Within the North American freight railroad industry, there is currently an effort to enable more intelligent telemetry for freight trains. By enabling greater visibility of their rolling stock, including locomotives and railroad cars, railroad companies hope to improve their asset utilization, operational safety, and business profitability. Different communication and sensing technologies are b...

ing to this estimate the railroad retirement system might have a relatively small amount to transfer to the old-age and survivors insurance system, but the amount is far more than offset by the employer and employee contributions with respect to the short-service employees that the railroad retirement system, in effect, collects and retains. No benefits other than the residual death payment, wh...

We study a scheduling problem that belongs to the yard operations component of the railroad planning problems, namely the hump sequencing problem. The scheduling problem is characterized as a single-machine problem with stepwise tardiness cost objectives. This is a new scheduling criterion which is also relevant in the context of traditional machine scheduling problems. We produce complexity re...

Greater than half of all the fatal injuries on United States railroads are sustained by trespassers. The paper provides a statistical analysis of the demographics of trespassers, the activities they were engaged in, and the causes of injury. It also analyzes trends over time. The paper finds that the risks of injury and death are particularly acute for males in their 20s and 30s. The annual cas...

Scholars have long recognized the important differences between the northern and southern rail networks. Business historians focusing on northern enterprises have documented an impressive list of accomplishments: railroads pioneered modern accounting methods; railroads introduced new management techniques and organizational structures; and railroads helped transform national and international c...

BACKGROUND The aim of the study was to summarize bladder cancer risk in motor vehicle drivers and railroad workers using meta-analysis techniques. METHODS We retrieved all published results (3 cohort studies and 27 case-control studies) during 1977-2008. We assessed the heterogeneity of the results assuming a fixed-effect model. For cohort studies, the observed and the expected number of case...

T hirty years ago, our paper entitled “The High Cost of Regulating U.S. Railroads” (Regulation, January/ February 1981) appeared in this journal. At the time, the Staggers Act had just been signed into law. Our paper provided an analysis of the U.S. railroad industry’s performance for the generation immediately preceding the legislation. We focused on the cost of pre-Staggers regulation and dre...