The 6180.49A annual report

Generate, complete, and certify FRA Form 6180.49A from the inspection and test events you have already filed.

FRA Form 6180.49A — the Locomotive Inspection and Repair Record — is not a document you sit down and type once a year. In RailCompliant it is assembled from the inspection and test events you have already filed against the locomotive. Keep the events accurate through the year and the annual report is largely written by the time you open it.

Opening the report

The 6180.49A lives on the locomotive's own record page, as the 6180.49A tab beside History. The 6180.49A links on the locomotive's Overview and Compliance tabs, and in the panel on the right of the page, open it too.

The tab opens on the current year. Its heading shows the report year and a status badge (open until it is certified), with the actions beside it:

‹ and › step to the previous or next year's record, so an earlier year is one click away.
Print / PDF opens the print-formatted record in a new tab.
Download JSON exports the year's data.
Certify & freeze appears for an officer with certify authority while the year is still open.

A note states the position plainly: the report is generated live from inspection events, and it is a working draft until an officer with certify authority freezes it. Once certified, the note says who certified it and when.

6180.49A report for a locomotive marked open, with a derived locomotive identity block above a report header block of non-derivable fields such as out-of-use credit and AFM calibration date

What the report derives on its own

The Locomotive identity block is marked derived — locomotive number, model, year built, propelled by, horsepower, air brake, and the operated-by and owned-by railroad names come from the locomotive record. Correct them on the locomotive, not here.

The header fields you fill in

The Report header block is marked non-derivable — you enter these. These are the values no event can supply:

Operated-by RR code and Owned-by RR code — the reporting codes, as distinct from the railroad names shown above.
Propelled by and Type of service.
Out-of-use credit (days) — now worked out from the out-of-use periods recorded on the locomotive's Compliance tab, and the year's periods are listed on the report as its out-of-use notations (§ 229.33). A number typed here before that change is kept and shown as typed, but it is no longer used.
Last periodic inspection date and Last periodic inspection place.
AFM calibration date — the air-flow-method calibration.
H&H test pressure — the hydrostatic and hammer test pressure.
Waiver (Part 229) and Waiver (other) — references to any relief the locomotive operates under.

Click Save header to store them. You can revise the header as often as you like while the report is open, and every save is written to the record history with what the header said before. If the record was certified in the meantime, your changes are not saved and the tab tells you so — a certified record cannot be edited. You can also certify a year without having saved a header.

The generated body

Periodic inspections (§ 229.23) lists this year's inspections with date, place, items, the person conducting, and who certified. Tests lists each required test — event recorder, annual tests, hand and park brake, air brakes levels 1 through 3, and hammer and hydrostatic — with its interval, and the date, place, person, and certifying officer, split between this year and the previous occurrence.

If a row reads "—" or the report looks wrong, the fix is almost always a missing or mis-dated inspection event, not the report. Go back to Inspections & tests, correct the event, and reopen the report.

Certifying and freezing

Certify & freeze is available to an officer with certify authority. It asks you to confirm, then takes an exact copy of the report as it stands at that moment and stores it. From then on the tab renders that frozen copy rather than re-deriving the report, so later edits to the underlying events cannot change what was certified. Certifying an already-certified report does nothing — if two officers certify at the same moment, the first certification stands and the second changes nothing.

The certification block carries the statutory warning that a false entry on the form is punishable by fine or imprisonment (18 U.S.C. § 1001).

Printing and exporting

Print / PDF opens the print-formatted record for signature and filing. Download JSON exports the report's data — the frozen snapshot if the report is certified, the live assembly if it is not.