2 minute read
New App Brings Efficiencies for Rail Teams
by OneWatco
Watco is wrapping up the rollout of iPads with a mobile app that distributes critical railroad resources in electronic format, making them searchable and easily kept up to date.
Since January, Watco has distributed about 900 iPads loaded with Watco rulebooks, timetables for each Watco railroad, and the railroad industry’s General Code of Operating Rules. These documents are delivered to the iPads through the Comply365 Mobile App.
“We’re initially using it for rulebooks and timetables,” said SVP of Environmental Health and Safety Travis Herod, “starting with train and engine service team members, who have to have rulebooks with them on the train.” Conductors and engineers at almost all the company’s railroads have received the devices. So have new conductors and engineers training at the Watco Safe Performance Center in Birmingham, Alabama.
Comply365 is in use at several Class I railroads and throughout the commercial airline industry. Just as it has replaced some paper documents kept by the pilots in airplane cockpits, Comply365 is replacing the printed documents carried in locomotives. In some cases, trains will still carry hard copies of some documents, but Kris Hawley, a software solutions architect who has helped orchestrate the rollout, believes providing resources electronically can in many cases educe the number of thick black binders, filled with printed rulebooks and timetables, that are carried in locomotive cabs. Not only will digital documents save printing and distribution time and expense, they’ll allow users to search for and quickly find information. And as documents are revised, they can be pushed promptly to the iPads.
Hawley noted that he has already heard from team members at railroads who have ideas for additional potential ways to use Comply365. “Our operations team members are creative,” he said. “They’re embracing this and saying, ‘This is great, and we want to take it even further.’” Hawley and Herod agree that Comply365 shows promise for possible additional uses, such as training.
