Gary Allen Montelongo
8th Grade, Lorenzo De Zavala Middle School
La Joya, TX
When 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023, Gary happened to be doing an internship at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley on railway safety. “It was the talk of the shop,” he recalls. Gary became fascinated by what might have caused the derailment. Was it an unbalanced load? A bad suspension system? Gary decided to find out what impacts acceleration at resonance — the vibrations on a track that can make a train go off the rails.
Rock Til’ You Drop: Investigating a Train’s Harmonic Rock and Roll
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Project Background
Gary headed for the train tracks near his house. “I was able to document the difference between new trains and their suspensions springs to older ones, visibly rusty and with less space between the spring coils,” he says. He then built three sets of train tracks out of foam. He attached springs to each track — new stiff springs, midlife springs or old springs. He programmed an Arduino to measure the vibrations and ran a toy train over his tracks. He also attached weights to the train to observe the effect of unbalanced loads.
“The beginning of life springs and midlife springs were able to take the uneven loads and go through the tracks smoothly,” Gary says. But old springs created more vibrations and made the train more likely to derail on sharp turns when it was loaded with more weight. “Railway engineers need to pay attention to both weight distribution and the suspension system to ensure the safety and reliability of the trains,” he says.
Beyond the Project
Gary loves to play baseball and football. “These sports bring my siblings and I together as we spend our afternoons pretending to be pros in a playoff game,” he says. He also coaches younger students in baseball and loves to put science in his coaching, “so while they are learning the sport they are also learning about physical science.” Gary wants to become a mechanical engineer and work for NASA or SpaceX.
