BACKGROUND There is some evidence for an association between traffic noise and ischemic heart disease; however, associations with blood pressure have been inconsistent, and little is known about health effects of railway noise. OBJECTIVES We aimed to investigate the effects of railway and traffic noise exposure on blood pressure; a secondary aim was to address potentially susceptible subpopul...

Technical restrictions and challenging details let railway traffic become one of the most complex transportation systems. Routing trains in a conflictfree way through a track network is one of the basic scheduling problems for any railway company, also known as the train timetabling problem (TTP). This article focuses on a robust extension of the TTP, which typically consists in finding a confl...

Railway bridges are exposed to repeated train loads, which may cause fatigue failure. As critical links in a transportation network, railway bridges are expected to survive for a target period of time, but sometimes they fail earlier than expected. To guarantee the target bridge life, bridge maintenance activities such as local inspection and repair should be undertaken properly. However, this ...

This paper presents a flow capturing location problem which focuses on railway passenger flows. The flow capturing location problem (FCLP), originally proposed by Hodgson (1990), aims to locate a given number of facilities on a network to maximize the total flow that can obtain service at facilities along their pre-planned routes. For railway users, facilities located at the origin station and ...

PRECON S.A. is a manufacturing company devoted to produce prefabricated concrete parts for several industries as railway transportation and agricultural industries. Recently, PRECON S.A. signed a contract with RENFE, the Spanish National Railway Company, to manufacture pre-stressed concrete sleepers for the sidings of the new railways of the high speed train (AVE). The scheduling problem associ...

In order to quantitatively and systematically explain the accident occur process and assess the risk for the complex system, this paper proposes a new accident-causing analysis model, i.e. perturbation-safety region (P-SR) model. In this model, the safety region definition is introduced for the quantitative description of the system safe status; also the change process of the system risk is ana...

In the last decades the development of very high speed trains in railway transportation requires new maintenance strategies. New trolleys equipped with innovative measuring systems have been employed for monitoring overhead lines (catenaries). Using this system gives two great advantages: i) the diagnose can be performed with a low level of breaking in railway traffic; ii) the monitoring can be...

A regular timetable is a collection of events that repeat themselves every specific time span. This even structure, whenever applied at a whole network, leads to several benefits both for users and the company, although some issues are introduced, especially about dimensioning the service. It is therefore fundamental to properly consider the interaction between the transport demand and supply, ...

Millions of carloads of hazardous materials are transported annually throughout the North American railway network. The risk of hazardous materials release incidents makes railway transportation safety a high priority. A number of strategies have been implemented or are in development to reduce the risk. Each risk reduction strategy has a particular effect on safety and different risk reduction...