---
title: "Step Support in Railpack, Faster Central Station, What’s Coming Next"
date: 2025-04-04
number: 0232
url: https://railway.com/changelog/2025-04-03-railpack-step-support-and-improvements
---

# Step Support in Railpack, Faster Central Station, What’s Coming Next

🎉 **Welcome to this week’s edition of the Railway Changelog!** 🚀

It’s the first week of Q2, and our team has been deep in planning mode laying the groundwork for a strong quarter ahead.

We’re wrapping up planning week with a change of scenery by jetting off to our biannual company retreat.

With that in mind, things will be a bit quieter on the feature front this week and next.

But before we unplug, let’s take a look at what we shipped this week 🚂✨

## Step Support (And Improvements) in Railpack

This week, we added [Step support](https://railpack.com/guides/adding-steps) to Railpack! 

Steps let you insert additional build actions. They are great for optimizing cache hits, and running commands without interfering with the automatically generated provider commands.

You can also use steps to run custom commands in the build image by specifying inputs and the exact order they should execute.

We also shipped the following improvements:

- Yarn 2 support with node-modules linker
- Fixed Python with poetry
- Use bash as the entry point to better handle signals
- Default pnpm to v9
- Updated the config file format to make it easier to define steps and outputs included in the final image

## Central Station Speed Improvements

The [Central Station](https://station.railway.com/) team: Chandrika, Nico, and Ray have been hard at work making it so that page loads go down, and thread activity goes up.

People who have been reporting issues on the Railway will enjoy:

- Page load times decreasing on avg. by 65 percent
- Optimistic message sends on the thread composer
- Search of similar threads to show you similar content 
- Added a CSAT survey at the end of resolved threads
- Added Railpack docs in Central Station search
- A bunch of admin related goodies when it comes to sharing context about your issue

Now, it’s easier to answer the question: “Have you complained to Railway today?”

(The answer should be: yes, always, we try to help.)

## What’s Coming Next?

In Q2, we are focused on leveling up the overall quality of the product. Increasing reliability, improving scalability at the platform level, and introducing few new features that make Railway the best place to deploy, manage, and scale your apps with ease.

We did a roadshow with customers on the platform: and we heard you- you want better Observability, Alerts, a better DB experience. 

So… you’ll hear us talk more about things like finalizing our Metal migration, Railpack, Custom Alerting, Metrics, HA Postgres, and… a faster dashboard.

There’s a lot of work ahead, and we’re excited to dig in! 🚀 

We’re going to be maintaining our hygiene with the progress of feature development on the [Central Station roadmap](https://station.railway.com/roadmap), we’ll see you there.

## Fixes and Improvements

- We pushed a fix to always show the preferred region setting on the workspace page
- We fixed a navbar bug on the customers page
- We added a new upgrade Hobby plan modal
- We fixed a bug with scheduled deletion of workspaces where they would dissapear
- We fixed a bug with syncing environment changes 
- We pushed a fix to update customer plan metadata on subscription update
- We fixed an event stream bug, staged changes shouldn’t pop in and out
- We improved CPU Usage query to make results faster
- We fixed some issues with cron usage
- We updated copy on Pricing page
- Users can now mark their threads as solved in Help Station
- Services stopped from trial credit running out are now automatically redeployed when upgrading to hobby
- We pushed a few fixes to improve dashboard performance
- We fixed a builder schema validation bug