• Gary Allen Montelongo won $10,000 for a scientific project when the train derails.
• More than 1,300 trains derailed in the US last year. One caused a catastrophic chemical spill in Ohio.
• Montelongo built and coded an experiment with railway suspension, then won a national competition.

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

Gary Allen Montelongo, 14, just won $10,000 for coding, building mini railroad tracks and driving a model train on them to investigate an infrastructure weakness that can cause trains to dangerously derail.

The project won the regional science fair, then took it to Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challengewhere he competed with 29 other middle schools. Each presented their research and completed challenges in coding, battery building, disease diagnosis and genome editing, and ecosystem research.

Tuesday, in the award ceremony of the competitionMontelongo was one of five big winners, taking home the Broadcom Coding with Commitment 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 of the Society for Science, which launches the competition, told BI. “So this integration, this interdisciplinary way of doing research I think got him to where he is.”

He also chose a research topic that resonates in the US. Last year there were 1,301 train derailments across the country, according to the report DATA from the Federal Railway Administration. Most of these are minor and occur at low speed, but some derailments damage property and spill hazardous materials.

Ohio derailment

When a commodity the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohiocausing a disastrous chemical spill that forced the city to evacuate, Montelongo was in the middle of an internship on rail safety. It was February 2023.

“I was shocked at first,” Montelongo said. But his cohort at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley was agitated about the incident and what might have caused it. Soon, everyone was talking about by railway suspension system.

The stage ended, but Montelongo could not escape his derailment, so he dropped to train tracks near his house.

While studying the trains there, he paid particular attention to the gigantic springs in their suspension systems. Some of the springs were brand new, while others were old and rusty and had visibly collapsed over time, with less space between each coil.

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

“I kind of got caught up in it,” he said.

Bouncing train tracks

It would need an instrument called an accelerometer to measure the vibrations. Montelongo started coding around the age of 8, so of course he built and coded an accelerometer himself.

He then built three sets of foam model rails and mounted them with three different types of springs: fresh new springs, middle springs, and old, worn springs. This mimicked the various suspension systems he had seen on the train tracks near his home.

Montelongo then ran a model train on different sets of tracks, measuring the vibration and spring bounce. He then attached weights to the train to see how an unevenly distributed load would affect the rails.

“All the springs that were completely worn were really bouncy and shaky,” he said.

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

Montelongo is now in his first year of high school, plays soccer and hopes to become a mechanical engineer.

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

One day he would like to work at NASA or SpaceX, he added. For now, he builds rockets in a game on his phone.

A subsequent investigation found that a faulty wheel bearing – part of the suspension system – caused the derailment in Ohio.