For North America’s railways, the landscape is shifting. Demand for public access, utility crossings, and infrastructure coordination is at an all-time high yet the workflows supporting those requests largely remain stuck in legacy processes.

PDF forms. Email intake. Manual payment coordination. Inconsistent templates. Missing information.

The downstream effect is always the same: highly skilled Engineering, Real Estate, Environmental, and Business Development teams spending hours on administrative tasks instead of focusing on safety, planning, and operations. Across both public and private rail organizations, these inefficiencies slow response times, introduce risk, reduce visibility, strain community relations, and make it harder to capture the revenue railways are entitled to.

At Tressl, we’ve spent years working alongside critical infrastructure owners and public works teams to redesign how land, permitting, and real estate workflows operate at scale. What we’ve learned from our work with regulated industries is clear.

Rail can unlock massive gains in speed, safety, and coordination by modernizing how public project requests move across teams, from intake to review, and payment.

Below are six key opportunities rail operators can tap into to strengthen governance, improve stakeholder experience, and return valuable time back to Real Estate teams, Engineers and other internal Reviewers.

1. Replace Manual Intake with Structured, Data-Ready Submission

Most railway teams receive requests in various formats such as PDFs, emails, outdated templates, or incomplete submissions. This creates friction from the very first step and forces reviewers to chase information that should have been collected up front.

Guided digital forms change that. With standardized questions and required fields, railways can dramatically reduce missing information, eliminate rework, and increase processing speed. This shift alone can reduce processing times by 50–70%, particularly for high-volume requests such as crossings, parallel occupancies, utility installations, and special move permits.

When teams begin with clean, complete data, reviews become faster, more consistent, and more accurate.

2. Standardize Workflows Across Regions to Strengthen Governance

Large rail networks operate across multiple provinces, states, and jurisdictions. Yet internal workflows often vary widely from one region to the next. Different forms, different routing paths, and different interpretations of requirements make it nearly impossible to get a unified operational picture.

Introducing standardized workflows brings clarity and control. Automated routing, consistent templates, digital audit trails, and role-based permissions ensure every request follows the right path. Leadership gains visibility into volumes, timelines, bottlenecks, and compliance across the entire network.

The result? Predictable, high-integrity operations with fewer delays and a more consistent experience for stakeholders.

3. Integrate Payments and Reconciliation to Capture More Revenue, Faster

Payment administration is one of the heaviest burdens in public use of railway workflows.  Accounting teams spend significant time chasing payments, verifying deposits, resolving discrepancies, and preparing reconciliation reports.

A modern, integrated payment experience eliminates that lift. In-portal payment collection, automated fee calculation, and monthly reconciliation reports create a clean financial trail from submission to settlement. Real-time visibility enables teams to quickly confirm payments, resolve issues, and maintain revenue accuracy.

This isn’t just efficient; it ensures railways capture 100%of the fees they’re entitled to without errors and significantly less manual intervention.

4. Build Community Relations by Improving Applicant Experience to Reduce Inquiries

Municipalities, utilities, contractors, telecom providers, road authorities, they all want the same thing: clarity.

And the most common question railways field is simple:

“What’s the status of my request?”

Providing applicants with a centralized portal, clear timelines, automated updates, and simple document uploads reduces inquiries by as much as 80%. It frees internal teams from constant email traffic while offering external stakeholders a professional, transparent experience.

Better communication builds trust and shorten the time it takes to move projects forward.

5. Protect Engineering Time by Eliminating Low-Value Tasks

Rail engineers are among the most specialized professionals in transportation, yet many spend hours each week on tasks like data entry, email coordination, and searching for files scattered across shared drives.

Digitized workflows remove that administrative burden. By centralizing documents, communication, approvals, and templates, engineering teams can refocus their time on what matters most: safety, infrastructure integrity, project execution, and high-risk reviews.

Efficiency isn’t the end goal, empowering people to work at the highest level of their expertise is.

6. Build a Single System of Record for All Public Use of Railway Activity

When information lives in inboxes, regional spreadsheets, legacy systems, and personal folders, rail operators lose the ability to answer basic operational questions with confidence, and expose themselves to significant key-man risk.

A centralized system of record provides instant visibility into every active request, past approval, fee paid, communication thread, template used, and reviewer action. With everything in one place, teams can plan more effectively, reduce disputes, accelerate decision-making, and strengthen overall governance.

Clarity drives better operations and better outcomes.

Looking Ahead: Modernizing Rail Workflows Is About More Than Digitization

Digitizing forms is only the starting point. Railways now can gain complete control by building a scalable foundation that unites:

• data
• people
• payments
• templates
• approvals
• internal collaboration

This is how rail transitions from manual coordination to modern operational resilience.

At Tressl, we’re helping rail organizations take that next step with a centralized, configurable platform built for clarity, speed, and control. One that reduces administrative lift, improves applicant experience, and enables engineering and technical teams to focus on keeping rail networks safe and moving.

Ready to modernize how your railway manages public use?

Let’s explore where inefficiencies are eroding control, slowing response times, and straining community relations, and what a connected, modern workflow could look like for your network.

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Schedule a discovery session with our team.

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