I spent twelve years inside Union Pacific deciding which fuel-saving technologies got funded and which ones died in review. I now work the other side of that table — helping suppliers find the person who owns the budget, build a savings case that survives a Class I engineering review, and move a stalled trial to a purchase order.
If you sell into the freight railroads, at least one of these will sound familiar. None of them are product problems, which is exactly why engineering cannot solve them for you.
We can’t work out who actually owns this decision.
Mechanical likes it, Operating is indifferent, and the fuel budget sits with a third group that has never heard of you. Nobody says no, so the opportunity simply never closes. A Class I railroad has a real approval path for capital and for fuel-saving programmes — it is just not visible from the outside.
Decision-map engagement
They rejected our savings number.
A 1–3% fuel claim from a vendor deck gets discounted to zero by an engineering reviewer who has seen dozens of them. What survives review is a number built the way the railroad builds its own: defined baseline, stated duty cycle, measurement method, and the error bars named up front rather than discovered by the reviewer.
Independent validation
The trial has been running for a year and nothing happens.
A pilot with no agreed success criterion cannot succeed — it can only continue. Trials convert when the acceptance threshold, the data owner and the decision date are written down before the first unit ships, and when someone keeps the internal champion supplied with the evidence they need to argue your case in a room you are not in.
Trial-to-purchase support
Most engagements start with one of these and grow into a standing advisory relationship. Several of my current clients have been with me three to five years.
Who evaluates your category at each railroad, who signs, what their fiscal calendar looks like, and which internal group has to be neutralised rather than persuaded. Delivered as a written map with named roles, followed by warm introductions where I have the relationship — and I say plainly where I do not.
I rebuild your fuel or emissions case the way a Class I reviewer would, using real duty cycles rather than best-case assumptions, and tell you what it actually supports. Sometimes the honest number is lower than your marketing claim and far more persuasive, because it comes with a defensible method attached.
Acceptance criteria, measurement plan, instrumentation, baseline period, and the decision date — agreed before units ship. For pilots already adrift, a short diagnostic on why it is stuck and what has to change to get a decision out of it.
An ongoing seat at your table: reviewing outbound material before it reaches a railroad, reading the regulatory and merger developments that change your buyer’s priorities, and being reachable when a call goes sideways. This is how most of my long-term clients work with me.
I am a sole proprietor. You deal with me directly, there is no account manager, and there is no minimum engagement length beyond the first month.
Twenty minutes on the phone. Tell me where the deal is stuck and I will tell you whether it is a problem I can move, and roughly what it would take. If the answer is no, you will hear that in the first call rather than the third.
A decision map, a validation review, or a trial-design package, scoped and priced up front as one piece of work. A common way to start when you want to see the quality before committing to anything ongoing.
A set monthly fee for continuing access, review and introductions, with the scope written down so we both know what it covers. Most of my clients are on this footing — it is the arrangement that has kept relationships running three to five years.
Twenty minutes, no charge, and a straight answer about whether this is something I can move. If it is not, I will usually know who can.
Kennedy Consulting