Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI)

Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI) - renamed MxV Rail in 2022 - is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads (AAR) that carries out the rail industry's research, testing, and training. From 1982 to 2022, TTCI operated the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) near Pueblo, Colorado - the test site that is owned by the Federal Railroad Administration and spans roughly 52 square miles, including dozens of miles of test track.

At the facility, the industry and government carried out testing and evaluation of freight cars, passenger cars, locomotives, track components, signaling devices, and defect detectors under controlled and accelerated conditions. The center has long been used for crashworthiness research, heavy-axle-load testing, and the development of inspection and monitoring technologies that feed into AAR standards.

TTCI conducts rail research, testing, and training supporting both AAR technical committees and FRA safety programs, providing the test data behind many equipment and track specifications used across North America, and it leads the industry-wide Strategic Research Initiatives (SRI) program.

In 2022 TTCI was renamed MxV Rail (the name evokes the momentum formula, mass x velocity). It remains an AAR subsidiary employing more than 300 people, including engineers and metallurgists, and continues to lead the SRI program. Around the same time the FRA's Pueblo TTC site - MxV Rail's longtime operating base - passed to a new operator (ENSCO), so the FRA-owned facility is no longer run by the company. MxV Rail is relocating its operations to a new campus it is building at the PuebloPlex, a large industrial development on the former Pueblo Chemical Depot site in Pueblo County, Colorado. That campus - featuring a high-tonnage loop for accelerated service testing, curve-negotiation loops, and the track infrastructure needed for AAR certification testing - is intended to be the new home of the company's research, testing, and training.

Learn more on the AAR website: https://www.aar.org/