a r t i c l e i n f o Using cross-national comparative analysis, this paper discusses the reasons why France has succeeded in partially privatizing its most recently constructed high speed line, while the U.S. has not reached this stage. The authors argue that France, with an interventionist government, diverged from the U.S. during the Great Depression by nationalizing its private railways and...

Market demands for different classes of rail transportation service are not served because of the inability to assess the cost to the network of disparate services, as well as the inability to determine optimal scheduling. A new scheduling model is presented, based on a multicommodity flow and discrete time, that both selects an optimal set of trains and schedules these trains over a time horiz...

In Japan, several projects to increase train speed are underway, requiring a new generation pantograph that achieves further reduction in aerodynamic noise. However, as reduction of pantograph noise usually conflicts with the stabilization of its lift force characteristics, a number of experiments have to be conducted to develop a new type of pantograph. The aeroacoustic and lift force characte...

This work presents a fully three-dimensional methodology for the computational analysis of the interaction between catenary and pantographs. The finite element method is used to support the modeling of the catenary while a multibody dynamics methodology is applied to support the pantograph modeling. The contact between the two subsystems is described using a penalty contact formulation. An high...