The firm
Headway is the interval between trains. It is also the progress that interval releases.
In railway usage, headway is the interval between successive trains — the metric that defines how many a line can carry. In everyday English, to make headway is to advance. The brand lives in that fold: reducing the interval increases capacity, and increased capacity is the progress the client contracts.
Context
Headway brings together advisory, operations engineering consulting, optimisation and a platform for logistics and supply chain — across rail, ports, terminals and the chain that depends on them. It is not off-the-shelf software, and it is not an audit firm. The central asset is not the project delivered to one client; it is the reusable intellectual property accumulated across clients — predictive and optimisation models, connectors to legacy systems, codified railway engineering rules, and a proprietary methodology for proving financial value.
Track, rolling stock, bulk terminal and circulation are treated as a single system. Handling them separately is what produces plans that are individually defensible and collectively wrong: the intervention that makes sense for the track competes for the window that circulation needs, and the workshop sequence that maximises fleet availability ignores the transport demand of the period.
The commercial architecture follows from that: a paid diagnostic, a controlled pilot with a written baseline, proof in a joint committee, implementation and annual licence, and a variable component under rules fixed in advance. No free pilots — the discovery phase is where the most expensive technical effort goes.
Scope
Technical scope
- Track: inspection prioritisation, tamping and grinding programming, rail, weld, sleeper and ballast renewal, and window allocation under traffic constraints.
- Rolling stock: critical component prioritisation, workshop and yard programming, spare parts policy, repair-or-replace decisions.
- Bulk terminals: availability of car dumpers, conveyors, stacker-reclaimers, hoppers and ship loaders, with the intervention window set against the vessel line-up and the inbound train queue.
- Circulation: reading of practised capacity, capacity cost of the maintenance window, and the effect of maintenance on transit time and volume.
- Data: connectors for ERP/EAM, inspection cars, non-destructive testing and telemetry, reconciled into a single asset model.
Limit
Explicitly out of scope
- Signalling, traffic control, CBTC and any operational safety system.
- Technical certificates, professional liability statements and formal engineering opinions.
- Replacement of inspections and tests required by regulation.
- Containers and liquids: in terminals the scope is solid bulk only. Container stacks and liquid or chemical terminals are outside what we serve.
- Supply and installation of sensors and hardware — we work on existing instrumentation, and through partners where new instrumentation is needed.
Partnership
Partners
Gabriel Fonseca
Founding partner
Aender Guerra
Founding partner
Headway is a partnership between Gabriel Fonseca and Aender Guerra. The firm is in its constitution phase; corporate details will be published here once registration is complete.
Next step