Standard Rail simplifies search for rail service
SASKATOON, Saskatchewan - If you've ever been an airline passenger, your travel likely was booked through a computerized Global Distribution System, the first of which was called SABRE.
SABRE replaced a manual, paper-based system for booking air travel and had a revolutionary impact on the airline industry when it was introduced in the 1960s. It reduced the time it took to book a reservation from about 90 minutes to just a few seconds.
Robert Skarzynski, founder and CEO of Standard Rail, believes that a similar system can be used to identify and book freight rail services. The company this month introduced SIDINGS Agent Mode , a conversational map search experience that helps shippers, logistics planners, and industrial users find rail-connected facilities by describing what they need in their own words. Users can search by place, railroad, corridor, or service type, eliminating the need to rely solely on traditional search filters.
Standard Rail is 10 years old and began in the rail services business after Skarzynski spent the early part of his career with a short line railroad, then overseeing derailment cleanups. The first iteration of his company focused on car repair and other rail-related services, so he has a deep understanding of the business and workflows the rail access system supports. This underscores the notion that the best systems cannot be developed in a vacuum –– systems must be designed by people who well know the workflow the system is going to support.
In addition to enabling these processes to operate more efficiently, Skarzynski believes the system can help win back carload freight that now goes by truck.
"The bottleneck is not track. It is that rail capacity is harder to buy," Skarzynski says. "Finding storage, locating a transload partner, getting a comparable rate, negotiating paper [i.e., insurance, credit, etc.], and running the railcar lifecycle still happens [today] by phone, PDF, and spreadsheet. A truck books in minutes. Rail often takes weeks –– so many shippers never try."
Shippers and others have trouble accessing information about products, services, locations, and details that make it easier to use rail. One of the big complaints among industries that purchase freight transportation is that "railroads are hard to do business with." Rail customers can offer a plethora of examples. Moreover, the current inefficiencies of locating resources and booking business add unnecessary costs to transactions.
Standard Rail's system platform is called The Rail Access System. SIDINGS is the "discovery and network" layer. FastTrack is the "transaction and booking" layer.
Simply put, SIDINGS enables you to locate a facility or service you need, and FastTrack enables you to book service with the necessary providers. The system relies on a large language model, which means you can communicate with the system in natural language, such as "What transload facilities that handle hazardous materials are located in the Pittsburgh region?"
The system will not only return resources that fit your precise needs based on your query but will also allow you to book services in real time.
The model used in the Standard Rail system is an artificial intelligence agent, or software that uses large language models to break down complex tasks and, ultimately, complete them in concert with humans or other computer systems. Modern computing tools, such as artificial intelligence – particularly natural language processing - make it easier for companies like Standard Rail to develop a system that makes necessary information available to all parties and enables business to be booked once it's gathered. While the use of this technology delivers phenomenal outcomes, it is dependent on high-quality data, or "labeling," as Skarzynski calls it.
"Before anything can be optimized, automated, or intelligently matched, it has to be clearly defined. If the underlying data isn't consistent, systems can't reliably interpret what a facility actually does, matching supply and demand becomes inconsistent, and visibility across the network remains fragmented," he explains. "You can build better software. You can apply better models. But without a shared [data] structure, you're still working from slightly different versions of reality, and that limits everything."
The beauty of the system is that when the database structure is organized and maintained so the computer can interpret how things are related, it provides a user-friendly interface based on natural language and makes accessing and booking rail-related products and services much easier, the company says.
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