Previous work has led to the development of a crash energy management (CEM) system designed to distribute crush throughout unoccupied areas of a passenger train in a collision event. This CEM system is comprised of crush zones at the front and rear ends of passenger railcars. With a consist made up of CEM-equipped cars, the structural crush due to a collision can be distributed along the length...

Railroad trespassers are persons on railroad property whose presence is prohibited or unlawful. Most trespassers are walking along or across railroad tracks. In 1997, fatalities to railroad trespassers became the leading cause of railroad-related deaths in the United States. In 1998, 513 persons were injured and 536 persons were killed while trespassing (Federal Railroad Administration, unpubli...

There are situations where a system in mind needs to be tested before it is built. Using modeling and simulation users can apply realistic interactions with their synthetic environments representing real world. In this study, the synthetic environment is a hardware railroad model representing a miniature of the actual size railroad. Simulation software, used to test the railroad system, consist...

The railroad industry was substantially deregulated by the Staggers Act in 1980. While railroad rates, as measured by industry-wide revenue per ton-mile, declined since that time, it is unclear why rates declined. Changes in commodity mix, length of haul, shipment size, lading weight, equipment ownership, railroad costs, competition from other modes, and demand for railroad transportation have ...

This paper proposes an ant colony optimization algorithm to assist railroad yard operational planning staff in their daily tasks. The proposed algorithm tries to minimize a multi-objective function that considers both fixed and variable transportation costs involved in moving railroad cars within the railroad yard area. This is accomplished by searching the best switch engine schedule for a giv...

T HROUGH an amendment to the Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act, approved by President Truman on July 31,1946, the Railroad Retirement Board was charged with the responsibility of establishing and administering a sickness insurance program for railroad employees.’ Thus, sickness benefits now form an integral part of the railroad retirement and unemployment insurance systems. The programs for p...

Collapsible soils could widely be found in central part of Iran and has caused lots of problems for roads and railroads in that region. Appearance of wide cracks in the collapsible soil near the Tehran-Semnan railroad tracks has caused some worries regarding the safety and performance of the railroad. However, due to the high traffic of the railroad, it is impossible to block the road for remed...

Derailments are the most common type of train accident in the United States. They cause damage to infrastructure, rolling stock and lading, disrupt service, and have the potential to cause casualties, and harm the environment. Train safety and risk analysis relies on accurate assessment of derailment likelihood. Derailment rate - the number of derailments normalized by traffic exposure - is a u...

This paper presents a computational study of the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) mechanism in pressurized commodity tank cars in railroad application. Within the Lagrangian framework of Abaqus/Explicit, finite element analysis (FEA) is conducted to predict the structural response of tank cars under dynamic impact loading. A three-phase approach is adopted that explicitly models pressurized ga...

The RRB administers comprehensive retirement/survivor and unemployment/sickness benefit programs for railroad workers and their families under the Railroad Retirement Act (RRA) and Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act (RUIA). These programs provide income protection to railroad workers and their families during old age and in the event of disability, death, temporary unemployment, or sickness. T...