‘Rail freight should not squander innovation opportunities’, RailFreight.com

By April 10, 2025July 1st, 2025Articles
RailFreight Summit 2025

One of the topics discussed at the RailFreight Summit 2025, which took place in Gdańsk on 8 and 9 April, was technology in the rail freight industry. Which technologies are promising? Are great technological advances wishful thinking or the future of the sector? TMV Investor Joshua Gold took the opportunity to issue an important appeal to attendees.

“You may be wondering what I am doing here”, Gold said during his introduction to the crowd. The Rail Freight Summit does not exactly sound like a typical event to speak at for an investor. However, TMV is heavily involved in the transport (and rail) sector, and so he had some insights to share.

Gold had an important message to get across: Be serious about innovating. “Blockbuster was once the leading company in movie rentals. They should have been Netflix, but failed to look ahead.” Co-speaker Chad Van Derrick from Tideworks noted that Blockbuster once even had the chance to buy Netflix, but squandered that opportunity.

Read the full article on RailFreight.com.

Mark Traynor

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Mark Traynor joined Tideworks in 2026 as Chief Product & Technology Officer, bringing more than two decades of hands-on experience in building and deploying terminal technology and automation systems. In this role Mark will lead the company’s product management and engineering organizations and is responsible for the product roadmap and the modernization of the Tideworks platform.

Before Tideworks, Mark was Chief Technology Officer at Lynxis, whose Nascent gate automation systems deployed in nearly 100 marine and rail terminals across North and South America. For Lynxis, Mark led a globally distributed 70+ person engineering team that built a modern, configuration-driven platform on a single codebase while introducing a visual workflow configuration designed to streamline customer implementations. He also introduced cutting-edge computer vision and agentic AI solutions as well as the re-engineering of the hardware to run on readily available commercial components rather than bespoke systems sourced from specialist manufacturers.

For the 13 years before that, Mark was an independent technology partner to major North American automated marine terminal projects, including Virginia International Terminals and Long Beach Container Terminal. These operators relied on him to help lead their most complex terminal operating system implementations driving efficiency and reliability through their gate, rail, yard and vessel operations.

Mark began his career at Navis in 2004, delivering terminal operating system implementations across North America and Europe.