Stop me if you’ve ever gotten stuck behind a train.

The red lights start flashing, the gates drop, and the rumbling of steel fills the air. Minutes crawl by as car after car clanks past. You check your watch, check your phone, check your patience. The train doesn’t care.

In Norfolk, Virginia, those moments weren’t just idle frustration. They were emails, calls, and complaints landing in the inbox of then–City Council member Andria McClellan. Over her eight and a half years on council, she heard the same story hundreds—maybe thousands—of times: blocked crossings that held up traffic, frustrated residents, and, worst of all, ambulances and fire trucks stuck on the wrong side of the tracks.

“I had constituents who were very frustrated with the trains stopping on the tracks,” McClellan says. “I went in search of a solution and found that the ones out there were too expensive, too time-consuming, and didn’t really solve the problem.”

That search led to something bigger than she expected. The problem wasn’t political—it was technological. And in 2024, McClellan decided to do something few local officials ever do: she built a company to fix it.

From Flood Sensors to Freight Trains

The spark for her new venture, Oculus Rail, came from an unlikely place: water.

As part of Norfolk’s coastal resilience efforts, the city had installed smart flood sensors that uploaded real-time data to Waze, the navigation app used by millions of drivers. If water levels could be tracked and shared instantly, McClellan wondered, why not?

“We were already uploading flood sensor information to Waze,” she says. “I thought—couldn’t you upload similar information about blocked rail crossings?”

That simple question revealed something staggering: there is no national system for tracking train blockages. Railroads don’t publish schedules, and their dispatch systems don’t show where trains are blocking roads. Even local governments have no reliable data. When a crossing is closed, no one officially knows for how long or why.

“The locomotive engineer knows when they’re blocking a road,” McClellan explains, “but that knowledge isn’t visible to the railroad companies themselves—and definitely not to the public.”

Adding to the absurdity, state and local governments are legally barred from fining railroads for blocking crossings, thanks to federal court rulings. With no penalty for causing delays, no shared data, and no public accountability, blocked crossings became one of those problems everyone complains about but no one can fix.

So McClellan decided she would.

A Civic Problem Becomes a Startup

Oculus Rail is built on a deceptively simple premise: give cities and drivers real-time visibility into rail activity. The company installs solar-powered, wireless sensors near crossings that detect when a train arrives, how long it stays, and when the tracks clear. Because the devices sit in public right-of-way rather than on railroad property, they don’t require railroad permission—a key distinction that cuts through red tape.

The data is uploaded to the cloud, where it serves two audiences. Cities access it through a subscription-based dashboard that displays live and historical information about each crossing. Drivers use a free app that sends real-time notifications when their usual routes are blocked, along with estimates of how long the crossing will stay closed.

It’s the kind of elegant civic tech solution that seems obvious in hindsight—part traffic management, part public safety tool, part convenience app. “We’re kind of the Waze for railroad crossings,” McClellan says.

Her approach reflects something rare in the startup world: a founder who actually understands how city government works. “There are a couple of startups trying to tackle this,” she says, “but they don’t know how government works—or how rail works. For them, it’s just a technology play. But to get adoption, you have to know both worlds.”

The Hidden Cost of Waiting

Blocked crossings may sound like a minor irritation, but for many communities they’re a major safety issue. The Federal Railroad Administration recorded more than 26,000 reports of blocked crossings in 2024, a figure that’s likely far lower than reality since most incidents go unreported. Nearly one in four of those reports—24 percent—came from first responders unable to reach emergencies because of stopped trains.

When a mile-long freight train sits still, it can paralyze an entire neighborhood. Traffic backs up for blocks. School buses idle. Delivery trucks reroute. Emergency response times stretch dangerously thin. And frustrated drivers, desperate to get moving, sometimes risk crossing before it’s safe.

Despite how widespread the problem is, the U.S. has no consistent way to monitor it. McClellan saw an opportunity to fill that gap with data that’s simple, accurate, and actionable.

“For cities, this kind of insight doesn’t exist anywhere else,” she says. “If you can show which crossings are blocked most often and for how long, you can plan better traffic signal timing, support grant applications, and even coordinate emergency response.”

Bootstrapped and Built in Hampton Roads

Rather than chase venture capital, McClellan and her husband, Mike McClellan—Chief Strategy Officer at Norfolk Southern—decided to fund the company themselves, to get Oculus Rail off the ground. The team partnered with Port Solution Integrators, a Portsmouth-based tech firm led by Ben Schoenfeld and Dave Lundquist, to design and install the sensors.

