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Overview

What RailCompliant is, what it keeps track of, and who uses it.

RailCompliant is a hosted application for heritage railroads, tourist railroads, and railway museums. It keeps the federal inspection and maintenance record your locomotives are required to have under 49 CFR Part 230 (steam) and Part 229 (modern and diesel equipment), and it runs the shop's day-to-day maintenance, purchasing, and operating records in the same place.

Your railroad gets its own workspace. Everyone at your railroad — paid staff and volunteers alike — works inside it, and no other railroad can see your records.

Locomotive Roster listing each engine with a drawing of its type, its reporting mark, steam, diesel or electric type, description, working pressure or horsepower, and year built

The two halves

The compliance record. Inspections, tests, repairs, and alterations are filed against a specific locomotive on a form that matches the FRA form your inspector already knows. Each record captures who performed the work, who certified it, and when. Records are signed off through an approval chain and every change is written to a permanent history that cannot be edited after the fact. On top of those events the app produces the paperwork: the Form 4 boiler specification card, the annual FRA Form 6180.49A, the Form 5 service-day record, and the filing deadlines each completed inspection creates.

The shop. Work orders, parts inventory, requisitions and vendors, bulk consumables, labor hours, excursions, and crew qualifications. This is the day-to-day side: what is broken, who is fixing it, which parts came off the shelf, what had to be bought, and what it all cost. The Cost Center adds up everything the railroad paid out in a fiscal year.

How the two connect

The halves are deliberately wired together rather than kept apart:

  • A work order raised for an inspection that is coming due is where you file that inspection, and filing it closes the work order it satisfies. The job and the paperwork finish together.
  • Costs roll up from paid labor and parts to the work order, and from work orders to the locomotive, so "what has this engine cost us" is a number you can read rather than reconstruct. Volunteer time is valued alongside it as in-kind, never mixed into the cash cost.
  • Running the railroad feeds the compliance clocks. Excursions, mileage entries, daily inspections, and days you log by hand all count as service days, which is what most Part 230 intervals are measured in.
  • Forms pull what the records already know. A crew member's pay terms come from the roster, and a fuel fill's price and unit come from the store it was drawn from, so nobody types the same figure twice.

Because of the service-day point, the app computes what is due next instead of relying on a wall calendar. The Compliance Due page shows every tracked obligation for every locomotive with its citation, how much of the interval has elapsed, and whether it is current, due soon, or overdue — and it opens work orders for the things that are coming due.

Who uses it

  • Mechanical department and shop foremen — filing inspections, running work orders, drawing parts, and requesting what the shop needs.
  • The chief mechanical officer or whoever signs — certifying inspections, the Form 4 card, and the annual report.
  • Crew and volunteers — logging the work they did and planning the days they will work, with this documentation one click away for people who do not use the app every day. Anyone with a login also has My Career, their own service record and certification file.
  • Administrators — adding people, deciding what each role can open and change, granting sign-off and purchase-approval authority, and watching the Cost Center.
  • The owner — one administrator who also holds the subscription.

What RailCompliant is not

RailCompliant is a record-keeping system, not a legal authority. Where an obligation is tracked, the app shows the citation and links to the official eCFR text so you can read the rule itself. Your qualified person makes the determination; the app records it.

Some FRA record families are deliberately out of scope and are not, and will not be, part of the app: accident and incident reporting (Part 225), hours of service (Part 228), grade crossing signal systems (Part 234), and signal systems (Part 236). Those carry casualty and employee personal information and a different legal posture from mechanical records.

Where to go next

Last updated October 1, 2026