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...

Neuropsychiatric symptoms in 65 welders exposed to aluminium and 217 railroad track welders were studied with the aid of a previously validated questionnaire. Semiquantitative data on exposure to the metals aluminium, chromium, lead, manganese, and nickel were also recorded by questionnaire. Logistic regression was employed to study the relation between exposure and the prevalence of symptoms. ...

I study the conversion of 13,000 miles of railroad track in the U.S. South to standard gauge on May 31 and June 1, 1886 as a large-scale natural experiment in compatibility. Using route-level freight traffic data, I find a large redistribution of traffic from steamships to railroads that declines with distance, with no effect on prices or aggregate shipments due to carriers’ anticompetitive con...

In this paper the Semi-Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) method for modeling guided wave propagation is extended to account for linear viscoelastic material damping. Linear viscoelasticity is introduced by allowing for complex stiffness constitutive matrices for the material. Dispersive characteristics of viscoelastic waveguides, such as phase velocity, attenuation, energy velocity and cross-sec...

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...