Case study
WayLink Touch JE
Interrail Engineering — Rail: wayside signaling and maintenance operations
At a glance
- Partner
- Interrail Engineering
- Industry
- Rail wayside operations
- Engagement
- Joint product development (hardware + software)
- Year
- 2023–2025
- Status
- Released
The challenge
Railroads run wayside maintenance under strict jumper policies. When a signal maintainer places a jumper to take a circuit Out of Service, that action has to be tracked, documented, and confirmed; an undocumented or forgotten jumper is an operational and safety risk. Enforcing and recording those procedures consistently, across crews and across sites, is difficult without a tool built for the job.
The wayside is also an unforgiving place to put electronics. Any device that lives at a crossing, a maintenance zone, or a signal asset has to survive the environment, integrate with existing field infrastructure, and stay usable by a maintainer working on site. Interrail Engineering had the concept for a rugged field device that could enforce jumper policy directly. What the concept needed was a partner to design and build the hardware and the software.
What we built
OEG joined Interrail Engineering in a joint development partnership to turn that concept into a product: the WayLink Touch JE — Jumper Edition. Interrail brought the concept; OEG provided the hardware and software engineering, designing the device and writing the software that runs on it.
The WayLink Touch JE is a rail-spec edge gateway built for the wayside environment. It pairs a 15.6-inch touchscreen with an ARM Cortex quad-core processor in an all-in-one, panel-mountable enclosure. Its defining feature is an integrated I/O system for jumper policy work: six 12V outputs and four isolated inputs that let the device track Out-of-Service status, jumper placement, and confirmation of field presence. Connectivity covers dual Gigabit Ethernet, RS232, and USB 3.0, so the unit integrates with existing field infrastructure.
On the software side, OEG wrote the internal logic that enforces and documents jumper procedures, drives the on-site touchscreen interface, and supports optional remote communication for reporting. The WayLink Touch JE runs on OEG's Wayside Watcher platform, giving it the monitoring, control, and reporting framework shared across OEG's wayside products.
Outcome
The joint development gave Interrail Engineering and OEG a released, rail-spec product. The WayLink Touch JE consolidates jumper policy enforcement, Out-of-Service tracking, and field reporting into a single rugged, panel-mountable device, giving maintainers one platform for monitoring, control, and documentation at the wayside. For OEG, the project added a hardware product line built on the Wayside Watcher platform.
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