RII has extensive expertise for designing and costing railroad operations that benefit all parties involved, from facility switching, storage and interchange to lines hauls, branch lines, unit train operations and complete system analyses. Rail operations include unique costs and unique resources and indices for determining what those current costs are. RII has years of experience working with these costing indices and developing models to fit each individual operation to measure and/or optimize costs, values and performance. Understanding the costs allows RII to advise customers on developing or improving their own operations, measure costs or savings and to negotiate profitable agreements with other parties. A sample of services include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Designing operating plans and track layout concepts that optimize efficiency, costs and flexibility
• Optimizing operating plans to utilize existing infrastructure, including recommended improvements with costs
• Locating rail system infrastructure to serve needs for rail operations such as switching, storage, transloading, distribution, etc.
• Developing the capital costs for track rehabilitation and new track construction
• Determining the costs of any rail operation, including multiple scenarios to test traffic levels, ownership structures, operator requirements, etc.
• Modeling different operating scenarios to compare operations by a Class I vs. Short line vs. Shipper vs. Third Party Switcher, etc.
• Incorporating transportation costing for local and long-haul moves for system operations and total savings analysis
• Flexible proprietary modeling that allow adjustments for the unique features of each operation