One Equity Couples Up With Metro East

One Equity Partners has invested in Metro East Industries, a railcar and locomotive repair business that maintains the freight equipment owned by railroads, leasing companies and industrial shippers.

Metro East Industries (MEI) repairs, blasts, paints and lines the freight cars and locomotives that move goods across North America. Railcar work runs from structural repair through interior lining, the protective coating applied inside a tank car or covered hopper so that its cargo does not react with the steel.

The locomotive division handles engine and running repairs both in the shop and in the field. Customers include Class I railroads, short line operators, leasing companies, original equipment manufacturers and industrial accounts that run their own rolling stock.

Class I is the federal designation for freight railroads with operating revenue above roughly $1.0 billion a year, a threshold the Surface Transportation Board adjusts for inflation. Seven railroads carry the label in North America, and between them they haul the majority of the continent’s rail freight. Short lines are the smaller carriers that feed them, and leasing companies own much of the car fleet that runs on both. None of those owners keeps enough repair capacity to handle its own fleet through a peak, which is what creates the market Metro East Industries sells into.

The company’s campus in southern Illinois covers 100 acres and more than 500,000 square feet, with roughly 30 miles of internal track — enough to hold, sort and shuttle whole strings of cars without tying up a customer’s own yard. On it sit two railcar repair shops, two blasting, painting and lining facilities, a locomotive shop, a locomotive paint shop and storage yards. Six mobile service locations extend the same work to customers’ own track around the country, sending crews to equipment that cannot economically be moved to Illinois.

OEP’s investment in MEI is the company’s first institutional capital and returns the firm to rail services, a market OEP knows from its 2005 acquisition of Progress Rail Services, which it sold to Caterpillar a year later for approximately $1 billion.

“Rail is a vital pillar of the North American economy, and rail services is a market in which OEP has prior experience. We are thrilled to be partnering with the Ortyl family and to be supporting the company’s next phase of growth while maintaining its heritage of excellence for customers and employees,” said J.B. Cherry, a partner at One Equity Partners.

The Ortyl family founded the business in 1990 as a railcar repair shop and added the locomotive division in 1995, broadening what it could offer the same customers without moving off the site. It is now in its third generation and employs approximately 490 people, with an average tenure of 17 years. Metro East Industries, led by CEO Rick Ortyl and President and co-founder Gayle Ortyl, is based near St. Louis in Alorton, Illinois.

“Our family is proud of the business we and the MEI team have built over the years, and we are excited to pursue the next chapter of MEI’s legacy alongside the One Equity team,” said Ms. Ortyl.

The global freight railcar repair market was valued at $22 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow at a 14.7% compound annual rate through 2034, according to Global Market Insights, which puts the top five providers at roughly 30% of the market combined. The work is regulated rather than discretionary: cars are inspected, repaired and recertified on a schedule set by federal rule and by interchange standards, not by an owner’s preference, which holds demand steadier through freight cycles than car-building volumes.

For One Equity Partners, Metro East Industries is a single-campus operator with a national mobile footprint that can be widened by adding shops and service lines. “MEI is a differentiated leader in rail car and locomotive services, and we look forward to partnering with the team through continued investment into base operations and investments to broaden its capabilities and service offerings,” said Haley Citrome, a vice president at One Equity Partners.

The repair network around Metro East Industries mixes railroad-owned shops with independents. Cathcart Rail, a Columbus, Ohio operator formed in 2018 and backed by Tikehau Star Infra Partners and Nuveen, has assembled a national shop network by acquisition, buying Appalachian Railcar Services from GenNx360 Capital Partners in 2020 and The Andersons’ railcar repair business in 2022. Watco, founded in 1983 in Pittsburg, Kansas and family-controlled, runs mechanical shops alongside its short line railroads. Progress Rail is a Caterpillar subsidiary, and The Greenbrier Companies, a public railcar builder founded in 1974 in Lake Oswego, Oregon, repairs what it also manufactures.

“MEI has a tradition of unmatched work ethic and commitment to quality,” said Mr. Ortyl. “Given OEP’s experience investing in and growing specialty industrial services businesses, we believe we have found the right partner to support MEI’s continued growth while remaining focused on delivering exceptional service to our customers.”

One Equity Partners invests in industrial, healthcare and technology companies in North America and Europe, and builds positions through business combinations rather than standalone buyouts. The firm has invested more than $13.5 billion across over 125 platform investments and has completed more than 500 transactions worldwide. OEP was founded in 2001, spun out of JP Morgan in 2015, and has offices in New York, Chicago, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. The buy of Metro East follows a run of industrial investments for the firm, including pipe fabricator EPIC Piping and construction products maker Leviat this year, and metals distributor McNICHOLS in October 2025.