A railway engineering short course in railroad project design offered through RailTEC at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign motivated Paige Hardt to move to Illinois to pursue a master’s degree. Hardt earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Wyoming in May 2021 and then worked for three-and-a-half years as a civil engineer at a transportation engineering consulting firm in Kansas City. “I took those years to figure out what I wanted, and it was not necessarily transportation engineering because that’s dealing more with highways,” she said. “After I took the RailTEC short course, I knew I wanted an MS.”
Hardt is the sixth person in her family to become a civil engineer. “Structural or hydraulic engineering is what everyone in my family is in,” she said. Although her mother is a structural engineer, Hardt wasn’t as passionate about that type of civil engineering. An internship working on rail projects helped Hardt to find her true passion.
“In 2020, I was lucky to have an internship, and they stuck me with rail projects,” she said. “I agreed to be hired full-time as long as I was on the rail team. “I designed sidings, and I had a few industry projects, including lowering a BNSF route by 15 feet so the City of Flagstaff could build an overpass,” she said. “I enjoyed the client relations and going onsite to see the location I’m designing,” she said. “While I was doing that, the RailTEC short course was suggested to me as a quick course to gain more knowledge of rail design.”
In 2023, Hardt decided to enroll in classes at Illinois and move to Champaign-Urbana where she is only an hour away from her grandparents. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Illinois in civil engineering with a focus in rail transportation engineering and expects to graduate in December 2025. “I took an untraditional route here, after working in the corporate world, but I had two really good managers that pushed me out of my comfort zone and gave me good opportunities on rail projects,” she said.
Hardt joined the RailTEC program in January 2025 and has started work on the first of two research projects: Longitudinal Rail Displacement Near Fixed Structures with Senior Principal Research Engineer Marcus Dersch. “I am taking measurements of rail movement at different distances from a fixed structure and then taking the differential distances and using that to understand rail temperature,” she explained. The other research project Hardt will work on is Non-linearity of Track Degradation in Relation to Maintenance Events with Assistant Professor Riley Edwards and Senior Research Engineer Arthur Lima.
Her time with the RailTEC program has been a positive experience. “Riley and the students have been very supportive, and I enjoy the collaboration,” she said. “They give me critical feedback, and it’s encouraged me to dig into the research more.”