Let your customers create their own orders, follow their trains in real time, and even help shape the product: all from a browser, with nothing to install.
For decades, rail freight has behaved like a black box. A shipper hands over a consignment and then waits; making phone calls, sending emails, asking the same question again and again: where is my train? On the operator's side, meanwhile, someone re-types that very shipment, field by field, from an Excel sheet that landed in an inbox an hour ago. It works. But it is slow, it invites mistakes, and it keeps two organizations busy doing work that neither of them should have to do.
The railcube Web Portal closes that gap. It is one of the most capable (and, frankly, one of the most underused) parts of the railcube platform, and it deserves a place in the spotlight.
The Web Portal is the part of railcube that you open up to the world around your operation. Where railcube Desktop runs your planning and operations, the Portal gives the people outside your four walls (shippers, clients, workshops, suppliers and driver agencies) as well as your own internal users a secure, browser-based window into exactly the information they need. No installation, no company device, no special hardware: just a web address and a login.
The key word is exactly. Through role-based access and Data Right Management, everyone sees only their own slice of the picture. A block-train customer sees the whole train; a single-wagon customer sees only the wagons that are theirs; a driver agency sees only the duties you have outsourced to it. You decide who sees what, and the result is that you share more information while spending far less time on the phone and in your inbox.
Three pillars do most of the heavy lifting: order creation, live tracking, and translations. Here is why each one matters.
This is the feature railcube talks about least and should talk about most.
Instead of receiving a shipment by email and re-keying it into Desktop, you let your customer enter the order directly in the Portal. Within seconds the order is in the system, and from there your planners simply cover it with a transport, exactly as they would for any other order. The work happens once, and it happens at the source.
Creating an order is deliberately quick and familiar. The screen (recently rebuilt to be far cleaner and easier to use) mirrors the consignment note your customers already know, with the field names matched to that document and the mandatory fields (consignor, consignee, and the rest) clearly highlighted so nothing gets missed. To go faster still, a contract order flow or an order template can pre-fill most of the form automatically, so a recurring shipment becomes a matter of a few clicks.
Adding wagons is just as painless. Customers can add them one by one, or (when they already keep their wagon lists in a spreadsheet) import a whole list from Excel in a single action. The Portal uses import templates you define in Desktop, shows a full preview of every wagon before anything is saved, and lets the user cancel cleanly if something doesn't look right. No data is committed until they are sure.
The payoff is concrete. A customer can create a complete order in well under a minute, login and logout included. That replaces the familiar loop of customer emails a PDF or Excel → operator re-types it → the order finally enters the system, with all the delay and double entry that loop carries. railcube already accepts orders automatically from official sources (electronic consignment notes and industry-standard messages such as Orpheus and H30) but the Portal answers the very common case where a customer can't or won't send those: they simply create the order themselves.
It is worth saying plainly: outside of France, almost no one in the market offers this. It is a genuine differentiator, and it is available today.
Once a transport is running, the same Portal becomes a track-and-trace tool for rail; the rail equivalent of following a parcel from dispatch to doorstep.
Your customer opens the Portal and sees their shipments on a live map. An order on its own is drawn as a simple point-to-point line; the moment it is attached to a transport, that line becomes the real, detailed route, with the train's progress and key events (departed, arrived, handed over) plotted along the way, alongside the latest known position and any variance against the plan. Where is my train right now, and where exactly is my order on it? The answer is on screen.
Selecting a transport opens the detail behind it, organized into clear tabs:
And, again, each partner sees only what concerns them.
For your customers this means transparency in an industry that has rarely offered it: they can see that the train is passing Strasbourg, that it will arrive tomorrow, and what is actually on it. For your own teams the saving is just as real. The operational data your operators already enter (including real delivery times) becomes visible to the customer the moment it's recorded, which means the late-night calls asking "where's my train?" largely disappear and your dispatchers are freed to do something productive instead. It also raises the bar on discipline and collaboration: customers can use the exact times for SLA reviews, and operator and customer finally work from the same, shared view of reality.
The third pillar is easy to overlook and valuable to every single client.
From the bottom of the Portal, your clients can suggest translations and corrections — and not only for the Portal. Suggestions can target railcube Desktop, Mobile and the Portal, all three products in the platform. A user sets their profile to the language they want to improve, opens the translation change request, filters by the English term or hunts for entries that are still empty, and proposes the right wording.
Nothing goes live unchecked. railcube reviews and approves every suggestion: an automated process gathers the new and changed approvals each week, a developer gives them a final review, and the wording then flows into the product on the normal release path. The result is a product that fits the daily vocabulary of the people who use it — including in languages our own team doesn't speak, from Finnish to Hungarian — and a localisation that keeps improving because the people closest to the work are the ones shaping it.
Order creation, tracking and translations are the bread and butter, but they aren't the whole story. The Portal also includes:
The case for the Web Portal comes down to time and trust.
Time, because the work moves to where the data already is and stops being done twice — your customers create orders in seconds, and your dispatchers stop fielding status calls. Trust, because the black box opens: customers see where their freight is and when it will arrive, operators are held to the times they record, and the relationship between the two becomes a genuine collaboration rather than a daily round of chasing.
If you are already a railcube client, the best part is that none of this is a future promise. The core of the Portal works well today, and your customers could be creating orders and tracking their trains tomorrow.
Europorte, a French rail freight operator, is bringing the Web Portal online for its own customers. In the team's own words:
Since December 2025, Europorte has been using the railcube solution to plan its train services. In its drive to work from a single interface, Europorte decided to develop the web portal — in collaboration with railcube — for the issuing of transport documents.
For Europorte, this solution offers several advantages, including in particular:
- ease of use for our shipper customers;
- the ability to exchange transport documents automatically with other railway undertakings, whether or not they use railcube themselves;
- the assurance of regulatory compliance;
- the ability to track the progress of transports and their associated wagons.
The development and testing were carried out in close collaboration with the railcube teams. Full use of the portal is planned for autumn 2026.
— Europorte
Bringing your customers into the railcube Web Portal takes pressure off your team, gives your clients the transparency they have always wanted, and turns a slow, manual exchange into a fast, shared workflow. If you'd like to switch it on (or get more out of the modules you already have) talk to your railcube contact.