Challenges

Transport Canada's new safety standards and regulations for railway grade crossings require Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) to achieve compliance by November 2021. To meet this deadline, CP needs to assess and perform all the necessary improvements across their 7,000+ network of active crossings throughout Canada.

• Information sharing of the regulatory requirements between CP and road authorities was not streamlined.
• Crossing assessment and cost estimate data for each crossing was being captured in thousands of disparate files resulting in a data management and integrity issue.
• Sharing and communicating the necessary compliance information to roadmasters was needed to provide the field teams with the required information to perform the crossing fixes.
• Better collaboration and communication between the field users and CP’s back office team needed to be maintained to validate completed fixes, as per the required safety standards and regulations.

Solutions

• In Phase 1, Hatch amalgamated the disparate information and created a single database for 7,000+ crossing assessments and cost estimate information. Each crossing could have up to 300+ data points and each cost estimate up to 42 work items. Hatch helped understand, organize, and update any crossing information discrepancies, resulting in a cleaner set of data. 
• In Phase 2, Hatch developed web application, Field Maintenance of Crossings (FMX), that is used by the roadmasters in the field. It helps them identify all the crossings in their area, indicate non-compliant crossings, and also identify the work items to achieve compliance. This tool also allows the roadmasters to add additional information about each fix, including pictures, and indicate completion of the work. A workflow is then initiated to CP office users, who are responsible for validating the completed work.
• In Phase 3, Hatch developed a second web application, Office Maintenance of Crossings, that continues the compliance journey of a crossing and allows CP office users to validate work items submitted by FMX users. This is necessary for the reporting of compliance progress to Transport Canada. Additional features help back-office users maintain and update existing assessment or estimate data.

Highlights

• Both applications help manage an estimated $240 million worth of capital improvements across all required railway grade crossings.
• Both applications (hosted in Hatch cloud infrastructure) are secure and scalable and are fully aligned with CP security requirements, including cloud hosting, authentication, and authorization. Hatch will also provide application support, maintenance, and enhancements throughout the life cycle of CP’s Crossing Compliance project.
• Special attention was given to ensure the solution is optimized to perform in low bandwidth conditions and remote crossing locations.