This paper addresses the lack of reliability within the Swedish rail network by identifying passenger train delay distributions. Arrival delays are analyzed in detail using data provided by the Swedish Transport Administration, covering all train departures and arrivals during 2008 and 2009. The paper identifies vulnerabilities by size, space and time in the network. Our results show that the d...

Within the transport sector, modal shift towards more efficient and less polluting modes could be a key policy goal to help meet targets to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. However, making comparisons between modes is not necessarily straightforward. Average energy and emissions data are often relied upon, particularly for rail, which may not be applicable to a given context. Som...

Positive Train Control (PTC), often referred to as Communication Based Train Control (CBTC), has been on the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) “Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements” for several decades as a safety-enabling system. The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 mandated its implementation after the September 12, 2008, Chatsworth, California, collision betw...

A framework for assessing the usage and level-of-service of rail access facilities is presented. It consists of two parts. A dynamic demand estimator allows to obtain time-dependent origin-destination flows within pedestrian facilities. Using that demand, a traffic assignment model describes the propagation of pedestrians through the station, providing an estimate of prevalent traffic condition...

Light-rail systems are becoming more popular in cities and urban residential areas around the country. One of the main environmental impacts from light-rail systems is noise from the trains as they pass through residential areas. In response to increasing noise complaints, it is becoming more common to perform noise measurements in the residential areas and attempt to identify noise mitigation ...

This paper describes a system for automated rail scheduling currently being developed at Dutch Rail (NS). This system will be used initially to base infrastructure decisions upon. Rail infrastructure poses constraints upon the rail schedules that can be made within it, because of the large extent in which trains share it. Good infrastructure is the one that allows good schedules. The Petri net ...

The paper presents the development of an intelligent image processing algorithm capable of detecting fatigue defects from images of the rail surface. The links between the defect detection algorithm and 3D models for rail crack propagation are investigated, considering the influence of input parameters (materials, vehicle characteristics, loading conditions). The dynamic behaviour at the wheel-...

In this paper the problem of scheduling train crew is considered. We discuss a general framework of which the method for solving the train crew scheduling problem is a special case. In particular, our method is a heuristic branch-and-price algorithm suitable for large scale crew scheduling problems. This algorithm is applied to a real life train guard scheduling problem which is provided to us ...

In this paper we present the concept for reliable vehicle-autarkic collision detection developed for a Rail Collision Avoidance System (RCAS) that is based on direct train-to-train communication. Similar to existing systems in air and maritime transport, the RCAS approach allows vehicle-autarkic detection of imminent collisions. Designed as a safety overlay system, it shall warn and advise trai...

This paper considers the second-best policy problem that arises when auto travel is priced below its marginal cost and there is a substitute mass transit mode. We analyze the problem by combining a model of a rail line based on Kraus and Yoshida (JUE (2002)) with the highway bottleneck model. The model involves a transit authority which optimizes, in addition to the fare, two dimensions of tran...