The first pilot network includes 40 sensors spread across Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, and Chesapeake. Each city offers a unique test bed: urban congestion, industrial zones, residential neighborhoods, and rural stretches. That variety helps the team understand how the system performs under real-world conditions.

“I didn’t want to just put up two sensors and say, ‘Look, it works,’” McClellan says. “We needed a meaningful pilot to show that this technology can function in all kinds of environments.”

Early results are promising. The app has already been downloaded more than 1,500 times, and local transportation departments are using the dashboard data to analyze patterns they’d never been able to see before.

The Business of Seeing Clearly

Oculus Rail’s model is intentionally straightforward. The company owns and maintains the sensors, while cities pay an annual data subscription that typically costs a few thousand dollars per crossing. In exchange, they gain access to continuous data feeds, analysis tools, and images that help them plan and manage mobility.

For drivers, the app remains free. It can be customized to send notifications only during certain hours or for specific intersections—say, Colonial Avenue and 23rd Street between 5 and 8 a.m.—so users get relevant updates without having to keep the app open.

That price point makes Oculus Rail a bargain. Competing systems from large engineering firms can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per crossing, making them impractical for most cities. By contrast, McClellan’s approach is quick to deploy, inexpensive, and requires no coordination with the railroads.

“If our assumptions are right, we’re selling actionable data and making communities safer in the process.”

What’s in a Name

The name “Oculus” comes from the Latin word for “eye.” For McClellan, it symbolizes visibility—giving cities and citizens the ability to see what’s happening around them in real time.

“I liked that Oculus Rail could one day become Oculus Flood or Oculus Bridge,” she says. “The idea is to create smart city sensors that provide real-time data to help communities make better decisions.”

The company’s mission reflects that ambition: to revolutionize how rail crossings are managed through innovative technology, making cities safer and more efficient by putting reliable information into the hands of the people who need it most.

The Hard Part Isn’t the Tech

Ask McClellan about her biggest challenge and she doesn’t hesitate. “Working with local governments,” she says. “Understanding who makes the decisions, how to get to them, and how to move through the process efficiently. But that’s where my background helps.”

Her years in public office have turned out to be Oculus Rail’s competitive edge. She knows the players, the processes, and the politics. She also knows that adoption will depend as much on relationships as on innovation.

Her approach is methodical: identify communities where blocked crossings are already causing public frustration, reach out to city leaders who are looking for solutions, and show them what the data can do. “It’s almost like lobbying,” she admits. “But the pitch is simple: how can I make your life easier?”

Back to the Future

Oculus Rail isn’t McClellan’s first foray into technology. In 1999, she founded CivicZone, a Northern Virginia–based startup that built websites and communication tools for local governments—essentially Squarespace before Squarespace. The company grew to 22 employees, raised a million dollars in seed funding, and was poised to expand before the dot-com bubble burst.

“I always felt I’d circle back to technology,” she says. “But this time I wanted to build something that directly improves quality of life.”

After two decades in public service, she’s come full circle—from dot-com founder to city leader to civic-tech entrepreneur once again. “Whatever I do, I want it to make my community a better place,” she says. “This isn’t about selling a widget. It’s about solving a civic problem with data that helps people move more safely and efficiently.”

What Comes Next

The company is focused on expanding across the eastern half of the United States, where rail congestion is highest. There are roughly 125,000 public grade crossings nationwide, and McClellan estimates that at least ten percent are “problematic enough” for Oculus Rail to make a meaningful difference.

As the data network grows, so does its potential value. The information could inform federal transportation policy, help railroads improve logistics, and even feed into connected vehicle systems for future autonomous cars.

“When the arms go down, most people just wait,” McClellan says. “We’re building a system that helps cities, drivers, and first responders know what’s happening—and act on it.”

McClellan laughs when she’s asked how it feels to be back in startup life after two decades in politics. “It’s been really fun,” she says. “I haven’t been this excited in years. And it’s been great to work on something with my husband that doesn’t involve our kids.”

That blend of civic purpose and entrepreneurial energy has become her trademark. Where most people see frustration, she sees opportunity.

Because sometimes innovation doesn’t start in Silicon Valley—it starts at a railroad crossing, with a frustrated city council member who decided to stop waiting for the train to pass.

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