Railway transportation is playing a key role in the development of many new shale oil and gas reserves in North America. In the rush to develop new shale oil and gas plays, sites for railway transload terminals are often selected on the basis of land availability and environmental constraints before full consideration is given to rail design and operating requirements. The result can be termina...

For real world railroad networks, we consider minimizing operational cost of train schedules which depend on choosing different train types of diverse speed and cost. We develop a mixed integer linear programming model for this train scheduling problem. For practical problem sizes, it seems to be impossible to directly solve the model within a reasonable amount of time. However, suitable decomp...

To reduce the occurrence of accidents during train-to-train collision test, it is necessary to carry out research on derailment protection. According characteristics a method using U-steel as guard rail proposed. The protection range obtained through geometric relationship. ability and damage risks in different impact conditions, velocities, installation positions are studied. Additionally, sec...

This research examined the feasibility of applying Time Domain Reflectometry to the task of broken rail detection. The key innovation is to regard the track as a two-wire electrical transmission line, and then apply the same electrical pulse/echo technique that is commonly used to locate breaks and shorts in electrical cables. The aim of the proposed locomotive-mounted system is to allow each t...

The publication of this book could not have come at a more appropriate time. A convergence of factors, particularly related to globalization, congestion and energy prices, has propelled a renewed interest about the role of rail in the North American transport system, both for passengers and freight. Train Time seeks to address this ambitious task with an abundance of facts and clever observations.

2 Abstract Every rail operator wishes to minimise the size of their locomotive fleet in order to reduce costs. This minimum fleet size problem requires a rail operator to allocate locomotives to the trains in a predefined train schedule so that the total number of locomotives required is minimised. The key to this is deciding how and when to transfer locomotives to where they can be better util...

This work presents a time–space network flow model for scheduling recurring bulk rail deliveries from suppliers to customers. The objective is to maximize demand satisfied while minimizing waiting times for loading and unloading the bulk commodity. The model uses a variety of information including customer demand, rail network characteristics, loading and unloading hours, and track and station ...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has sponsored research, conducted by the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center of the U.S. DOT Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), aimed at integrating Positive Train Control (PTC) and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technologies. The objective...

raction power computer simulation software has changed in the last 20 years. The tool has evolved from simpler, DOS-based, energy management software to detailed, Windowsbased, user friendly, analytical software that can accurately model train performance, predict train voltages, and produce a train voltage profile for an entire rail system. Traction power computer simulation software is now us...