Author: LB Frye

RailTEC is proud to announce that Professor Christopher P.L. Barkan, George Krambles Director, is the recipient of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) 2025 Robert E. Skinner, Jr. Distinguished Transportation Research Management Award. Dr. Barkan is recognized for his nearly four decades-long career advancing research, safety, and operational capacity in the nation’s rail transportation industry. He is the fourth winner of this notable award. Click here to read Dr. Barkan’s award citation.

The award will be presented on Wednesday, 14 January 2026, during the Chair’s Plenary Session of the TRB Annual Meeting, 11-15 January 2026, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

The Skinner Award was established by the TRB Executive Committee to recognize outstanding lifetime achievement in management, administration, promotion, fostering, and implementation of transportation research. It honors Robert E. Skinner, Jr. who served TRB for more than 30 years, including 21 years as its executive director from 1994 to 2015. Award recipients are chosen by a selection committee consisting of the Chair and Vice Chair of the TRB Executive Committee, Chair of the Executive Committee’s Subcommittee on Planning and Policy Review, Chair of the TRB Division Committee, and the Executive Director of TRB. For more information about the Skinner Award, click here to read the award’s information page on the TRB website.

Congratulations to Professor J. Riley Edwards for being named to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Spring 2025 list of  “Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students”. These lists are compiled by the University on a semester basis and reflect student ratings of instruction. The ratings are based on Instructor and Course Evaluation (ICES) questionnaire forms and are maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning on campus.

Riley taught CEE 411 | Railroad Project Design and Construction. This course focused on five elements of a railroad project: Economic Analysis, Planning, Design, Construction, and Operation. Students worked in teams to identify, gather and analyze the necessary information, to plan and manage a new railroad construction project. The class included a field trip to observe and participate in railroad track maintenance and construction activities, and visited a major railroad construction project. CEE 411 is typically offered in the classroom or online in the spring semester.

Approximately 25 RailTEC students and faculty attended the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA) 2025 Annual Conference & Expo on 14-17 September at the Indianapolis Convention Center in Indianapolis, IN.  Many RailTEC alumni were also in attendance and played a key role in the schedule.

Presentations by current RailTEC faculty, staff and students this year were:

• Identifying Frozen Ballast and the Impact it has on Rail Gaps – A Laboratory and Numerical Study
  Coleman Froehlke & Marcus Dersch, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

• Turnout Frog Profile Optimization Through Dynamic Interaction Modeling with Revenue Service Wheel Profiles
  Jaeik Lee, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In addition to attending technical presentations and sessions designed specifically for student participants, RailTEC students created two teams of five to battle in the AREMA Committee 24 Collegiate Quiz Bowl Competition. The first team consisted of Alex Roskov, Jose Gustavo V. S. Ramos, Derek Campbell, Kaifeng Hu, and Ryan Loscalzo. This team came from behind after three rounds to beat Penn State Team A by one point. The second team, consisting of Coleman Froehlke, Cayden Schroeder, Sam Eberle, Drew Hohe, and Batu Alp, tied for third place with Penn State Team B. RailTEC also took first place in last year’s Student Quiz Bowl in Louisville.

This year the Dr. William W. Hay Award for Excellence was given to Brightline Florida and HNTB Corp. for their 38-mile East-West Connector Project in Central Florida. This was the last piece of Brightline’s passenger-rail line between Orlando and Miami and riders now can travel from the Orlando International Airport to Miami in three hours and 25 minutes. The project, which included 20 grade separations, involved more than 700 workers including multiple RailTEC alumni.

RailTEC faculty, staff and students were attendees, moderators and presenters at the 2025 Midwest Rail Conference (MRC) on 12-14 August at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. The theme of the conference was “Railroads 200 Years – Learning from the Past, Shaping the Future”.  Wednesday 13 August 2025 consisted of a full day of educational and breakout sessions while Thursday was reserved for field visits including Elkhart Yard and Shipper visits, South Bend Grade Separations and Airport Passenger Rail Station Relocation. MRC brought together industry leaders, advocacy groups, academia and state organizations to discuss key issues shaping the region’s extensive rail network. Covering freight and passenger rail across states like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin, the conference explored a diverse range of topics, mixing speakers across stakeholder groups. See the final program here.

The second annual meeting for the National University Rail Center of Excellence (NURail CoE) was held in conjunction with the Midwest Rail conference. The approximately 35 attendees took the time to review accomplishments from year one, receive an update from each of the CoE Principal Investigators including highlights from the prior year and plans for next year, listen to student poster rehearsals, finalize plans for the AREMA conference and discuss a funding reauthorization update.

Coleman Froehlke said his experience in the RailTEC program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been one of personal growth and a newfound interest in transportation engineering.  The Boise, Idaho, native earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on geotechnical engineering from Illinois in 2023 and expects to graduate in December 2025 with a master’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on transportation engineering. “I had options to stay in the West, but I have a relative who is a physics professor here,” he said.

