14-Year-Old Wins $10,000 Investigating Train Derailments

• Gary Allen Montelongo wins $10,000 science project It’s about a train derailment.
• More than 1,300 trains derailed in the United States last year. One of these caused a devastating chemical spill in Ohio.
• Montelongo created and coded an experiment on railway suspension, then won a national competition.

Toy trains can be a hobby or entertainment. award-winning science experiment.

14-year-old Gary Allen Montelongo won $10,000 for coding, building mini railroad tracks and operating a model train They need to investigate an infrastructure weakness that could cause trains to dangerously derail.

The project won the regional science fair and subsequently Thermo Fisher Scientific Young Innovators Competitionhere he competed with 29 other middle school students. Each presented their research and completed challenges in coding, battery creation, disease diagnosis and genome editing, and ecosystem research.

on tuesday award ceremony of the competitionMontelongo was one of five big winners, receiving the Broadcom Contracted Coding Award.

“He integrated mechanical engineering and learned how to use machines and specialized tools, as well as being a coder.” Maya Ajmera, president and CEO An official from the Science Foundation, which organizes the competition, told BI. “So I think it was this integration and this interdisciplinary way of doing research that got it to where it is.”

He also chose a research topic that resonated across the United States. Last year, 1,301 trains derailed across the country. data From the Federal Railroad Administration. Most of these are minor and occur at low speed, but some derailments cause property damage and spill hazardous materials.

Ohio derailment

When a burden Train derailed in East Palestine, OhioMontelongo was in the middle of an internship in railroad safety when he caused a catastrophic chemical spill that forced the evacuation of the town. It was February 2023.

“I was shocked at first,” Montelongo said. But his team at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley was very excited about the incident and what might have caused it. Soon they were all discussing the matter. railway suspension system.

The internship ended, but Montelongo couldn’t get the idea of ​​the derailment out of his mind and went down. train tracks near his house.

While examining the trains there, he paid particular attention to the giant springs in the suspension systems. While some of the springs were brand new, others were old and rusty and had visibly collapsed over time, leaving less space between each coil.

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Montelongo had an idea. He wanted to see how these spring differences affected simple trains and rails.

“That kind of hooked me,” he said.

bouncing train tracks

He would need a device called an accelerometer to measure the vibration. Montelongo had started coding around the age of 8, so of course he built and coded an accelerometer himself.

He then built three sets of model railroad tracks from foam and placed three different types of springs on them: fresh new springs, middle-aged springs, and old, worn-out springs. This mimicked the different suspension systems he had seen on the train tracks near his home.

Montelongo then measured the vibration and bounce in the springs by running a model train on different sets of rails. He then attached weights to the train to see how an unevenly distributed load would affect the rails.

“All of the fully worn out springs were really flexible and wobbly,” he said.

“These caused a lot of derailments,” he added, especially when the train was carrying unbalanced weight.

Montelongo is currently playing football during his junior year of high school and hopes to become a mechanical engineer.

“I really enjoyed designing and coding things,” Montelongo said. “What I really want to do is design spaceships that will go into space.”

He added that he wants to work at NASA or SpaceX one day. For now, he’s building rocket ships in a game on his phone.

Later investigation found that Ohio’s derailment was caused by a defective wheel bearing, which was part of the suspension system.