The record behind the name, and the bench that carries the work.
At RailWorks in the Hoboken Tunnel system.
We are not in the railroad business. We are in the business of solving problems, and the railroad is the ground we know best.
We are a firm of career railroaders. Every hand on our bench came up through the craft, none with less than two decades in the field and most past three, better than 160 years of combined field experience among us. Engineers, conductors, mechanics, track men, officers; Class I and short line, carrier and contractor. We learned the railroad the only way it can be learned: on the ground, at all hours, in every weather, answerable for what moved and what didn’t.
That knowledge was earned, not studied, and it cost something to acquire. We do not intend to retire it. We put it back to work for the railroads running today, for the railroaders who will run them tomorrow, and for the shippers, ports, communities and public bodies whose fortunes ride on steel wheels.
We come to a problem the way the railroad taught us to come to anything: early, unhurried, and unwilling to leave until it is right. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
That is the work. It is also the debt we owe the craft that made us.
The record behind SteelWheels.Co begins in 1980 at Burlington Northern’s Parkwater diesel shops in Spokane. Frédérick M. St. Simon, Principal & Founder, was a high-school student who spent more of his days in the shop than in class. The railroaders there treated him as one of their own and handed down what they knew; few young men his age cared about trains, and he was a welcome anomaly. They taught him how to maintain, service and troubleshoot locomotives, and he grew a close, reciprocal working relationship with the EMD service rep that ran on for years after.
By 1985 it had become a contracting career across rail, marine, naval and power generation, and locomotive commerce followed. From there the work ran worldwide, through wartime railway reconstruction in Iraq, shortline management, terminal and network operations on BNSF, Norfolk Southern and CPKC, transit capital work under the Port Authority and Class I engineering production across the BNSF system.
SteelWheels.Co carries that record forward as a firm of career railroaders. We take the operating problem together with the track, equipment, people and paper it depends on.
The bench is made up of senior railroad specialists led by Frédérick M. St. Simon, Principal & Founder. The discipline follows the matter: train operations, track, equipment, capital programs, commercial decisions or regulatory work. We put the relevant disciplines on the condition you and your team and crew need to change.
When the bench is full, we say so and give you a date.
RP-01 rail gang production roadmaster on the BNSF Peavine near Ash Fork, Arizona, August 2025.
Day or night, sleet or heat. 24/7/365.
Long day of pendling ties on the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad.
Burlington Northern diesel shop: maintaining, servicing and troubleshooting locomotives alongside the mechanical crews.
First locomotive transaction, for GATX. Contracting across rail, marine, naval, power generation and rebuilding.
Sales, service, rebuild and remanufacture of EMD, GE and ALCo power for Class I railroads, navies and railways abroad.
Iraqi Republic Railway reconstruction under U.S. Army and State Department oversight.
Founded SteelWheels.Co.
Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad, Leadership Advisor, engineer and conductor: WSDOT and federal grant work that took the line from marginal to solvent.
Jaguar Transport Holdings, General Manager and DSLE: business up 60%.
North Shore Scenic Railroad, Operations Manager.
BNSF, Conductor, Spokane.
Norfolk Southern, Terminal Supervisor, Louisville and Decatur.
CPKC, Road Trainmaster, Quad Cities to Kansas City.
RailWorks, Lead Project Manager, PATH Hoboken Tunnel and Kearny Pocket, $40M+ under Port Authority of New York and New Jersey oversight: zero damages, zero service interruptions, zero FRA findings.
BNSF, Production Roadmaster across seven subdivisions including the Seligman Transcon: zero recordable injuries.
Principal & Founder, SteelWheels.Co. Publisher of The Manifest.
Railroad fine art and documentary photography, behind the camera since the age of 11. Published in Trains Magazine, Railroad Heritage, Locomotive and CTC Board, and a presenter at Winterail.
A field-born project that preserves the craft, culture and code of real railroaders through field notes, stories and hard truths. “GCOR tells you how to move a train. TCOR reminds you why you care.”
“Every night when you reported for duty, he already had a plan. The work was organized, the information was there, and you were set up to succeed—not set up to fail.”Dylan Jones, former brakeman and conductor
Put the condition in writing. The railroader on our bench who knows that ground answers within one business day.
What happens when you write back