Although Froehlke admits he misses the mountains of the West, the friendly people in Central Illinois more than make up for the area’s lack of scenery and bitter winters. “The winters are harsher here. Boise has more of a desert climate,” Coleman said. “But the people are nice here.”

An internship building dams and doing geotechnical work in the energy division of Stantec, an international civil engineering consulting firm, prompted Froehlke to consider pursuing a master’s degree to improve his future job opportunities. “I was finishing up my undergrad here in fall 2023, and I was thinking about getting a job here, but a lot of jobs required an MS,” he said. One of Froehlke’s professors knew RailTEC Senior Principal Research Engineer Marcus Dersch because the two were pursuing a PhD at the same time. “He knew Marcus was working on a frozen ballast project,” Froehlke said. “As an undergrad, I didn’t have a lot of experience with transportation, but the project had other aspects I was interested in, such as laboratory testing.”

Since joining RailTEC in spring 2024, Froehlke has had the opportunity to work on a research project in Joliet about how frozen ballast affects rail destressing. “It’s not necessarily freezing temperatures,” he said. “We investigate how ballast is degraded or not degraded, if moisture is present, and how a combination of those conditions can change the properties of ballast. “I do the laboratory testing and evaluate the data to compare the behavior of different testing conditions,” Froehlke explained.

RailTEC also has provided Froehlke the opportunity to attend conferences, including the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) annual meeting in January in Washington, DC, where he gave a presentation on “Effect of Sub-Freezing Temperature on Ballast Strength.” “I am excited to go to conferences and learn about research that is being done,” he said. “Presenting at TRB is a memory I’ll remember for a while,” he said. “Presenting research is a good exercise and helps me build my confidence with public speaking.”

Froehlke said he enjoys working on research with the RailTEC team and is now considering furthering his education at Illinois. “It is very rare that people in other research groups are as close as we are in RailTEC,” he said. “I am still considering pursuing a PhD and seeing what other opportunities are out there.”

Time is running out to sign up for RailTEC’ s virtual railway engineering short courses.  These two one-week sessions will be held Monday – Thursday from noon – 4:00pm (Central) via Zoom. Track Engineering Fundamentals starts on 4 August 2025 and Railroad Project Design starts on 11 August 2025. We welcome you to join us for one or both weeks. Participants earn 14 professional development hours per week and those enrolled in both weeks receive a $100 discount. Past attendees include rail professionals, engineers, planners, consultants and more from employees throughout the rail industry.

For more information and to register, click here.

Schedule

Track Engineering Fundamentals
4-7 August 2025 | Noon-4pm CDT
Instructor: Conrad Ruppert

• • • Monday: Introduction; Rail; Crossties & Fasteners
    • Tuesday: Ballast & Subgrade; Drainage; Slab Track; Turnouts & Special Trackwork
    • Wednesday: Track Structural Analysis; Track Structural Design
    • Thursday: Track Standards & Inspections; Track Maintenance Technologies; Asset Management & Life Cycle Costs

Railroad Project Design
11-14 August 2025 | Noon-4pm CDT
Instructor: Conrad Ruppert

• • • Monday: Introduction; Horizontal Track Geometry
    • Tuesday: Vertical Track Geometry; Cross Sections & Earthwork
    • Wednesday: Railroad Location; Location Referencing & Track Charts
    • Thursday: Project Phasing; Project Cost Estimation

RailTEC faculty, staff, and students attended the 2025 Wheel Rail Interaction (WRI) Heavy Haul (HH) conference from 10-12 June 2025 in Kansas City, MO. J. Riley Edwards, Assistant Professor, presented on “Track Structures and Components” at the Principles of Wheel/Rail Interaction Course on 10 June ahead of the conference.

This course was an intensive, full-day class providing an in-depth examination of the primary aspects of wheel/rail and vehicle/track interactions and sponsored by the National University Rail Center for Excellence (NURail CoE). NURail CoE is a nine-university consortium led by RailTEC at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). It is dedicated to advancing rail Research, Education and Workforce Development, and Technology Transfer.

The WRI HH conference is specifically tailored for the heavy haul (freight) sector, focusing on the unique challenges and advancements in the railroad industry. It is devoted to examining wheel/rail and vehicle/track interaction on light rail and subway operations. The conference features a comprehensive principles course crafted to meet the distinct needs of each discipline. Since 1994, Wheel Rail Seminars (WRS) has produced WRI and over many years the conference has become synonymous with high quality, practical presentations and the very best in networking.

WRI HH 2026 will be in Dallas, TX on 22-24 April.

Both CEE 410 (Railway Signaling and Control) and CEE 411 (Railroad Project Design and Construction) participated in field visits this semester.

On Saturday 10 May CEE 410 students visited CN’s Network Operating Center and Training Facility in Homewood to learn about CN’s network management and observe train dispatchers controlling train operations.

In addition, they also visited Metra’s Signal Wiring Shop in Mokena on 10 May where Illinois students learned about relay and microprocessor-controlled CTC, ABS, APB, electric lock switches, and grade crossing warning system technologies.

