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9/18/2025
Compiled by Jeff Stagl, Managing Editor
Deswik’s RACE Crew Management solution is redefining how railroads manage their workforce, company officials said in an email. Although “Deswik” may be a newer name in North America, the company has provided crew planning solutions in Australia for over eight years, they said.
The RACE suite — which includes Bulk Train Optimization, Crew Management and Live Operation Planning — now is being introduced to the North American market.
At its core, RACE Crew helps ensure the right people are in the right place at the right time, while honoring labor agreements, complying with regulatory requirements and minimizing unnecessary van usage, Deswik officials said. The platform integrates advanced optimization capabilities, including tiers that can prioritize different aspects of crew planning and eliminate overstaffing.
Recent upgrades to RACE Crew include an embedded Gurobi optimization engine for high-speed, cloud-based processing; scenario comparison tools designed to allow railroads to evaluate multiple crew plans instantly; and strategic planning capabilities for long-term workforce forecasting and bargaining unit negotiations.
The enhancements have reduced crew overtime by 50%, improved rostered crew utilization by 8% and provided rapid scenario modeling for operational agility, Deswik officials said.
The company has found that railroads increasingly are seeking software that goes beyond scheduling and compliance. Their demands today include optimization-first solutions that reduce costs and improve crew utilization; scalable cloud-based platforms that support real-time decision-making; strategic forecasting tools to support long-term labor planning and negotiations; and integrated systems that align crew planning with train operations and broader logistics.
“These evolving expectations reflect a shift from reactive crew management to proactive, data-driven workforce planning,” Deswik officials said. “Railroads want tools that not only meet today’s operational needs but also prepare them for tomorrow’s challenges.”
RACE Crew is built to meet, and exceed, these demands, offering a future-ready solution that’s already been proven in some of the world’s most complex rail environments, they said.
GIRO offers HASTUS, its flagship software solution, to passenger-rail operators around the world. HASTUS is designed to provide flexibility and robustness in the face of everyday rail challenges involving vehicle and crew scheduling, GIRO officials said.
The software platform enables passenger-rail operators to optimize schedules and rosters for both onboard and station staff; generate more cost-effective shifts that comply with union rules, qualifications and fatigue regulations; reoptimize shifts in response to timetable changes while preserving the integrity of approved plans; and offer employees intuitive web-based tools. Employees can use it to submit shift and duty preferences, and request swaps and vacation exchanges directly from their mobile devices.
HASTUS is modular, so users can tailor solutions to their practical needs, and seamlessly integrate planning, scheduling and operations management for all modes of public transport, they said. GIRO aims to ensure the software platform meets the dynamic needs of today’s rail industry, with a particular focus on crew management.
Passenger-rail operators currently are prioritizing regulatory compliance, such as adherence to hours of service, collective agreements and business rules, so HASTUS is designed to ensure compliance is built into every planning decision, GIRO officials said.
The software platform also targets other rail operator priorities, including staff empowerment by providing flexible, automated work distribution that respects employees’ preferences and availability, giving staff more control and transparency; operational efficiency by providing tools to streamline work planning and assignment processes; and disruption management by showing impacts on staff and determining the best available solution when a situation arises.
A major advantage with HASTUS is its artificial intelligence-powered optimization and decision-support functions, GIRO officials said. Those capabilities enable passenger-rail operators to tackle planning challenges — such as timetabling, rolling stock management or crew assignments — with confidence, they said.
Currently, more than 100 passenger-rail operators in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific use HASTUS to adapt to rapid changes, manage rolling stock and workforces, and improve service quality, GIRO officials said. In the United States, the software platform has been deployed for passenger-rail operations at Bay Area Rapid Transit, the Chicago Transit Authority, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.
MaxAccel focuses on developing web-based software solutions to drive safety, regulatory compliance, operational efficiency and return on investment for customers. Over 200 freight railroads, passenger operations and railroad contractors rely on the company’s suite of AssetPro™ and SafeTrack™ applications every day, MaxAccel officials said.
The SafeTrack Crew™ management application has quickly established itself as a core addition to the company’s market leading SafeTrack™ platform, providing significant functionality and value to freight- and passenger-rail customers, they said.
SafeTrack Crew manages job scheduling and crew assignments, including vacancy management. The web- and mobile-based system is designed to provide common crew management functionality such as employee certification status, extra boards, transactional history, employee communications, hours of service compliance, job/territory qualification and payroll with claims and arbitraries.
Functionality includes improved extra board management, temporary job assignment and relief job assignment, among others.
The SafeTrack Crew Mobile™ smartphone app offers a range of benefits to train and engine employees, and SafeTrack customers in general, MaxAccel officials said. Real time job and extra board status informs employees of their upcoming work assignments along with supplemental information important to their quality of life, they said.
MaxAccel has found that customers today demand a crew management solution with a reliable and intuitive interface that has the flexibility to respond to the dynamic railroad operations environment. SafeTrack Crew meets that need and represents the next generation crew management solution for the railroad industry — an easy to implement and easy to use, highly functional system supporting railroads large and small, MaxAccel officials said.
“We believe SafeTrack Crew offers a more economical and streamlined crew management system, tailored to meet the needs of our customers and the transportation market,” they said.
PS Technology (PST) has been steadily increasing the capabilities of its crew management solutions for both transit and short-line operations. The solutions will do double duty handling locomotive crew members and hours-of-service workers, as diverse as bar tenders to mechanical to maintenance-of-way workers, PST officials said.
The company’s CrewPro Short Line and CrewPro Transit Systems software offer capabilities that have been steadily expanding. A growing set of self-serve configuration tools now allows crew administrators to precisely manage automated decision-fill agreement positions with greater finesse and exception handling, PST officials said.
The set includes enhanced editing tools for agreement rule changes and rule isolation by district/subdistrict, controls for visibility on mobile devices or terminals utilizing role-based security and geo-fencing.
In addition, PST has finished making new improvements for automated vacation bidding with expanded controls for editable bidding processes respecting a wide range of agreement worker rules.
This allows employees to place vacation requests from on-site or home computers, and then enables administrators to automatically process the awards while maintaining the ability to edit individual cases, PST officials said. The entire award process is logged for validity and challenges.
Employee quality-of-life improvements have been added, as well, including SMS messaging notification, coupled with emails to ensure status awareness and availability. Moreover, personal devices can be used to view status and schedules, bid, bump and extra boards.
Coupled with these enhancements are modern security protocols and API integrations for third-party solutions to handle qualifications, D&A, business analytics and payroll, PST officials said.
A majority of innovations such as these are driven by growing broad rail industry demand for increasing automation for both processes and record keeping, as well as third-party business analytics, they said.
Email questions or comments to jeff.stagl@tradepress.com.