Long term demand for freight movements in North America is expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades. The railroads are poised to take on this additional traffic assuming the capacity is available. Measuring the capacity of these rail lines is complicated by the interrelationships between asset utilization, reliability, and throughput. There is not a single metric that captures th...

In the United States, the freight railway industry is already running without much excess capacity. Hence, better planning and scheduling tools are needed to effectively manage the scarce resources, to cope with the rapidly increasing demand for railway transportation. The integration of freight train and passenger train scheduling and dispatching is an important railroad management task since ...

This paper examines the determinants of truck accidents in the United States using a time series data set covering the period 1970–2001. Along with other factors, the effect of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which deregulated the trucking industry, is examined for its impact on truck accidents. In addition, the model accounts for the effect railroad freight mileage has on truck accidents. Empir...

The new Qinghai-Tibet railroad will run across the world’s highest permafrost region for 632 km, of which about half is high-temperature and ice-rich permafrost. Therefore, an important and challenging engineering problem is the possible instability and sensitivity of permafrost. Chinese permafrost scientists are now making efforts to solve the problem by carrying out numerous field and laborat...