(birds chirping) - A train is the entire freight cars.

The locomotive is the engine, is the driving force.

And the other one is, you don't drive a train, you operate a train.

(bright music) (crossing bell sounding) We are a true manufacturer of a lot of the components that you would find on the locomotive.

- The first thing, of course, is that we're a manufacturer and distributor of locomotive parts, which begs the question, well, aren't freight railroads dying?

Or, railroads, it's a dead industry.

Well, no, it's some of the most profitable companies in the world are our biggest customers.

- In our warehouse, you could probably build three quarters of a locomotive from all the different components that we stock and supply to customers.

I always say, depending on what day you come through here, we could be making engine parts, we could be making generator parts, we could be making truck parts.

We like to ask the customers, what do you have problems with?

What would they like to change?

And then we take those projects on and say, okay, well, back in the day it was made out of metal.

Why can't it be made out of a plastic?

It's pretty neat to see mostly every one of our parts just come from scratch, like just a piece of metal over there, and we could turn it into a lot of different things.

- [Butch] We're always looking at how can we make it better and how can we give the customer a better product?

- This is an old industry.

The parts are in some cases 40, 50, 60 years old.

- Back in the day, 50 years ago, 50 plus years ago, GE General Electric had a locomotive division, and GM had a locomotive division.

Those two basically controlled the market.

So if you needed to buy a water pump or a filter, you had to go directly to them, which price and lead time was a huge downfall for all the customers.

PowerRail gave the convenience of having a third option.

- You as the customer can go out and get that 60-year-old part from the original equipment manufacturer.

What we're gonna do, we're taking the original part and improving upon it.

- Take 50-year-old water pumps and rebuilt them to basically a new standard.

Locomotives use sand for adhesion, so we make sand pipes and basically when a locomotive is slipping and the wheels need adhesion, they'll hit a button that dumps sand on the tracks.

So we make a lot of different sanding pipes here.

We have so many different products.

This is the large model desktop of a simulator that we sell to PS Technologies.

- This is what a normal cab of a locomotive looks like now, but we're able to simulate actual train movement.

We also have the throttle.

You can hear the engine rev up, decrease.

These seats shake to simulate what the engineer feels on the rail.

Normally takes them a year or so to be trained to be an engineer.

And this is kind of how they start out in a classroom.

- At PowerRail here, we built this.

We designed the stand, the seating.

We put all the hardware together.

We came up with a desktop model-- (plastic crumbling) Which is not even an eighth of the size and much easier to use.

(upbeat string music) - You're covering companies that are successful and dynamic companies, but it starts with somebody taking a risk.

Paul Foster, who is the majority owner, he was a successful sales guy in the industry and saw an opportunity and risked everything he had.

He created this tremendous thing.

We should note that 30% of this company is owned by the employees.

There's 160 employees.

On campus here in Exeter, we have about 90, 95.

- Being at the 80 81 intersection gives us the ability for distribution.

We have trucks in and out of here every day.

We have manufacturers in Georgia and in Indiana.

- We always knew we had an opportunity on the export side and now approximately 25% of our sales are ex North America.

(train whistling) Our customer makes money by having their locomotive on the track.

So if your locomotive is down-- - When things slow down, the railroad never does.

The railroad is always-- - [Kevin] Moving freight.

- Is always busy.

(bright string music) (crossing bell sounding)