A 14-year-old took home $10,000 for his award-winning investigation into train derailments. Here's what he found.

• Gary Allen Montelongo won $10,000 for a science project on train derailment.
• More than 1,300 trains derailed in the US last year. One caused a catastrophic chemical spill in Ohio.

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

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

The project won his regional science fair, then took him to the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, where he competed with 29 other middle schoolers. They each presented their research and completed challenges in coding, battery building, disease diagnosis and genome editing, and ecosystem research.

On Tuesday, in the competition's awards ceremony, Montelongo 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, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which puts on the competition, told BI. "So it's this integration, this interdisciplinary method of doing the research that I think got him to where he is at."

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

The Ohio derailment

When a freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing a disastrous chemical spill that forced the town to evacuate, Montelongo was in the middle of an internship on railway safety. It was February 2023.

"I was shocked at first," Montelongo said. But his cohort at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley was abuzz about the incident and what could have caused it. Soon they were all discussing the railroad's suspension system.

The internship ended, but Montelongo couldn't get the derailment off his mind, so he went down to the train tracks near his house.

As he studied the trains there, he paid special attention to the giant 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 simple trains and tracks.

"It kind of just hooked me into it," he said.

Bouncy train tracks

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

Then he built three sets of model railroad tracks out of foam and fitted them with three different types of springs: fresh new springs, midlife springs, and old, worn-out springs. This mimicked the different suspension systems he'd seen at the train tracks near his home.

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

"All the springs that were completely worn out 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, playing football, and hopes to become a mechanical engineer.

"I really enjoyed designing things and coding things," Montelongo said. "What I really want to do is design the spaceships that go up to space."

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

Later investigation found that a defective wheel bearing — which is part of the suspension system — caused the Ohio derailment.