It’s January, and an aluminum skiff glides slowly across the waters of an old, flooded railroad tunnel in northern Georgia. Its lone passenger is an atomizer, a machine commonly used to disperse air fresheners or mosquito repellents. Over the course of its half-hour journey through the 430-m tunnel, the atomizer sprays an aerosolized cocktail of antifungal compounds that drift up to the craggy ...

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 replica of a full-size railroad system under study. The hardware model is tested by means of real-time adaptive software simulator consisting of two subsystems: the virtual ra...

Attractive train schedules are quite important for the success of public rail transport. We consider schedules which are repeated after some xed time period. Periodicity is a well accepted, convenient attribute of all major railroad systems. Since trains share the public railroad network, we have to handle many connicting demands. Increasing competition from transportation alternatives as well ...

As a next generation of Global System for Mobile Communications – Railway (GSM-R), 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE)/ LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is considered for railroad wireless communication, i.e., LTE-Railway (LTE-R). Railroad wireless communication has its own requirements and functions since railroad wireless communication is very closely related to safety. In...

In the 1930s, amidst concern about the ability of existing pension programs to provide former railroad workers with adequate assistance in old age, Congress established a national Railroad Retirement system. This system is primarily administered by the Railroad Retirement Board (RRB), which is an independent federal agency charged with providing benefits to eligible employees of the railroad in...

consider an individual’s Railroad Retirement benefit, other than the tier I benefit, in dividing property in a divorce case. This would treat Railroad Retirement benefits like other pension benefits. The only benefits paid to divorced spouses under the Railroad Retirement system are tier I benefits. Tier I benefits would continue to be immune from garnishment, attachment, assignment, levy, or o...

Line type heat detectors (LTHD) are used since many years in road tunnels for reliable fire detection. Today various systems as semiconductor sensor cables, fiber-optic sensor cables, and pneumatic copper tube systems are in use. In addition, after first pilot installations done in the last years, the demand for applications of LTHD in railroad and metro tunnels as well as in underground statio...

The railroad network carries 40 % of the freight in the US. Railroad bridges are the most critical part of the network and they need to be properly maintained for safety of operations. Railroad managers inspect the bridges to assess their structural condition. Railroad managers are interested in measuring displacements under train crossing events to prioritize their bridge management and safety...

To determine the employment characteristics of workers covered jointly by old-age and survivors insurance and the railroad retirement program, a sample of the work histories from the Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and the Railroad Retirement Board has been analyzed. In the analysis the hypothesis has been developed that, as time progresses, virtually all railroad workers will at some...

This paper addresses the determinants of three types of railroad related fatalities: trespasser fatalities, those at grade crossings, and those involving passengers and employees. Of particular interest are the effects of railroad deregulation (the Staggers Act) on railroad related fatalities. Models are developed using specification error analysis and seemingly unrelated regression. Deregulati...