Data page offering Locomotives and Rolling stock as the two importable types, with a note on saving an Excel sheet as CSV first

Two entities can be imported today:

Locomotives — your motive-power roster. Reporting initials, number, and type are required; everything else is optional and editable afterwards.
Rolling stock — coaches, cabooses, flats, and tanks. Reporting mark and car type are required; capacity, light weight in tons, status, and notes are optional.

Everything else — inspections, work orders, parts, people, history — is entered in the app. Those records carry signatures and a permanent history, so they are created deliberately rather than bulk-loaded.

The four steps

Get the template. Click Download CSV template. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets and fill in one row per machine, keeping the header row as it is. The page lists every column it looks for and marks the required ones in bold. Header names do not have to match exactly — common variants such as "Road Number" and "No." are recognized.
Upload and preview. Choose your file and click Upload & preview. In Excel, save the sheet as CSV first (File → Save As → CSV). The file is scanned for viruses, then read for its rows; the file itself is never stored.
Review. Nothing has been saved yet. The preview shows exactly what will be created and flags any problem rows. Fix those in the spreadsheet and upload again.
Import. Commit the good rows.

Duplicates are skipped automatically, so running the same file twice is safe.

Import your fleet before you file your first inspection. The locomotive template includes Service days baseline and Last 1472 date, which carry over the history the compliance clock needs. Set once at import, they save you correcting every interval by hand later.

Exporting

Click Export Data in the sidebar. Everything exports as CSV, and each dataset has its own CSV button:

Export your data page with a card per dataset — locomotives, service days, inspections, annual records, work orders, labor, parts, stores, crew, excursions, fuel and more — each with its own CSV button

Dataset	What it contains
Locomotives	The roster with Form 4 identity, boiler, MAWP, service-day count
Service days	Every logged in-service day per locomotive
Inspections & tests	Every filed inspection with dates, status, signatures, and full responses
6180.49A annual records	Annual records; certified rows include the frozen snapshot
Work orders	Status, priority, compliance linkage, and rolled-up cost
Labor entries	Hours and cost per person across work orders, inspections, and excursions
Parts inventory / Parts consumed	Stock, unit cost, reorder points and quantities; every part drawn against a work order
Requisitions	One row per item: status, approvals, vendor, PO, quantities requested and received
Vendors	Suppliers with contacts, account numbers, and whether they are active
Consumable stores	Coal, diesel, oil, water, sand — stock, cost, reorder points
Crew & people	The roster with roles and certify authority
Excursions & runs	Runs with route, trips, mileage, riders, and direct cost
Fuel log	Fuel taken on, by locomotive, with quantity and cost
Rolling stock	Cars with type, capacity, weight, and status
Volunteer hours	The activity log 2 CFR 200.306 asks for, with rates and bases
Waivers & special approvals	Dockets, expiry dates, conditions, covered locomotives
Audit trail	The full record history — every create, amend, and approval

Fields that hold structured data — inspection responses, Form 4 specifications, the before-and-after values in the record history — are embedded as JSON text inside the CSV, so nothing is dropped on the way out.

Typical uses are a board or grant report, analysis in a spreadsheet, an archival copy kept alongside your own records, and a handover if you ever move to another system.

Two more downloads live on their own pages: the fiscal year's spending from the Cost Center (CSV in its header), and each crew member's own hours across every railroad from My Career.

An export contains your railroad's data and nothing else. The audit trail export includes each row's hash pair, so the record chain can be re-verified outside RailCompliant — see How your data is protected.