THE decision in March 2021 by the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to award Ensco a contract to operate the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, Colorado, at the expense of long-term tenant, and American Association of Railroads (AAR) subsidiary, Transportation Technology Center Inc (TTCI), shook the foundations of railway industry research in the United States.
Ensco took up residency at TTC in October 2022, and under its initial five-year contract has continued to serve industry clients at the facility, which features more than 80km of test tracks and specialist testing laboratories. TTC’s remit has also been extended under Ensco’s stewardship to include the research, testing and training activities of other US Department of Transportation agencies.
While some thought that TTCI would focus solely on its domestic and international consulting activities upon vacating TTC, the group, and its AAR owners, including the US Class 1 railways (see panel), had other ideas. TTCI took stock, refocused, and worked to identify and secure a new home to continue the world-renowned railway testing and research and development (R&D) activities that its experts provided for more than 40 years at TTC.
While prospective sites in Florida and Texas were considered, the appeal of staying in Pueblo proved too strong. PuebloPlex, which lies 24km east of Pueblo and directly south of TTC, and has direct access to a BNSF main line, emerged as the preferred option for a new facility that would be operated by a newly-branded organisation, MxV Rail.
The change in focus also prompted a change at the top of MxV. With much of the previous generation of TTCI management moving on, Kari Gonzales, a mechanical engineer and Pueblo native, who has spent her entire career with TTCI, rising to vice-president and chief financial officer, was appointed to lead the organisation into a new era at its new home in September 2021.
Juggling
IRJ last spoke in depth to Gonzales at the previous World Congress on Railway Research (WCRR), which was held in Birmingham, Britain, in June 2022. At that time, Gonzales said the newly-formed group was juggling continuing operations at TTC while contemplating how it might relocate around $US 100m of assets that it owned to the brand-new facility it was building at PuebloPlex.
Just over three years later, and with MxV set to co-host the 14th WCRR this month in Colorado Springs alongside the 13th International Heavy Haul Association (IHHA) Conference, Gonzales says she is pleased to report that all major construction, including around 40km of track, is now complete. MxV began to run trains at the new site in November 2022, offering continuity from its activities at TTC, which ceased that month. It has also steadily taken up facilities vacated by the US Army, which left the former munitions storage facility in June 2023.
“Through that transition we worked really hard to avoid service disruption,” Gonzales says. “We were running operations at the old facility and getting things up and running as soon as we could at the new facility. That really helped us to retain the majority of the clients we had built relationships with over the years.”
Those clients now have access to four test loops at PuebloPlex: a 9.65km loop that is used for the majority of the site’s performance and durability testing, and another 5.3km loop where MxV continues to perform Facility for Accelerated Service Testing (Fast) activities, for which TTCI was renowned, and which Gonzales says remain unique in the world of railway industry R&D (see panel below).
Two further loops are available for testing of vehicle dynamics. These include a 5.5km suspension resonance track where Gonzales says MxV has the ability to introduce track faults that will cause vehicles to pitch, bounce and sway, helping to better understand how wagons, and their suspension systems, are performing. A 3.5km curving performance test track is primarily used by an instrumented vehicle to better understand the ideal combination of forces needed to successfully negotiate different curve radii.
“The great thing about the facility we’re operating out of now is that it is within our control to be able to build what we need, when we need it.”
Kari Gonzales, MxV president and CEO
MxV’s research and development laboratories are located at a separate site at Pueblo Industrial Park, closer to the centre of Pueblo, and around 16km from its track testing facilities at PuebloPlex. Building these from the ground up offered MxV the opportunity to install only what it deemed necessary and to dispose of ageing equipment that its engineers felt was obsolete. Among the large-scale component testing equipment used at TTC that has found a new home at MxV is a 300-tonne test rig, a sleeper wear tester, a cold room, and a rolling contact fatigue simulator.
“It was an exercise in understanding the needs of the industry as a whole and making sure we are continuing to serve those needs with the equipment we have, while figuring out ways of getting rid of things that we didn’t need,” Gonzales says.
Gonzales says it cost $US 55-60m to get both the laboratory and track facilities to a point where MxV was able to offer test services. “We were very strategic about what we built out and the sheer cost associated with it,” she says, adding that there was a deliberate emphasis on testing the high-utilisation assets used by the freight sector rather than passenger operators. “You don’t get new passenger vehicle builds all of the time, so you see a very cyclical need for passenger testing,” she says.
“We therefore decided it wasn’t in the best interest of our finances to go down this path, also because you still had a facility [TTC] that has the capability to do passenger testing. However, we do a lot of passenger work in the consulting space, and we still have experts who are able to contribute to that side of the industry. We’re just not in the business of doing high-speed testing.”
Since leaving TTC, MxV has remained very much a separate entity from Ensco and the FRA, with currently no shared projects taking place between the organisations. However, Gonzales reveals that MxV is in discussion with the FRA about possible collaboration opportunities. One area where she sees the greatest potential is the future evolution of Positive Train Control (PTC), a project where TTCI played a crucial role in development, as Gonzales says there are significant opportunities to do more with the underlying infrastructure.
Rail Research Week
With the heavy lifting complete and no further major infrastructure builds in the pipeline - a prospect Gonzales says she is “super happy about” after the intense pace of activities over the past few years - the focus now is on ensuring the facility continues to meet the evolving needs of MxV’s board members by supporting the safe and efficient deployment of new technology and innovation on the railways of North America.
