Anyone who has worked a terminal gate knows the choreography. A truck pulls in, the driver hands over paperwork, and the gate operator walks back to a workstation to check the booking, log the inspection, capture damage on a clipboard, and produce the gate-in documents. Meanwhile, the next truck is already queuing. In the yard, a shunter radios in for the latest wagon list because the printed plan from this morning is no longer accurate. Every step that happens away from a screen has to be reconciled with one later.

The new TOS Light Mobile app closes that gap. Gate, yard, and train workflows now run on a phone or tablet, in the lane or on the wagon, with every action written back to TOS Light in real time.

The Problem With a Desktop-Only Terminal System

A terminal operating system that lives only on a back-office workstation forces a constant translation step. Inspections are written on paper, then typed in. Damage is photographed on a personal phone, then emailed and attached later. A wagon sequence is rearranged in the yard, then someone walks back to update the plan. Each handover is an opportunity for a mismatch between what happened on the ground and what the system thinks happened.

The fix is not a generic forms app or a yard-only tool. It needs to be the same system of record, available wherever the work is actually being done.

A Native Extension of TOS Light

TOS Light Mobile is the iOS and Android companion to TOS Light, Rail-Flow’s terminal operating system. It is built as a native extension, not a parallel application: every validation runs against the same TOS Light backend, and every completed step updates the system immediately. When a gate operator finishes a check-in, the screen confirms “Synchronized with TOS Light,” and the record is live for the rest of the terminal.

The app covers the workflows that define a terminal day:

• Gate-In — Entry validation, parking assignment, configurable inspection paths, photos, services, and driver signature, all in one flow.
• Gate-Out and Check-Out — Exit confirmation, structured damage reporting, truck and driver data, and on-device PDF generation for handoff and print.
• Loading and Unloading — Wagon-level work driven by the live plan board, with push updates when the plan changes.
• Train Arrival — Arrival damage checks and documentation linked directly to the TOS Light record and customer portal.

Inspection steps and questionnaires are not hard-coded into the app. They come from terminal configuration on the backend, which means an operator can adjust a process, add a check, change an order, introduce a new question, without waiting for an app-store release.

Built for the Reality of a Gate Lane

A mobile tool for terminal work has to survive conditions that an office application never sees. TOS Light Mobile is designed around that. The layout adapts from a phone in a shunter’s pocket to a tablet mounted in a gate lane, with a breakpoint optimized for the larger devices most operators actually use. Plan-board updates arrive through a socket connection, so a loading screen refreshes when the plan changes upstream rather than waiting for someone to pull-to-refresh.

Role-based access means a gate operator sees gate workflows, a shunter sees yard workflows, and a terminal supervisor sees the full set — without each user having to navigate around tools that do not apply to their shift. And because terminals differ, the available actions are driven by backend configuration per site. A terminal that does not run a particular workflow does not see it in the app.

The app ships as a multi-brand, multilingual build, currently available as white-label deployments with the interface in English, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, and French.

A Companion, Not a Replacement

TOS Light Mobile is deliberately positioned as a companion to the TOS Light desktop and back-office environment, not a substitute for it. The strategic work, such as planning, exception handling, and reporting, still happens at a workstation. What changes is that the operational moments at the gate, on the wagon, and in the yard now happen inside the same system, not alongside it.

For terminal managers, the result is a single source of record. Damage, inspections, signatures, and gate documents are all attached to the right booking from the moment they are captured, not after a transcription step. For IT, the rollout uses the same environment ladder as the rest of the Rail-Flow stack – development through staging and beta to production with per-terminal feature toggles and store distribution that handle forced updates cleanly.

What This Unlocks

The dangerous goods workflow we shipped earlier this year showed what becomes possible when validation runs at the point of data entry. TOS Light Mobile applies the same idea to the physical operations of the terminal: the system check no longer happens after the fact, because the operator is already inside the system when the work is done.

The platform behind TOS Light Mobile is built to extend. New inspection types, new workflows, and new terminal configurations can be added through the existing backend, without rebuilding the app. The gate lane is the first place this shows up. It will not be the last.