Calgary Alberta - Kyle Mulligan never planned on being a railroader.
 
Mulligan graduated from Carleton University at Ottawa in 2009 with a master's degree in biomedical engineering where his thesis focused on figuring out what sounds electronic stethoscopes could detect from the lungs.
 
While in school he also worked for the National Research Council of Canada, studying bearing failures in turbines and airplane engines.
 
After getting his doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Sherbrooke in 2013, he took a job in the aerospace industry.
 
While working for Bombardier Aerospace, he studied how airlines used their planes and scheduled maintenance.
 
Simply put, nothing about Mulligan's resume suggested that a career on the railroad was on the horizon.
 
But then he saw an ad on Linkedin for a job at Canadian Pacific.
 
He looked at the job requirements and realized he would be a good fit.
 
He applied and in January 2015, he moved to Calgary to start as a senior engineer of mechanical reliability.
 
Earlier this year, he became the railroad's chief engineer.
 
"If you have a multi-disciplinary background, railroading is a really great industry to be in," Mulligan says.
 
"Electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering, it all comes together nicely in the railroad industry."
 
Mulligan, who is just 33-years-old, was promoted to chief engineer in less than five years at the railroad, in large part, due to his work in acoustic sensors and data processing.
 
When a hot bearing detector brings a train to a halt, that single bearing on a single car sets off a series of cascading events that delay other trains in the area.
 
That, in turn, means shipments are delayed, which means customers are unhappy.
 
But what if you could figure out that a bearing was going to fail months before it ever triggered a detector?
 
That is precisely what Mulligan has helped CP do.
 
Using his experience in acoustic sensors, Mulligan was able to figure out the sound a soon-to-fail bearing makes months before something actually goes wrong.
 
"Temperature sensors give you about a 100 mile warning before a car bearing fails, whereas an acoustic sensor will warn you three months ahead of time so that you can still deliver a car to a customer, unload it, and then take it out of service when it's empty for repairs," Mulligan says.
 
Mulligan wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of using acoustic sensors to find failing bearings.
 
Railroaders have long known that some bearings make a whining noise before they fail, they even have a nickname for them, "growlers."
 
In the early 2000s, CP tried to use acoustic sensors to spot problem bearings but they were too sensitive and resulted in false detection.
 
But the ability to effectively process the acoustic data with advanced computers changed all that a few years ago.
 
Mulligan and his team were able to pinpoint the precise sound a soon-to-fail bearing makes and soon four acoustic bearing detectors were deployed in Ontario, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.
 
As a result, CP has reduced the number of unplanned setouts by 95 percent.
 
Fewer detectors are necessary because they can warn the railroad months in advance of a problem.
 
But that is just one of the projects Mulligan has worked on in recent years.
 
In Saskatchewan, CP has built what it calls a "high speed camera train inspection system" with 16 infrared cameras that captures a 360-degree view of every passing train (the infrared cameras were used so that the detector captured a consistent view of the train, regardless of if it was day or night or where the sun is positioned).
 
The detector creates a massive amount of footage that is then analyzed by computers to spot any deformities, such as an air hose hanging, or a missing component.
 
When the system recognizes an issue, a human reviews the footage and the car is marked for repairs.
 
"A picture really is worth a thousand words," Mulligan says.
 
Mulligan says none of this would be possible without advanced computing systems that can analyze huge amounts of data and he credits CP's information technology division for making it all work.
 
"We're moving to a point where we can use technology to inspect every component of a train," he says, which means railroaders in the field can spend more time actually doing repairs instead of looking for problems.
 
"We want to turn finders into fixers."
 
Five years after seeing that ad for a job at CP, Mulligan says it still surprises him that he's working for a railroad, but that he's loving every minute of it.
 
"I never thought I would end up working for a railroad, but I'm glad I found it," he says.
 
Justin Franz.