“The great thing about the facility we’re operating out of now is that it is within our control to be able to build what we need, when we need it,” Gonzales says. “PuebloPlex has been a great partner in allowing us that flexibility. There is still lots and lots of space available - our overall footprint is actually quite small in the size of the development - so we have lots of opportunity for expansion, but industry needs will drive that.”
Many of these industry requirements will be discussed at this month’s Rail Research Week, which brings together WCRR and IHHA into a single event for the first time.
As the current chair of IHHA, Gonzales says it has been an “extraordinary experience” over the past few years to see what challenges the wider industry is facing and how many of these span the globe. This includes how engineers from different countries are tackling rail wear and the wheel-rail interface She adds that there is currently a great deal of momentum behind innovations such as train inspection portals, autonomous track inspection systems, and wayside detectors. “We’ve had wayside detectors forever, but we’re enhancing those in a way that is helping us to make even better business decisions and safety decisions in ways that we hadn’t thought of before,” Gonzales says.
Overall, she believes that automation and sustainability will be the two major talking points during Rail Research Week. The North American Class 1s will also be given the stage to explain how they are preparing their railways for the introduction of new digital and intelligent technologies that promise to make operations safer, greener and more efficient, while continuing to respect the significant challenges of successfully operating ever-heavier trains.
The basic definition of AI - making machines smarter - is something the rail industry has been working on for many years through processes such as machine learning.
Inevitably Artificial Intelligence (AI) - a current international buzzword covering all manner of intelligent processes - will find its place into these discussions. Gonzales says the basic definition of AI - making machines smarter - is something the rail industry has been working on for many years through processes such as machine learning. But with the pace of development seemingly picking up, she says MxV experts are working to actively expand their knowledge of this sphere as it exists today. This includes understanding how AI and other technologies might enable railways to make better use of the vast data sets that they now possess, a process that includes engaging with other industries where AI use is more refined and mature.
“We’re not a product developer,” Gonzales says. “We’re this third-party assessor of all things. We want to understand how all of those cutting-edge AI technologies can be applied in a real-world environment. We already have a couple of projects underway that tap a bit more into deep machine learning and robotics to enhance some of the existing systems that are out there. Our goal is to help the industry to stay ahead.”
Gonzales adds that embracing cutting-edge technology in this way offers the wider sector an opportunity to point out what an attractive and innovative place it is to work. She believes this is essential to address the challenge of attracting and retaining top talent, which is set to be another key talking point of the event.
In the case of MxV, Gonzales says the quality of its people helps set it apart. After 40 years at TTC, the group now comprises around 250 experts with “deep cross-functional knowledge,” a level of experience that she argues is hard to match in the industry today. “When you combine that with this purpose-built facility that is designed to support innovation, you have a pretty powerful set-up,” Gonzales says.
Indeed, feedback from discussions with staff largely determined the path MxV followed during the move and transition to working at the new facility. For many, the prospect of effectively starting from zero was quite daunting. “We spent a lot of time listening to people across the organisation to understand their concerns and to make sure the transition felt right,” she says. “A lot of our board members infused a great deal of confidence in our people about our purpose and our value to the industry at that time. That really helped to strengthen our culture and sparked even more passion among our experts.”
That enthusiasm - and that of the global industry R&D community - will be apparent for all to see in Colorado Springs this month.
With more than 700 sessions and papers and an exciting line-up of more than 40 plenary speakers, Rail Research Week is set to be one of this year’s must-attend industry events. It will also offer insight into where the industry is at and where it is heading on its technological journey, with MxV set to play a prominent role in these discussions.
MxV stays Fast at new facility
THE Facility for Accelerated Service Testing (Fast) at MxV is designed to test a variety of vehicle and infrastructure components in real-world conditions before they enter revenue service. The 5.3km loop accumulates more than 140 million gross tonnes of heavy axleload traffic every year using heavier-than-standard freight wagons and is currently supporting more than 50 active experiments.
Fast is powered by funding from the AAR’s Strategic Research Initiative. It also supports privately-financed initiatives, offering companies the ability to install their equipment and technology on the track in a controlled environment. This ranges from components such as sleepers and rail to entire bridge structures.
“We were able to provide insight to the industry that some of these simple little things can make a big difference to minimising disruption.”
Kari Gonzales
A recent interesting example highlighted by Gonzales is performance testing of rail welds. She says one of the advantages of installing the new Fast track was the opportunity to observe welds on brand new rail. While there was not a single weld failure during the first 50 million tonnes of operation, she says failures began to intensify after traffic increased earlier this year, occurring every 2-3 million tonnes of service. This prompted MxV engineers to investigate what might be happening, sharing their findings with the wider industry.
“Our engineers were able to take the time to trace those failures back to stress risers that were caused by things like poor post-weld grinding or stamp marks that weren’t removed before welding,” Gonzales says. “We were able to provide insight to the industry that some of these simple little things can make a big difference to minimising disruption.”
Along with infrastructure, MxV is working to test the performance and durability of locomotives operating on the test loops. It is also actively working with start-up companies, including some developing non-traditional rail technology.
This includes Parallel Systems which is developing an autonomous battery-powered container wagon. The company began working with MxV engineers at TTC and is performing bogie tests on the suspension resonance track and curving performance track at PuebloPlex.
Another notable collaboration is with Swiss Pod, which is exploring the construction of the world’s largest hyperloop test track at PuebloPlex. Gonzales says this should be completed by the end of this year or in 2026.
“It validates our purpose of being here to help people to advance their technology,” she says.
MxV Board Members
Association of American Railroads
Amtrak
BNSF
Canadian National
CPKC
CSX
Genesee & Wyoming
Metra
Norfolk Southern
RJ Corman Railroad Company
Union Pacific
