Railnova
Railnova is a Belgian supplier of rail telematics and maintenance management software, headquartered in Brussels and founded in 2010. The company is part of the Knorr-Bremse group and serves operators, rolling stock lessors and maintainers in Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
Railnova belongs to the segment of digital systems and software suppliers that sell independently of rolling stock manufacturers. Its commercial argument is direct operator access to vehicle data: the operator reads the train buses itself, writes its own detection rules, and does not depend on manufacturer software upgrades to add a parameter.
The product line covers the three functions that define fleet management systems in practice — data capture on the vehicle, diagnostics, and maintenance planning.
Onboard hardware
Railster is the onboard remote monitoring and edge computing unit. It connects to vehicle networks and components — CAN, MVB, Profibus, RS232, RS485, J1708, Ethernet and analogue inputs — and transmits diagnostic data, fault codes and position to a cloud back end over cellular networks.
The device carries its own rule engine, so thresholds and combinations of parameters are evaluated on board at bus sampling rate and short-lived events are not lost to downsampling. Data acquisition is passive and does not alter the vehicle network architecture, which avoids re-homologation of the vehicle.
Software platform
Railgenius is the monitoring and diagnostics platform. It lets engineering teams convert maintenance experience into detection rules without programming, filter and rank fault code alerts, and support drivers and field technicians while a fault is still live.
Railfleet is the fleet and maintenance management application: fleet overview, availability, defect reporting, work orders, and preventive scheduling based on counters, time limits and tolerances.
It supports multi-company and multi-fleet deployments and connects to customer enterprise resource planning (ERP) and asset management systems through web service application programming interfaces (APIs) and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).
Maintenance compliance and hosting
Railfleet’s maintenance functions are structured around the duties of the entity in charge of maintenance (ECM) under Regulation (EU) 2019/779, which establishes the certification system for entities in charge of maintenance of rail vehicles.
Scheduling, traceability and maintenance documentation are held in the application. Hosting is cloud based, with encrypted connections and a separate database per client.
Customers and installed base
Company client references list DB Cargo, Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), Eurotunnel, SNCF, Lineas, SBB Cargo, Alstom, Beacon Rail Leasing, Alpha Trains and Erion among users. Deployments include Traxx electric freight locomotives and Vossloh G1000 diesel locomotives.
In April 2026 Knorr-Bremse put the installed base at approximately 3,000 locomotives and multiple units across Europe, Railfleet at more than 9,000 users, and the Railgenius rule library at more than 2,000 algorithms.
Ownership and current activity
Knorr-Bremse acquired a minority shareholding in Railnova in 2019 and now identifies the company as a group subsidiary. Railnova continues to trade under its own name from Brussels and maintains its own product line.
In March 2026 the company held a customer day at its Brussels office, presenting a smaller Railster variant, a configuration environment for the device, and functions using artificial intelligence (AI) to read and classify defect reports automatically.
