With ever-increasing volumes of freight traveling by rail and the promise of high-speed passenger trains on the horizon, the need for greater rail transportation safety, efficiency, reliability and sustainability has emerged as a high priority in the U.S.

All these objectives are at the core of the research conducted by faculty and students in the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center (RailTEC) in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. RailTEC is the largest railway educational program in North America and is a leader in rail transportation engineering research.

This leadership will continue with the formation of the new National University Rail Center of Excellence (NURail CoE) later this spring. Last September, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced that UIUC had been selected to lead the new $15 million center, whose objectives include research to enhance the safety, efficiency, reliability and sustainability of passenger and freight rail transportation and development of the future rail transportation and engineering workforce.

In addition to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the NURail CoE comprises eight other partner institutions, including the University of Illinois Chicago, University of Delaware, Kansas State University, Michigan Technological University, Morgan State University, Rutgers University, University of Texas at Austin and Tuskegee University.

The research conducted at RailTEC will be particularly important to the state of Illinois since Illinois is the largest freight railroad hub in North America; 11,800 Illinoisans are employed in the freight rail industry. Illinois’s central location in the U.S. makes it a key node in transcontinental traffic, with 3.8 million railcars originating in and 3.6 million terminating in the state each year. Chicago is also the Midwest hub of Amtrak’s national network of intercity passenger service, and among U.S. cities, Chicago boasts the second-largest commuter rail system.

“You know the saying, ‘All roads lead to Rome?’ Well, all railroads lead to Chicago!” said Professor Christopher Barkan, the George Krambles Director of RailTEC in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. “Railroads have been in the DNA of Illinois since the 19th century, and rail transportation has been a cornerstone of engineering education and research at the University of Illinois since that time.” 

Twenty-five years of RailTEC

RailTEC, which marked its 25th anniversary in September 2023, was established in 1998 with initial support from the Association of American Railroads. Substantial additional support soon followed from the George Krambles Scholarship Transportation Foundation, Canadian National Railway and BNSF Railway to educate and inspire a new generation of rail transportation and engineering professionals.

Since RailTEC’s inception, nearly 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students have received railroad engineering education, and many graduates of the program have attained high-ranking positions in the rail industry. RailTEC faculty offer nine rail courses, the most comprehensive such curriculum in North America.

“Twenty-five years ago, the university recognized the importance of rail to its mission and to the state of Illinois, and it made the decision to reaffirm its commitment at a time when rail engineering had nearly disappeared at other universities,” Barkan said. “It paid off, because Illinois is now the undisputed leader of rail education and research at a time when rail transportation is experiencing a major renaissance.”

Photo Credit: Heather Coit

RailTEC research is focused on three areas: infrastructure and its components, safety and risk, and system capacity and efficiency. The center has developed close relationships throughout the rail sector and conducts research for both private- and public-sector sponsors.

“Our U.S. freight rail system is owned, operated and maintained by private-sector companies, so there’s an interest in solving problems quickly and effectively,” said J. Riley Edwards, a Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor and RailTEC researcher. “Our work is highly visible and earned the respect of the entire North American rail industry. In addition to being documented in academic journals, it often goes into practice within a couple of years.”

Infrastructure and Components

The continued growth in rail freight has increased the demands on rail infrastructure. Freight trains are moving larger quantities of goods, meaning that tracks must be designed and maintained to accommodate heavier railcars, higher speeds and increased traffic. Meanwhile, high-speed passenger rail systems require specialized track systems that differ from freight rail systems.

To address those needs, RailTEC researchers are pioneering the application of mechanistic empirical design principles to railroad track. First developed for the study of highway pavements, mechanistic empirical design uses data and physical modeling to pinpoint the mechanisms responsible for failures and to inform new and improved designs.

“In the past, railroads would often respond to increased loads and traffic by simply making track components larger, and the result was often inefficient or unreliable,” said Arthur Lima, a RailTEC research engineer. “Mechanistic empirical design is about understanding demands and response of components and using that knowledge to improve designs, and we are the first to apply this to rail transport.”

