Christopher Barkan is the Recipient of the 2026 Worth Award
By Jeff Tuzik
Wheel Rail Seminars named Christopher Barkan, Professor of Railway Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as the recipient of the 2026 Worth Award. Professor Barkan also serves as the George Krambles Director of the UIUC Rail Transportation and Engineering Center (RailTEC) and Director and of the FRA-funded National University Rail Center of Excellence (NURail CoE). In addition to his academic roles, he is the Deputy Director of the Railway Supply Institute – Association of American Railroads, Railroad Tank Car Safety Research and Test Project, a position he has held since 1990. The Worth Award is presented annually to a professional who has made a lasting impact on operations, practices, and/or safety in the railroad industry over the course of their career and has made it a priority to share their experience and knowledge with the industry at large.
“I’m very happy to present the Worth Award to Chris. His expertise and his commitment to education and collaboration are admirable and invaluable to the industry,” said Gordon Bachinsky, Founder of Wheel Rail Seminars.
Barkan’s 38-plus year railroad career spans academia and industry, research and practical applications, and teaching and curriculum development in rail transportation engineering. Early in his career, he worked for the Association of American Railroads’ (AAR) Research & Test and Safety & Operations Departments where the focus of his research was on improving the safe transport of hazardous materials and helping the rail industry reduce its environmental impact by developing remediation technologies better suited to railroad contamination problems, and investigating new pollution prevention technologies. “In 1998, the AAR, was consolidating all of its research personnel at the Transportation Technology Center, Inc (TTCI) in Pueblo, CO where I was offered a position. I proposed an alternate suggestion in which I would instead move to UIUC to join the faculty there. This would enable me to support and reinvigorate the railroad engineering academic program there. They [the AAR and the University] supported this because they wanted someone who understood the issues facing the industry at both an academic and a practical level,” Barkan said.
Railroad engineering programs had all but disappeared from North American universities at the time Barkan joined the UIUC faculty. “The University of Illinois has 150 years, of leadership in rail engineering but by the 1990s the last person teaching rail at UIUC had retired. Chris’ appointment as the Rail Program Director marked the start of a major expansion of the program in terms of its research goals, faculty, curriculum, and endowments,” said J. Riley Edwards, Assistant Professor at RailTEC/UIUC.
Since his move to UIUC, Barkan has continued his research for the AAR. He and his students conducted several nationwide quantitative risk analyses of hazardous materials transportation including on chemicals harmful to the environment, toxic inhalation hazard (TIH) materials, and petroleum crude oil and other flammable liquids. As part of this work, he developed a new methodology to optimize tank car safety design that AAR has adopted, analyzed the causes of train derailments and collisions, and has recently focused on quantitative analysis of longer train safety performance. In the mid-2000s, he and Edwards also conducted extensive work with colleagues in Electrical & Computer Engineering developing prototype machine vision systems for inspection of railroad rolling stock and track.
By the mid-2000s, the reinvigorated UIUC rail educational program was beginning to gain its footing. It became evident to Barkan and several other rail academics that North America needed more university rail programs. Consequently, he and Edwards worked with AREMA developing the first Railway Engineering Education Symposium (REES) in 2008.This was a “teach the teacher” event, in which university faculty interested in expanding the rail content in their courses and curriculum participated in a three-day series of seminars in which they were introduced to rail engineering concepts and educational materials by professors with established rail courses. Since then, they also worked with APTA to develop a passenger-rail version (p-REES) and fourteen REES or p-REES events have been held annually or biennially with the most recent one this year. More than 300 professors from over 70 different colleges and universities have attended these events.
Further evidence of the re-emergence of North American rail academic programs is this year’s inaugural INNOVARail conference. Barkan led his NURail CoE colleagues partnering with another rail center, the US DOT-funded University Transportation Center for Railway Safety, and the IEEE organizing a new, multi-disciplinary rail research, technology, and development conference. INNOVARail was hosted by RailTEC on the UIUC campus with 200 attendees. The program included nearly 120 presentations from academic, government, and industry researchers from throughout North America and some overseas presenters as well. The conference featured keynote addresses from David Fink, FRA Administrator, Kari Gonzales, MxV Rail President and CEO, and Patrick Whitehead, CN Executive VP and Chief Operating Officer.
