Rail supplier news from Road & Rail, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Marsh, IBM, Hatch Mott MacDonald and HDR (Oct. 24)

Road & Rail Services Inc. was recently honored with awards from American Honda Motor Corp. (AHM), including the Processor of the Year Performance Excellence Award, which recognizes the auto-processor that best meets AHM’s safety and quality performance standards. Road & Rail also won the Superior Quality Award that recognizes an automotive processor that scores the highest on AHM’s quality audits and attains the lowest damage to Honda vehicles. Also, Road & Rail's Marysville, Ohio, team was recognized for outstanding safety, quality, processing performance and service for 2014.

Ronald Tober, a senior adviser in the Charlotte, N.C., office of Parsons Brinckerhoff, was inducted into the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) Hall of Fame in October. Tober has worked in public transportation for 45 years as a planner, manager and chief executive. He currently advises Parsons Brinckerhoff clients on transit policy and strategy. Prior to joining Parsons Brinckerhoff in late 2012, Tober was an adviser on the creation of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit and the Honolulu Rail Transit project. He also served in leadership positions at Sound Transit, Charlotte Trolley Inc. and the Charlotte Area Transit System.

Kevin Myles has joined Marsh as a vice president in the global rail practice. Myles has more than 25 years of experience in freight- and passenger-rail operations, with specialties in locomotive and rail-car design and manufacture, quality assurance, risk assessment and safety evaluation for rail organizations. In his new role, he will serve advise Marsh clients on railway operations and safety.

German transportation company SSB AG selected IBM Cloud, Software Defined Storage and Flash to improve business application performance and customer response times, IBM announced. The principal public transportation organization in Stuttgart, Germany, SSB operates a network of light-rail line and bus routes that serve more than 171 million passengers a year. Stuttgart's greater metropolitan area has grown to 5.3 million, causing SSB’s data volumes to grow 10 percent annually.

Hatch Mott MacDonald (HMM) named Dan Ifrim senior project manager in Mississauga, Ontario. Ifrim comes to HMM after 30 years of tunneling experience in the United States, Canada and overseas. He has provided project administration, technical leadership and other skills on such projects as Metro Istanbul in Turkey, the Grand San Bernardo service tunnel in Switzerland, the Ohio Canal interceptor tunnel in Akron and Kennedy Station redevelopment in Toronto.

HDR promoted Carol Bellinger to transportation real estate services director. Based in the firm's Plymouth, Pa., office, Bellinger will focus on building HDR’s real estate services practice. Before her promotion, she was HDR’s north central real estate services lead and Illinois section manager. She has been with HDR since 2009 and has served as project manager for the Chicago-to-St. Louis high-speed rail project and the Mountain View corridor program management project in Utah, and assisted with initial right-of-way work for the Colton Crossing grade separation project in California.