Cordel, the artificial intelligence platform for transport corridor analytics, has appointed of Erik Henderson as Global Head of Rail Solutions, effective immediately.
“We are very excited to welcome Erik to the Cordel leadership team”, said Nick Wayne, Vice President Americas at Cordel. “He has an impressive track record of innovation and success, and he understands railroads’ pain points inside and out – he’s been working on the same
problem sets as Cordel for years. The combination of Cordel’s best-in-class purpose-built technology and Erik’s deep operational expertise will have a huge positive impact on our customers and our business in the US and around the world.”
Erik brings over 15 years of experience leading railroad field services and building highperforming organizations focused on automation and continuous technology improvement. He is a renowned expert in Positive Train Control (PTC), asset change management and in the use of remote sensing technologies such as LiDAR and UAVs for railroad engineering applications. He spent several years developing and completing the PTC Validation and Verification process for FRA approval at CSX. Most recently, Erik was Technical Director, GIS Field Services, Robotics & Automation at CSX, driving the automation of asset survey, inspection and inventory across 20,000 miles of the CSX railroad network.
Erik Henderson said: “Joining Cordel is a significant step for me which I have not taken lightly, moving from the in-house side of railroad automation planning to the technology provider side of AI and automation. Over the years, I have seen and evaluated many new technology approaches to railroad survey and inspection, finding that most offer only incremental improvements on current methods. Cordel is different.
“Cordel is a real tipping point for railroad inspection. It’s the first model I’ve seen that actually works at scale – collecting LiDAR and imagery with low cost and highly accurate sensors from moving trains, leveraging automation to process data at scale, and performing complex AI to extract meaningful information from vast amounts of data. Once collected, the data can be used across the organization for different applications – from ballast management, to vegetation, to clearances and PTC asset location audits and more. This will revolutionize the economics of railroad inspection, rapidly reducing expenditure and reducing the number of boots on the ballast line.”