Students from CEE 411, as well as UIUC AREMA Student Chapter members, traveled to St. Louis on Friday 11 April for their field visit. They visited the Terminal Railroad Association (TRRA) of St. Louis where they had an overview of the business and visited the TRAA Hump Classification Yard. TRRA was created in 1889 to satisfy the need for an efficient, safe and economical method of interchanging rail traffic and has grown to become one of the largest intermediate switching terminal railroads in the U.S. interchanging with all six of the nation’s Class 1 railroads.

Neeraj Thakur may be halfway around the world from his native Katmandu, Nepal, but he hopes to use the knowledge he has gained from the RailTEC program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the burgeoning rail industry in Nepal. After earning a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 2016 from Tribhuvan University, Thakur worked for a few years in Nepal’s Department of Local Infrastructure. “Nepal is quite hilly, and we have a lot of rivers, so in the rural areas people have to use pedestrian suspension bridges,” Thakur explained. “My job was to employ contractors for building new pedestrian bridges.”

During the next few years, Thakur worked in the department’s headquarters creating budgets and allocations for roads and bridges, and eventually was promoted to the Department of Roads where he worked on the design, construction, and maintenance of bridges. “I didn’t have the opportunity to learn about railroads in college,” he said. “There were few railroads in Nepal because it is hilly, and they started building railroads only five years ago.”

Arriving at UIUC in August 2023, Thakur expects to earn his master’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on transportation in August 2025. “I wanted to attend a university that had a good rail program, and the University of Illinois has very good ranking in engineering,” he said. “I was looking at rail courses ahead of time and saw the introduction course to track and met with (Assistant Professor) Riley (Edwards),” he added. Thakur joined the RailTEC program and is involved in the student chapter of AREMA (American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association). “It has been amazing. I get to attend conferences, and I enjoy having the opportunity to present my research to rail industry professionals and the academic environment,” he said of his RailTEC experience. “The management team is supportive, and my colleagues are a close-knit group. Primarily my research work has dealt with track buckling and using inspection systems to collect data so we can tell where track might buckle so we can maintain it,” Thakur explained. “Track buckling is an important issue right now.”

Thakur said he is enjoying his first time in the United States by visiting as many places as possible, including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Tennessee, Boston, and New York City. “I’m trying to maximize my time here. Every chance I get, I travel by train,” he said, adding, “The weather is really different, and everything is big in the U.S. – the buildings, the roads.”

After graduation, Thakur plans to return to Nepal with the railway knowledge he has gained at UIUC. “I will go back to Nepal and work on the railroads and make good use of the knowledge I’ve learned here,” he said. “The knowledge about track components, track maintenance, and track inspections will be helpful.”

In addition to giving a William W. Hay Seminar on Friday 16 May, Paula Pienton, Chief Engineer Bridges & Structures with CN Railway, presented four RailTEC students with certificates awarding them CN Research Fellowships in Railroad Engineering. Paige Hardt and Xinhao Liu received awards for 2025 while Sadaf Shafie and Negin Shafie received ones for their fellowships awarded in 2024. A CN Research Fellowship in Railroad Engineering supports students affiliated with the Railroad Engineering Program in CEE at Illinois and was created as part of CN’s support for RailTEC’s educational programs.

The Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department also recognized outstanding achievement and held its annual Student Awards Convocation on 25 April. RailTEC would like to congratulate the following 2025 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign rail scholarship recipients. They are:

Albert J. Reinschmidt Memorial Scholarship Fund

2025 – Alex Roskov

Michael W. and Jean D. Franke Railroad Engineering Scholarship

2025 – Sam Eberle

Norman and Mary Carlson Scholarship

2025 – Batu Alp

Union Pacific Scholarship

2025 – Cameron Taylor

More information about the scholarships can be found below.

 Albert J. Reinschmidt Scholarship in Railway Engineering

This scholarship was founded and sponsored by friends and railroad industry colleagues of Dr. Albert J. Reinschmidt. Reinschmidt earned all of his degrees studying railway engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and went on to a successful career in railway research, engineering practice, and policy with the Association of American Railroads. The scholarship is intended to provide financial assistance to help any civil, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering student achieve their educational goals in rail transportation engineering and technology with the objective of supporting development of a new generation of engineers advancing rail safety, efficiency, and technological advancement.

Michael W. & Jean D. Franke Family Foundation Scholarship

The scholarship is awarded to an outstanding student interested in railroad transportation engineering, as evinced by coursework, participation in rail research, and other railway engineering and transport related activities. The objective of the scholarship is to encourage the candidate to continue railway engineering studies and ultimately pursue a career in the rail-related transportation industry.

Norman and Mary Carlson Scholarship Fund

Established in 2005, the Carlson Scholarship encourages students to pursue careers in the rail industry. Carlson graduated from the UIUC College of Commerce and Business Administration in 1964, has spent his career in service to the railroad industry, and has written and published extensively on the history and technology of railways.