For the plants, terminals & transloaders we serve
Rail Customer Builder is the screen your plant runs its rail dock from. You model your own trackage down to the numbered spot, click cars where you need them, and the day's moves go straight to the railroad — no phone tag, no emailed spreadsheet, no retyping car numbers on either end.
01 · What you get
This is a live facility's board — every numbered spot on the track, what is sitting on it, what is inside it, and what stage it is at. The tiles across the top answer the morning's first questions before anyone walks the track.
02 · Entered once, used every day
Setup is a one-off, and it is yours — nobody knows your dock better than you do. After that, every screen speaks in your track names and your commodities, and nobody types a car number twice.
Each track, each numbered spot, in your words: Spot 1 · RACK 1 · unload only · usually chlorine. Spots that are occupied say so, right in Setup, because Setup reads the same board everything else does.
Record each tank — what it holds, its capacity, which spots feed it — so the board can answer “where does this car's product go” without anyone walking out to look.
Each one carries its car type, unit, UN number, hazard class and TIH flag — Caustic soda · Tank · gal · UN1824 · 8. Enter it once and every card that ever carries it is labelled right. Even “empty for load” is a commodity, so ordering empties is one click.
A track wears its chips — Track 613 · Gate · Derail — and those flags drive the checklist the railroad's crew must complete at your fence line. Your rules follow the crew in.
Save the addresses you send lists to every day and they wait as checkboxes on the send screen. Paperwork templates live in Setup too, so the documents leave looking the same every time.
03 · The daily habit
Ordering cars is the part your team does every day, so it is the part we made simplest. Pick a car from the yard pool, tap the spot you want it on, and the switch list underneath writes itself — car number, commodity and destination spot, exactly as the railroad's crew will read it.
Try itPick a car, tap a spot, and watch today's switch list build below. Tap a placed car to pull it back. This is the same interaction your clerk uses.
Yard pool
Select a car →
Spots — tap one to place the selected car
Today's switch list — generated
04 · No phone tag
Five move types cover a rail dock's whole day — pull, spot, respot, weigh, hold. Build the list, send it, and it lands on the crew's own screen, not in an inbox. Then the status comes back to you the same way.
Mark GATX 456342 loaded and released on spot 3, add the pull to today's moves. Four taps on a tablet, in a hard hat.
The same row appears on the crew's Industry Moves screen. They acknowledge it, and the acknowledgment shows on your board — you know it was seen, not hoped.
Placed, in progress, done. When the car leaves, the record of when it sat and where it went is already written — by the work itself, not by a phone call.
Mark a car ready for pull on the spot board and it suggests itself onto today's moves. Each row reads move · car · from · to · commodity · loaded-or-empty · status — the way a crew reads it.
Submitting puts the list straight on the crew's screen — no attachment — and you watch each move go acknowledged, then completed, as they work it.
The same list goes out by email to your saved inboxes — or a one-off address — or leaves as PDF, CSV or print. Your note to the crew rides on top: “Derail is on at the west end. Call the office on channel 4 before coming through the gate.”
The recently-sent history keeps the work date, how it went — in app or as a download — how many moves, when, and who sent it. The argument about whether the list went out is over before it starts.
05 · All day, without asking
The card says: the car, the commodity, loading or unloading, and how long it has been there. Nobody walks the track to find out.
Every placarded car shows its UN number and class on the card, and TIH cars are flagged in their own count at the top of the board.
The dwell clock runs per car from placement. When demurrage questions come up, both you and the railroad are reading the same timestamps — which is what makes the conversation short.
Every placement and release is history you can scroll, not a memory. The board is also the record.
06 · The practical part
Your people see your facility and nothing else — not other customers, not the railroad's yard. The railroad's crew sees your requests and your safety flags, not your business.
Phone, tablet or the desktop in the scale house, straight from the browser — no app store, no IT project. Tap Install app once and it sits on the home screen with its own icon, opens full screen, and keeps working where the signal doesn't. On iPhone and iPad it is Apple's two taps: Share, then Add to Home Screen.
Next
Thirty minutes, your track names, your racks, your commodities. If it doesn't fit how your dock actually runs, you have lost half an hour.
If we serve your plant, the portal is included with our service — your login costs your plant nothing. Served by another railroad? Run it standalone for $250 a month, email them your lists — and the fee goes away the day they join RailOps.
Would rather just write to someone? sales@clearlineprotocol.com