EIC Accelerator Check: NGRT and Its Rail Vibration Sensors

Rails carry sound. A crack, a boulder on the line or a train still kilometres away each sends its own vibration through the steel, and Next Generation Rail Technologies (NGRT) builds small sensors that clip onto the rail and listen for those patterns. In the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with the cut-off of 19 May 2020, the Málaga company won a grant to turn the idea into a market-ready monitoring system. The European Commission's list of selected companies names "NGRT SL" of Marbella, project SAFETRACK, grant only, as the project's sole beneficiary. CORDIS puts the EU contribution at €2,090,921.88 towards a total cost of €2,987,031.25.

What the selection did not show is in Spain's commercial register. Between July 2019 and January 2020, four Málaga labour courts declared NGRT provisionally insolvent while enforcing judgments against it, with principal sums from €6,674.07 to €27,860.58, according to entries in the Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil (BORME) listed by Empresia. A fifth decree followed in January 2023. None of the entries is a bankruptcy proceeding, but each records a court finding that the company did not pay a judgment debt.

What NGRT Is Doing Now

NGRT is still registered as active. Empresia and eInforma both show annual accounts filed up to the 2024 financial year, and eInforma reports a positive result for the latest year. Empresia states an annual turnover "inferior a 500.000 euros"; Infoempresa puts the company at 1 to 9 employees and sales below €2 million; eInforma gives 3 employees for 2021. The filed accounts themselves are behind a paywall, so equity, debt and the exact result could not be checked.

The last sign of public activity is a post on the company website dated 7 August 2025, an article on extreme weather and rail that quotes chief executive Richard Aaroe but names no customer or project. Nothing newer was found. More than 12 but less than 18 months without news or a dated filing puts the company's current status as unknown under this series' rules, not dormant.

The Technology: Listening to the Rail

NGRT's pitch on CORDIS is that existing rail infrastructure relies on technology from the early 1950s that requires "runs of expensive electrical cabling along tracks for several kilometres that are vulnerable to theft and vandalism". Its alternative is a vibration detector unit (VDU) attached to the rail. Its US patent, granted on 11 April 2023 with a European priority date of 17 October 2017 and Richard Aaroe as inventor, describes a unit with an accelerometer, microphone or piezoelectric sensor fixed magnetically to the rail web. A processor in the unit compares incoming vibrations with stored patterns, such as an approaching train or a broken rail, and signals a main unit when one matches. The same family includes WO2019076993A1 and EP3473518A1.

The company's website sells eight applications on that base: broken rail, rock and landslide, sand and sandstorm, flooding and wash-out, wheel derailment, flat wheel, train detection and worksite protection. The Railforum trade site describes the same patented system as "low-cost, real-time vibration detection". In its CORDIS objective, NGRT said field trials in Germany, Slovakia and the UK had detected incoming trains up to 5 km away. No independent report of those trials was found.

What SAFETRACK Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

SAFETRACK ran from 1 July 2020 to 30 September 2022; the grant agreement was signed on 21 September 2020, after the start date, according to the CORDIS reporting page. Its objective was to "design, develop, manufacture" a real-time monitoring system based on passive rail vibrations that would detect damage and obstacles on the rails, locate trains and check wheels, with machine learning that improves with use. The objective also promised new applications to detect derailments and rockfalls and warn drivers in time.

The only published report is labelled period 2, covering 1 July 2021 to 30 September 2022, yet its text says the team "has now completed the first 12 months". It lists work done: new algorithms for axle counting, train speed, event direction and location; a redesigned VDU and its electronics; a worksite protection solution; and patent renewals in the EU, Australia, South Africa, Brazil and the US. For the validation work package it reports only that NGRT "identified two sites on the ADIF infrastructure", Spain's rail infrastructure manager, and prepared the documentation and equipment for pilots. CORDIS lists no deliverables or publications. No report of a pilot on ADIF's network, by NGRT or ADIF, was found.

1. Software upgrades and detection algorithmsDeliveredAxle counting, speed and location algorithms built, per the CORDIS report.
2. New vibration detector hardwareDeliveredNew VDU designed and manufactured, per CORDIS; the unit is covered by a US patent granted in 2023.
3. Pilot tests on ADIF's networkNot achievedTwo sites identified; no pilot announced by NGRT or ADIF.
4. Derailment and rockfall applications on the marketPartialListed on the website; no named customer for them.
5. Commercial roll-outPartialBroken rail installations in India and Lagos reported by NGRT only.
6. Final project reportNot publishedOnly a report on the first 12 months is public.

What NGRT Has Achieved Since the Award

The company's own account is one of rapid international uptake. Its 2023 review says it inspected sites with Brazil's RUMO, agreed to install broken rail detection with Egyptian National Railways and with Infraestruturas de Portugal, completed a first installation on the 272 km Lucknow to Gorakhpur line in India in July 2023 with partner TranzRail Solutions, and was selected by LAMATA for the Lagos Metro Blue Line. Its 2024 review says the Lagos system was installed in June 2024 and quotes LAMATA: "The BRD system installation project was successful, fulfilling all prerequisites!"

Searches found no statement by RUMO, Egyptian National Railways, Infraestruturas de Portugal, Indian Railways or LAMATA confirming these deals. The one event confirmed outside NGRT's channels is a memorandum of understanding with the Global Centre of Rail Excellence (GCRE), a test site in South Wales, announced at InnoTrans in Berlin on 30 September 2024. NGRT will use the site for product development and demonstrations, Railforum reported.

A loan campaign on the Portuguese crowdlending platform Goparity, undated but referring to targets for the end of 2023, offered a 24-month loan at 5.85% a year to fund working capital "to manufacture more systems". The page claims a team of 12, eight installed systems in India, Germany, the UK and Spain, and an Indian agreement "securing NGRT a revenue stream over the next five years of more than 147 million euros". The page marks the campaign as closed but its progress figures contradict each other, so whether any money was raised could not be verified. No equity round has been reported, and NGRT is not among the 319 organisations in the EIC Fund portfolio, checked page by page on 18 October 2026; the award was grant only. SAFETRACK is NGRT's only project on CORDIS.

The Money and the Court Record

NGRT is a small company by any register measure. Its share capital was €3,900 at incorporation and rose by €665.13 to €4,565.13 in February 2021, when Rail Tech Holding SL ceased to be the sole shareholder, according to the BORME entries listed by Empresia. The new partners are not named in those entries. In the same month the registered seat moved from Calle Calvario in Marbella, the address CORDIS still shows, to the Málaga technology park.

The five labour-court decrees add up to €49,666.11 in principal, plus at least €5,778.22 in interest and costs where the entries state them. The largest, by Málaga Labour Court No. 2 on 30 September 2019, covered €27,860.58 plus €4,528.63. eInforma confirms 13 BORME entries, the last on 13 February 2023, which matches the date the January 2023 decree was published. Whether the debts have since been paid is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem SAFETRACK addressed is real and growing. The EU's Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy aims to double high-speed rail traffic by 2030 and rail freight by 2050, which puts more trains on the same infrastructure. A December 2025 study by the European Union Agency for Railways found that infrastructure managers rank floods, windstorms and landslides as the main climate hazards for rail, that landslides cause the longest average delays per incident, and that not all managers have "a systematic and structured monitoring system" of weather-related occurrences. Cheap, cable-free sensors that flag a rockfall or a wash-out would fit that gap, which is why the project was funded in the Green Deal round.

A grant pays for development, not for market success, and NGRT did build new hardware and software. The test is whether European infrastructure managers have adopted it. Six years after the award, no European railway has announced using NGRT's system in service.

The Verdict

NGRT and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.