Watco dedicated terminals often serve a single customer or handle a small range of commodities, but that doesn’t mean operations are simple. The Tioga, North Dakota, terminal is a prime example of this. Tracking each railcar’s location, destination, commodity, load/empty status, and order volume fulfillment was always a completely manual process. Thanks to Conductor Brookes Backes and Lead Operator Justin Studaker, keeping tabs on the terminal’s inventory is now much more efficient and accurate.

The Tioga terminal transloads liquefied natural gas, propane, and butane for our primary customer, but that customer ships those products to about 20 businesses. Each of those businesses has dozens of locations across the country. Volumes fluctuate, some have preferred shipping dates, and others require special permits. Our team is responsible for ensuring all those railcars are switched, loaded, and shipped correctly.

There’s no singular system that manages all this. The Tioga team receives orders via email and tracks them manually in spreadsheets. Each commodity, customer, and final destination are in separate tabs. It requires meticulous, time-intensive, and detailed data entry to get it right. Studaker and Backes improved that process by taking time to master Excel.

Backes built a database of known customer-owned equipment that ties to the team’s workflow. When railcars arrive and are entered into the on-site inventory, they are color-coded and sorted by commodity, customer, and historical shipping lanes. This helps the operations team spot the cars at the correct loading racks and block outbound loads more efficiently.

Studaker built formulas, links, and charts that simplify how the team visualizes the workload. As orders arrive, they are added to each customer’s tab, separated by commodity and shipping lane. When a railcar is loaded, the lead operator simply adds the date it occurred into a column on main page. That automatically updates the order fulfillment status for that customer and tracking dashboards our crews use to plan their shifts. The rack crews can easily see how many railcars have been loaded for each customer and location so far that month, and the rail crews know what’s ready to ship.

Both systems work together to track, sort, load, and ship railcars from the moment they enter the facility until they leave the property.

“These enhancements have streamlined the sorting process for train crews and improved the ability of operators to quickly identify and locate customer equipment,” said Operations Supervisor Eric Turner. “Brookes and Justin went out of their way to learn how to build these tools. We’re more efficient and accurate. It’s been a huge benefit for our team and our customers.”

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