A ballasted railway track system comprises several components among which steel rails, rail fasteners, timber, steel or concrete sleepers, granular ballast, sub-ballast, and subgrade materials are the main parts. Railway track systems are constructed to provide a smooth and safe running surface for passenger or freight trains. They are designed to sustain the force of lateral, longitudinal and ...

Today there are thousands of kilometers of freight trackage in the United States over which two—and often more—railways operate regularly and safely. Tracks in Argentina, Canada, Chile, and Japan also have multiple users. Thus there is no question that rail infrastructure can be separated from operations. The question is when it should be, and what are the costs, benefits, and challenges of doi...

This paper explores the development of rail systems in Ireland and Australia. The paper highlights the different trajectories of both systems and charts the experiences and influences of Empire and Commonwealth on both. In Australia the rail system was developed as a way to promote nation building and overcome isolation while in Ireland both prior to and after partition the system enabled acces...

Internet under the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD with the aim of bringing information on this subject to the attention of a wider audience. Executive summary This review of the environmental effects of freight is structured by transport mode, addressing shipping, air cargo, trucking, rail, pipelines and intermodal terminals. It begins with a brief overview of the major env...

The major driving forces behind the establishment of intermodal facilities include number of jobs that will be created by the facility, freight performance improvement, and other economic benefits to the region. Job creation is the most tangible benefit that stakeholders use to justify the development of such facilities. This project explores different job creation factors for intermodal facili...

The study of various countries rail transportation indicators is an appropriate criterion for evaluating the existing performance of Iranian railways. The experiences of other countries can be used to improve the efficiency of Iran’s rail transportation. At the beginning of the study, in order to compare the Iranian railway performance with railways of other countries, various efficiency indica...

There is a significant interaction between sizing a fleet of rail cars and its utilization. This paper presents a new multi-period mathematical model and a solution procedure to optimize the rail-car fleet size and freight car allocation, wherein car demands, and travel times, are assumed to be deterministic, and unmet demands are backordered. This problem is considered NP-complete. In other wo...