Railinc Corporation (pronounced "rail-link") provides rail data and messaging services to the North American freight railway industry. Railinc is a for-profit subsidiary of the

Association of American Railroads The Association of American Railroads (AAR) is an industry trade group representing primarily the major freight Rail transport, railroads of North America (Canada, Mexico and the United States). Amtrak and some regional Commuter rail in North Am ...

Corporate structure

Railinc was established as an information technology department within the

(AAR), and later spun off as a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary of the AAR in 1998. The nine-member corporate board of directors consists entirely of members of the railroad industry, including all of the Class I railroads in North America and the AAR. Railinc headquarters is located in

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. Railinc's headquarters was relocated from joint operations in

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and

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, in 1999. Locations also considered were

Denver, Colorado Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

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, and

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

. Railinc employs nearly 300 full-time and contractor employees, approximately ten percent of whom are certified project managers.

Products and services

Railinc processes and delivers rail

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(DaaS) and provides

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

(SaaS) to the freight rail industry. Because many of the company's IT systems are required by formal railroad operating rules, the company’s applications and services can be found embedded in critical operations and financial systems throughout the industry. Key Railinc services include:
Umler
- The Umler system is the rail industry's official source for rail equipment information, including freight cars of all varieties, locomotives and end of train devices. This system replaced the legacy U.M.L.E.R. database, an acronym for Universal Machine Language Equipment Register. The name was changed in 2009 with the launch of the new Umler system in favor of the lower case spelling and trademarked name.
RailSight
- Railsight provides tracking and tracing data, known as car location messages (CLMs). The messages provide car locations to rail equipment owners, shippers, and

third-party logistics Third-party logistics (abbreviated as 3PL, or TPL) in logistics and supply chain management is an organization's use of third-party businesses to outsource elements of its distribution, warehousing, and fulfillment services. Third-party logisti ...

providers. The data is used for fleet management and to track and trace the movement of freight and freight cars throughout North America to ensure goods are delivered on-time or to track the progress of their movement. The RailSight engine delivers more than 7.5 million rail events each day from more than 530 Class I, Class II and Class III railroads and shops across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Damaged and Defective Car Tracking
- The Damaged and Defective Car Tracking (DDCT) system is used to identify and track damaged and defective rail cars to ensure their proper handling on the railways. This system, launched in 2011, replaced paper defect cards. Paper defect cards were used to aid in maintaining a record of the identified defects on each car, where the defects originated, and to determine the responsibility for each defect.
Equipment Health Management System
- The Equipment Health Management System (EHMS) monitors equipment to identify possible mechanical problems in cars and various car components.
Interline Settlement System
- Interline Settlement System (ISS) settles funds monthly between railroads to share revenue generated for car movement when two or more railroads are involved in the shipment route.
Forward & Store
- Forward & Store is a system to exchange interline waybill information.
Railinc Message Service
- Railinc Message Service (RMS) delivers messages over its electronic data interchange (EDI) network, including transportation waybills, advance train consists, trip plans and blocking requests and responses.
Industry Reference Files
- Railinc also maintains the North American railroad industry's official code tables, also known as industry reference files (IRFs), which includes the active reporting marks for the rail industry. Those codes define car marks, commodities, locations and other rail information used in all intra- and inter-industry communication to assure railroad data is consistent between railroads.
Steelroads
- The company also operates Steelroads, a legacy application which allows shippers to trace the movement of their rail freight shipments.

Corporate memberships

The company is part of the Surface Transportation Board information sharing and analysis center (ST-ISAC).Radvanovsky, Robert
''Critical Infrastructure: Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness''
Taylor & Francis Group; CRC Press, 2006.

References

External links