As GE Transportation’s product portfolio grew, operating conditions demanded a smarter approach. Conductors navigated dense instruction manuals with route-specific parameters, one for each section of track, each car, and each locomotive, accounting for sharp curves, grade changes, weight variations, and speed limits. The inconsistency led to higher fuel consumption and unplanned stops.
GE needed a system that could replace that manual judgment with real-time automation, without taking control away from the conductor entirely.
Dense manuals, inconsistent braking decisions, and no unified view of route parameters led to inefficient fuel use and increased operational risk.
An intuitive iPad interface that surfaced the system's calculated speed profile and helped conductors follow, or hand off to, automated throttle and braking controls.
Working alongside the UX researcher, I mapped how conductors currently handled trip planning. The core insight: they were mentally tracking multiple overlapping rule sets simultaneously, terrain, load, weather, schedule, with no single decision-support tool to surface conflicts or suggestions.
Imagine a railroad with so many obstacles that, in order to preserve the locomotives, the train operators needed to drive according to different parameters, taking into account unstable and remote areas, sharp curves and speed and acceleration variations.
To give you an idea, train drivers had an instruction manual to drive the train in different sections of the track, with specifications for each car and locomotive, contemplating several territorial and operational factors!
After a brainstorming and sketching phase with the team, I mapped the conductor experience into five clear stages. These became the core navigation architecture for the iPad app, ensuring conductors could always locate themselves in the process and understand what the system was doing next.
I designed the iPad interface in Sketch and Adobe XD, handled motion design with After Effects and Lottie, and produced all GUI assets for the engineering team.
Below are the in-train screens deployed onboard operational trains.
Trains operating daily using the Trip Optimizer system worldwide, covering over 16 million kilometers with automated speed optimization.
The system reduced fuel consumption, lowered emissions, and cut unplanned stops across global rail networks. In 2019, GE Transportation became part of Wabtec, where the platform continued to scale.
