What this is, and is not

Docket Yard is an independent public record of proceedings before the Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency that regulates freight rail. It keeps one chronological sheet per proceeding — every filing and decision the Board posts, in the order the Board dates them — at an address that does not change, and it emails people who ask to follow a docket.

Not the Board

Docket Yard is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Surface Transportation Board. The Board's own record is at stb.gov, and every entry here links to the Board's own file. If this record and the Board's ever disagree, the Board's is the record; ours is the one that is wrong, and we would like to hear about it.

Who runs it

Docket Yard is operated by RMI Valuation, LLC, a firm that works in railroad valuation and so reads these dockets for a living. It was built because the Board's search is a search, not a record: it answers a question and forgets it, and nothing on it tells you when something new arrives. The code is open under the AGPL at github.com/RMI-Valuation/docket-yard; the design decisions are recorded there too.

What the summaries are

Captions and decision summaries appear exactly as the Board prints them — in the Board's own capitals, including its abbreviations. Docket Yard adds a short label to each entry's type so a column can be scanned, and folds a record entered in both a docket and its sub-docket into one line. It does not summarise documents, characterise what a party argued, or compute a date. Where it ever derives a claim from a document, that claim will say what produced it and link to the passage; see methodology.

Nothing here is legal advice, and a sheet is a reading aid, not a substitute for the record.

How to reach a person

Corrections and bug reports go through GitHub Issues, where they are public and their handling is auditable. Anything else: hello@docketyard.org.