Michael Cegelis

Experience

1. Executive Vice President, Rail Infrastructure

   Brightline Trains

   Sep 2017 — Present · Orlando, FL, US

   Overall responsibility for engineering and construction of the $2.8B Orlando Extension (OX) project, encompassing 170 miles of Class 6 (110mph max) and Class 7 (125mph) track. Built and led the outstanding 50-person team that managed the project from start to completion. Major portions of the project were constructed within an active rail corridor. Work also included 40 miles of greenfield corridor, a Vehicle Maintenance Facility, three new stations, and five additional trainsets. Over 50 new bridges were constructed including two movable structures, and three railway tunnels. Design and construction was divided into 26 prime packages with direct contracts to Brightline. The earliest construction package began in April 2019, and revenue service on the entire OX began September 2023. On 8.5M construction hours, the total recordable and lost time rates (per hours) were 0.97 and 0.14, respectively.The Brightline team was relentless in finding ways to drive down cost and time. Examples: 1) Ballast by ship. Brightline countered Covid related freight rail system congestion by opening a supply line with a quarry in Nova Scotia and delivering to Port Canaveral by ship. This prevented a delay of ~6 months, made ballast continuously available, and eliminated dependency on the freight railroads. 2) Rail tunnels. We used box jacking technology for two rail tunnels under roadways. In one of those cases we jacked under an in-service limited access highway, eliminating costly and disruptive maintenance of traffic and reducing activity duration from ~10 months to 3 weeks. 3) Embankment fill by conveyor. Rather than using trucks to make 27-mile trips to move fill material from a borrow pit across a highway corridor, we rented a pre-engineered bridge and secured approval from FDOT to convey fill material over the roadway. This avoided truck trips traveling an aggregate of 2.7M miles, about vehicle hours, congestion, wear and tear on the roadways, etc.

Education

• Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College

  MBA

• MIT Sloan School of Management

  Executive Program, Closing the Gap between Strategy and Execution

• Indiana University of Pennsylvania

  Bachelor of Science - BS

Skills

• Bridge