Stuart Grassie has worked on problems of rail damage, as an academic, consultant and in industry, for almost 50 years. He undertook doctoral research on rail corrugation at Cambridge University in the late 1970s in collaboration with British Rail Research and has maintained an active interest in research and consultancy in the area since. During his doctoral research at Cambridge University, colleagues were undertaking research into rolling contact fatigue (RCF). RCF was only a nascent problem at that time, but burst into significance decades later.
Dr Grassie has undertaken consultancy work on almost every continent, given invited lectures in several countries and published widely referenced papers on rail corrugation and RCF. A review paper by Dr Grassie and his close colleague Dr Joe Kalousek, which was published in 1993, established a simple framework for understanding rail corrugation that has been usefully adopted since. In a consultancy project undertaken in the 2010s, a metro railway was built using this understanding on which no corrugation has developed under traffic.
In the 1990s, Dr Grassie was immersed in the practical side of rail maintenance while working for Loram Maintenance of Way Inc. Since then, he has also helped to draft European and International Standards on reprofiling and ground-borne vibration from railways.