RailTEC also stands out for the scope of its education and research which encompasses civil, mechanical, electrical, and systems engineering, rail infrastructure, rolling stock, operations, economics and policy in both transit and freight environments. “A lot of the topics and questions in the railroad industry touch on many different disciplines—it takes a broad range of expertise get to the bottom of things,” Edwards said. To that end, Barkan has been instrumental in reaching out to and building relationships with other faculty around the college of engineering. “We’re not alone in our civil engineering silo. There’s expertise outside the typical railroad engineering disciplines that can be applied to railroad engineering problems.”
While RailTEC research covers a wide range of subjects, it’s important to be cognizant of the way everything works together: the big picture. Barkan’s position gives him a privileged perspective of the railroad industry that spans the details of specific research efforts, to trends in the industry as a whole. “I think one of the great challenges for the industry in the 21st century is to combine the service quality, and reliability of trucking with the economies of rail transport,” he said.
“It’s no secret that rail freight traffic has generally plateaued. It’s not falling, but it’s not gaining either.” He cited former BNSF CEO Matt Rose’s observation at a recent rail conference, who said “an industry that doesn’t grow is going to die”. One area the railroad industry can capitalize on is improving carload freight service. “Carload freight is where the big profit margins are, compared to intermodal. If we can hit the service quality levels that trucking achieves, we stand to benefit greatly.”
Another area of unrealized potential is the Positive Train Control (PTC) infrastructure that railroads have invested in but not fully utilized. “There was no ‘PTC industry’ when the legislative mandate [The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008] to implement the technology came down,” Barkan said. The industry invested tremendous effort and capital to satisfy the mandate. “But now the question is: how to do we take advantage of this massive investment we’ve made?” The use of virtual or moving blocks to reduce headways, improve service reliability, and increase capacity may be one way to take advantage of some of the existing PTC infrastructure. But a lot of capacity challenges are terminals and interlockings, places where PTC isn’t going to be much help, he said.
“Whatever the most constraining factor is in the system will be the bottleneck that limits capacity, or reliability, or service quality. Railroads have already picked most of the low-hanging fruit, so finding the most economical improvements gets that much harder.” –Christopher Barkan
It’s also important to consider the human factors throughout the railroad industry and its systems. For example, hot-bearing detectors can, from a technological standpoint, reliably detect failing journal bearings, but remedying the situation requires human intervention at multiple stages. This is true of all flaw-detection and subsequent maintenance actions. As a result, technologies that help humans do their jobs more reliably and more accurately are important. “Increasingly, human factors are emerging as a ‘constraining factor’ because technology-based solutions are solving a lot of the mechanical and engineering problems that don’t necessarily require human intervention.”
The rise of autonomous inspection and measurement systems and the growing prevalence of AI have already had a significant impact on the railroad industry, but they also present great challenges and opportunities going forward. “I have a hard time imagining AI replacing a lot of railroad job functions. And there are a lot of job functions you wouldn’t want to replace,” Barkan said. An example of this is PTC. Allowing such a system to fully operate a train means that the locomotive engineer isn’t engaged and may not understand why the system is doing what it’s doing. “You don’t want to turn people into button-pushers who don’t understand what’s going on under the hood.” Instead, the way PTC is typically implemented is as a kind of failsafe that only engages when it detects a potentially unsafe condition and its warnings to the locomotive engineer go unheeded. This is an implementation Barkan sees as a potential model for other types of semi-autonomous systems.
Clearly, there’s a delicate balance that the industry will have to achieve as it navigates the intersection of human factors, automation, AI, safety, and reliability. It’s a balance that will (or should) require close collaboration between the industry, suppliers, researchers, academics and government regulators. “Regulation often doesn’t keep pace with technological change, and we’ve seen that in the railroad industry like in any other industry,” Barkan said. Railroads want to move forward with automated inspection and measurement systems, but the regulatory/mandated consequences of detecting a potential defect are onerous enough that railroads remain leery of fully implementing the technology. This is part of what makes the collaborative, multi-disciplinary framework that Barkan spearheads at RailTEC so valuable to the industry.
In addition to educating the next generation industry professionals and conducting its own research, RailTEC facilitates dialogue and information exchange among its partners and collaborators which in turn spurs innovation.
“Chris is passionate about every area of rail engineering. He’s relentlessly curious,” said J. Riley Edwards.
It seems clear these traits are very much ingrained at RailTEC and UIUC.
Jeff Tuzik is Managing Editor of Interface Journal.
Image courtesy of Chris Barkan.