Message from Director
As founding director, it is my pleasure to introduce you to the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety (UTCRS).
Our commitment is to advancing the safety, reliability, and efficiency of America’s rail system through research that is impactful, leading to results that are actionable and accessible to every stakeholder: US railroads, railcar manufacturers and owners, railroad workforce, federal and state government, and the public at large.
To ensure our projects are impactful, we are guided by an External Advisory Board composed of distinguished leaders from Class I railroads, rail equipment manufacturers, federal agencies, and labor unions. Every UTCRS-funded project is approved, and in many cases proposed, by our Board.
To ensure that our results are actionable, we partner directly with engineers at major railroads, national test tracks, bearing manufacturers, and sensor manufacturers; investigators at federal safety agencies; and experienced on-the-ground personnel including signalmen and short line operators. We transfer technology to our partners and multiple UTCRS products are in commercial production.
To ensure that our results are accessible to all stakeholders, we provide a wide range of publicly available resources. Every taxpayer-funded project results in an open-access report available at our website in addition to publications. We provide online models for bearings derived from years of data collected in our laboratories. Most recently, in 2025, we brought online our bearing temperature and vibration database that makes raw data from over fifteen years of collection available directly to the public.
Founded in 2013, UTCRS is a Tier 1 University Transportation Center led by UTRGV in partnership with the University of South Carolina, Texas A&M University, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of California, Riverside, and South Texas College. The center was established and is supported by the US DoT University Transportation Centers (UTC) program. In addition to UTC support, we also take on a wide variety of projects funded by industry and other government agencies.
At our UTRGV site, we maintain the only publicly available bearing test facility in the United States. It includes five separate bearing testers, extensive facilities for bearing analysis, and ability to test to Association of American Railroads (AAR) standards. This unique resource serves bearing manufacturers and rail industry, as well as UTCRS research projects.
Our staff includes faculty researchers, full time engineers, and most notably one of America’s largest groups of undergraduate and graduate student researchers working on rail transportation. Our commitment to workforce development and recruiting includes several dozen university students each year, and transportation safety camps that typically enroll up to 1000 K-12 students with their teachers each summer.
I invite you to browse our website, learn more about our work, access the many available tools and documents, and to contact us if you are interested in knowing more. Thank you for your interest in the UTCRS.