RailTEC operates the Research and Innovation Laboratory (RAIL) on the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory campus in Champaign to study rail infrastructure systems and components. The facility houses multiple hydraulic testing frames, including a track-loading system on a full-scale, full-depth track structure. Some of the infrastructure innovations to emerge from this facility include the identification of failure modes in track spikes, the development of instrumented concrete crossties for studying revenue-service loading demands, and a new rail joint bar design now being used in New York’s subway system.

Safety and Risk

Rail is much safer than highway transport, but the consequences of even a single failure can be substantial. Railroads transport large quantities of hazardous materials, so infrastructure must be well-maintained and trains operated so as to prevent derailments and minimize the associated risk. RailTEC has been a leader in applying optimization principles to improve tank car safety design and in identifying the safest ways to configure and operate trains.

“If a derailed tank car releases chlorine, this poses much greater hazard than a release of corn syrup, so managing this risk requires different designs to account for the different hazards,” Barkan said. “Much of our work in the 2000s involved combining detailed statistical analysis of tank car damage and failure modes with data on mechanical properties and cost of different tank car components, and using optimization techniques to identify the most effective and efficient means of improving tank car safety design.” The results of this work were used by the Association of American Railroads to modify tank car design standards.

More recently, RailTEC researchers have developed statistical models to assess the probability and severity of major derailments and collisions and are again using optimization techniques to identify ways to configure trains to minimize the probability that cars transporting hazardous materials will be derailed.

Systems Capacity and Efficiency

Another implication of increased rail traffic is that the infrastructure must be able to handle the greater volume. This can be addressed by adding new infrastructure or better managing traffic on existing infrastructure. In both cases, railroads need to understand how to allocate resources to maximize the value of the investment.

Many rail lines are single-track with passing sidings spaced along a route to permit trains to pass one another. Increasing the number of sidings or adding a second track increases a line’s capacity, but this additional trackage is a costly capital investment. RailTEC research has been used to identify the optimal locations for adding sidings that have the most impact on line capacity and the most efficient allocation of resources.

RailTEC alums in the world

“When I came here in 1998 to lead the rail program, the railroads made it clear that our role at Illinois transcended research and that our rail education program was equally important,” Barkan said. “Illinois was among the last schools to have any kind of rail program, and there was serious concern about where future generations of railroad professionals would come from. My initial focus was on rebuilding our own curriculum, but once we were on firmer ground, I reached out to like-minded faculty at other universities to see how we could leverage our success here to [benefit] a broader group of schools.” That outreach led to the first Railway Engineering Education Symposium (REES), a “teach the teacher” event intended to attract and educate new faculty who wanted to expand their own courses and curriculum to include more rail content. REES was organized by RailTEC and held in 2008 on the UIUC campus, with more than two dozen faculty attendees. Since then, REES has been repeated over a dozen times, and more than 100 faculty from all across the U.S. and Canada have attended.

The REES faculty also formed the nucleus of what was to become the consortium that formed the National University Rail Center, the first-ever US DOT University Transportation Center focused solely on rail. That center was, in turn, the forerunner of the new NURail CoE.

Now, RailTEC alums are innovating and invigorating the rail sector throughout the U.S. and around the world. They are employed by major freight railroads, short line railroads, Amtrak, commuter railroads, rail transit agencies, rail research organizations, railway engineering firms, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, and universities. RailTEC alumni are also at the cutting edge of high-speed rail development in the U.S. with Brightline, which is already operating the first private-sector passenger railroad in the U.S. and is expected to begin construction of the first North American high-speed passenger railroad, between Las Vegas and southern California, later this year.

“The professors and researchers at RailTEC actively encourage students to make industry connections from the earliest stages and, because railroad engineering is such a relatively small community, those connections are tight,” said Nao Nishio, M.S. ’18, a Manager of Engineering Technology at Brightline. “I work here with several other people who passed through RailTEC, and we agree that it’s the reason we are where we are today. They don’t just teach you how a railroad works, but they put in the effort to mentor, teach professional practices, and position you to succeed.”