Product
Patents Pending Demo-ready
Wayside Watcher™
Detection without doubt. Records that verify themselves. (Patent Pending)
Contact us about Wayside Watcher™ →Overview
Wayside Watcher is the back-office platform for the devices the railroad industry uses to inspect rolling stock and wayside equipment. It runs on premises inside your data center, in your own cloud tenant, or as a managed service from Outlier, with the same features across all three options. It does the conventional things a modern back office should do: ingest inspection reports, surface alarms, manage calibration, route notifications, generate compliance documentation, produce data feeds.
What sets it apart is one property the incumbents do not have: every operational record it produces is tamper-evident and independently verifiable (Patent Pending). The brake-test report, the calibration certificate, the firmware deployment event, the operator certification, the wayside detector inspection: each is an audit-ready artifact under the same framework, with a verification link anyone can open without an account.
Key features
- → Six device categories on one consistent platform
- → Tamper-evident operational records with a public verification portal (Patent Pending, no account required)
- → Direct contribution to AAR M-1003 elements E07 (document control), E08 (measuring and testing equipment), E14 (identification and traceability), E15 (process control), E17 (quality records), E18 (nonconformance), E21 (internal audits), and E24 (design control) (Patent Pending)
- → FRA line of sight via 49 CFR 232.305 and AAR S-4027
- → Three deployment options (on-premises, customer cloud, or fully managed Outlier SaaS), all with the same feature set
- → Built for four jobs: Operations & Program Managers, Maintenance & Reliability, Engineering, and Compliance & Quality
- → Designed against NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-82 Rev 3, and IEC 62443-2-1 (2024)
Technologies & Protocols
Device coverage
One platform, six device categories on the same surface.
Founding device, Pivotal Rail
Automated Single Car Test Device (ASCTD)
Pivotal Rail Products' next-generation brake-test platform, which Wayside Watcher was built around. (Patent Pending)
Live today
Hot Box Detectors (HBD)
Historical inspection corpus loaded; alarms filterable by AAR-standard categories (Absolute, Differential, Carside). (Patent Pending — legacy-record canonicalization method)
Live today
Highway-rail Grade Crossings
Audit-ready records under 49 CFR 234. Predictor health, gate, light, bell, and event-recorder data.
Live today
Battery & Charger
The standby power systems behind every wayside bungalow. Bank state-of-charge, charger health, and aging characteristics.
Roadmap
Wheel Impact Load Detectors (WILD)
Committed on the same architecture, the same surfaces, the same record format.
Roadmap
Acoustic Bearing Detectors (ABD)
Committed on the same architecture, with the same one-dispatcher-trained-on-one-UI promise.
Built for the people who run it
Different teams, same platform, same surface.
The platform's value lands differently for each team that touches it. Operations lives in the fleet grid and the alarms queue. Maintenance lives in calibration and reliability. Engineering lives in playback and provenance. Compliance lives in the audit log and the verification portal. One platform, four jobs done well.
Operations & Program Managers
The normal morning is easier. The bad morning is manageable.
Fleet visibility in one consistent pattern across device classes. Alarm lifecycle with documented ownership and reason capture. An investigations queue that pulls the failed report, the playback, the related health trend, and the calibration record into one place, automatically (Patent Pending). Customer and auditor requests turn from "pull, format, sign, send" into "here's the link."
From evidence courier to evidence custodian. (Patent Pending)
Maintenance & Reliability
The M-1003 audit cycle becomes a query, not a paper hunt.
Calibration management is first-class: fleet dashboard, drift per channel, due-date status, technician identity bound to every certificate (Patent Pending). Health analytics surface drift, retries, watchdog clusters, and atypical pressure events with the rule, the threshold, and the value that crossed it all visible. No opaque scoring. Recommendations come with evidence; maintenance decides what work happens.
Predictive maintenance, with the evidence to back it.
Engineering
Failed tests are replayable. Cohort questions are queryable.
Every certified report carries firmware version, configuration version, requirements baseline, and calibration package. Test sequence playback at 10 Hz across four pressure channels lets engineering replay any moment of any test (Patent Pending). When a firmware version turns out to have an issue, the affected report population is a single filter, not detective work.
Field defects, scoped in seconds.
Compliance & Quality
Audit-ready by construction, for AAR, FRA, and customers.
Direct contribution to M-1003 elements E07 (document control), E08 (measuring and testing equipment), E14 (identification and traceability), E15 (process control), E17 (quality records), E18 (nonconformance), E21 (internal audits), and E24 (design control) (Patent Pending). FRA line of sight via 49 CFR 232.305 / AAR S-4027. Every record carries a tamper-evident audit trail (Patent Pending).
Records that hold up, in court, in audit, in the press.
Three deployments. One feature set.
Wayside Watcher runs where your security, data-residency, and procurement posture say it should, with the same capabilities in every option.
Option A
On-Premises
Runs inside your data center on your hardware, behind your firewall. Internet egress is required for verification, telemetry, and updates. The platform is not designed to run air-gapped.
- — Your servers, your network boundary
- — Egress controlled by your firewall policy
- — Same UI, same APIs, same record format
- — Supported on a defined hardware spec
Option B
Customer Cloud
Deployed inside your AWS, Azure, or GCP tenant. Your network, your IAM, your data residency. Outlier supports the platform that runs there.
- — Your cloud account, your VPC
- — Egress to verification & update endpoints
- — Customer-managed encryption keys
- — Supported under a documented run-book
Option C
Outlier SaaS
Fully managed by Outlier. Often the right fit for short lines and smaller operators who want detection and verifiable records without standing up infrastructure.
- — Multi-tenant or dedicated single-tenant
- — SSO via SAML/OIDC into your IdP
- — Outlier owns ops & patching
- — Standard data-processing terms
Integration posture: built so your IT team recognizes it.
Identity
OIDC into your existing IdP. Role-based access mapped to your groups.
APIs
Documented REST endpoints; event webhooks; streaming feeds where high volume warrants.
Observability
Structured logs, metrics, traces. Exportable to your SIEM and observability stack.
Frameworks
Designed against NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-82 Rev 3, IEC 62443-2-1 (2024).
Live demo
Open the demo. Verify a record without taking our word for it.
A working v0.5 build runs at waysidewatcher.com with a ten-device ASCTD fleet, eighty-plus operational reports, the hot-bearing module's historical corpus, and the public verification portal (Patent Pending), reachable anonymously. Open any certified report's verification link and confirm the record yourself (Patent Pending — real-time on-demand verification method).
Try the demo at waysidewatcher.com →Related case studies
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M-1003 Vendor Compliance Strategy and ASCTD Phase 2
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