Train drivers are trained to operate trains. Operators of specialized railway equipment are not. A Russian engineer has developed simulators that are changing that reality — and the implications extend far beyond Russia.
The year 2024 brought a wave of record-breaking milestones for the railway industry. The European Union reported an all-time high in passenger traffic. China unveiled the CR450 high-speed train prototype designed to reach 450 km/h. In the United States, construction began on Brightline West — the first privately funded high-speed rail line connecting Las Vegas and Southern California. Somewhere in the middle of all this momentum, a quieter question kept resurfacing: who is training the people responsible for operating all of this infrastructure, and how?
Passengers never see the operator of a railway snow removal machine. They work at night or during blizzards — the tracks must be cleared before the first morning train departs. Yet whether a train leaves on schedule often depends entirely on them.
Operating this type of machinery means doing two fundamentally different things at once: driving the vehicle along the line and controlling the working equipment — brushes, plows, rotary mechanisms. Two modes, two entirely different sets of decisions. And this is precisely where the railway industry left a gap for decades, with little urgency to address it.
Locomotive simulators have existed for a long time. Even during the Soviet era, early attempts were made to recreate train cabins for training purposes. By the 2010s, simulator systems for standard locomotives had become the industry norm. But specialized self-propelled rolling stock — known in the industry as SSPS — remained largely overlooked.
Part of the reason was technical, part organizational. There are dozens of machine types, each with its own operational characteristics: a snow removal train is one thing, a railway crane something entirely different, a maintenance railcar yet another. Developing dedicated simulators for every type was both technically complex and expensive. Companies kept relying on classroom theory and on-the-job training using real machinery — with predictable consequences for costly equipment and for the operators themselves.
Svetlana Egzhanova joined the Russian Railways Locomotive Engineering Design Bureau in 2010 as a software engineer, focusing on simulator systems from the very beginning of her career. Over the next fourteen years, she advanced to lead designer and head of a division responsible for developing simulation systems for a broad range of rolling stock — from freight locomotives to specialized track maintenance equipment. She identified the problem with SSPS training plainly: “An operator could understand perfectly well how the machine moves. But there was nowhere to learn how it actually works — how the operating equipment behaves in real conditions, how travel speed affects cleaning intensity — except through hands-on experience in the field.”
The solution developed and patented by Egzhanova as part of a team of co-authors was designed specifically to close that gap. Russian patents No. 2801838 and No. 2805578, registered in 2023, describe simulator systems in which transport and operational modes function simultaneously within a unified simulation environment that recreates real operating conditions. The engineering challenge proved far more complex than it appeared on paper: the team had to develop algorithms capable of reproducing the interaction between the two systems — how train speed affects track cleaning quality, and how the load on the working equipment impacts traction performance. The architecture had to be built from the ground up rather than layered onto existing locomotive simulators.
The systems are now part of Russian Railways’ active personnel training infrastructure. During her years at the Design Bureau, Egzhanova participated in the development of simulator systems for more than 30 types of rolling stock. Some are used in railway training centers and universities across the country.
This isn’t just a Russian problem. Railway networks are expanding rapidly across Asia, Africa, and Central Asia. India is carrying out a large-scale modernization program. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are increasing freight capacity. Egzhanova works directly with this region, including participating in on-site incident investigations — the kind of fieldwork that produces insights no report can replicate. Several African countries are building railway systems from scratch. Everywhere new rail infrastructure goes up, the same issue eventually surfaces: who maintains it, and whether anyone is properly training the people who do. Specialized railway maintenance equipment exists in every national railway system. Almost nowhere are its operators trained to the standard the role actually demands.
This became a recurring theme at the international conferences “Industrial, Transport, and Specialized Simulation Engineering of Russia,” which annually brought together experts from more than 14 countries. Egzhanova participated from 2018 through 2023. Over that period, the conference became one of the few forums where SSPS operator training was examined seriously — developers, transportation companies, and ministry representatives in the same room. Over five years, the audience exceeded 12,000 participants. “This is more than just dialogue,” says Egzhanova. “It leads to concrete decisions and intergovernmental agreements. We raise the issues we face every day — and propose practical solutions.”
In February 2023, the results of the nationwide “Engineer of the Year — 2022” competition were announced. More than 70,000 participants from 55 Russian regions, 420 laureates. Svetlana Egzhanova received the award in the Transportation category. The competition is organized by the Russian Union of Scientific and Engineering Associations, a member of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO), which brings together professional communities from more than 100 countries. Winners are entered into the National Register of Professional Engineers of Russia. At industry conferences attended annually by specialists from Europe, Asia, and CIS countries, her projects have repeatedly come up as practical models for improving safety and training quality. “Being included in the register of top engineers is both a great honor and a serious responsibility,” she says. “Every day you work knowing that every step — in research or in technical development — is part of a vast global network that connects the entire world.”
Reducing human error in railway operations became the central focus of her work. Accidents get investigated, reports get published, causes get named: equipment failure, regulatory violations, operator mistakes. And human error keeps showing up near the top of that list. Aviation and nuclear power adopted mandatory simulator training decades ago and built rigid standards around it. Railways are moving in that direction — but slower, and for specialized maintenance equipment, that shift has barely started. “There is no safety without training,” says Egzhanova. “No speed record and no new infrastructure can compensate for an unprepared operator at the controls.”
Egzhanova has shown it’s technically possible to close this gap. The rest is a matter of will.
