This paper examines the historical impact of railroads on the American economy, with a focus on quantifying the aggregate impact in the agricultural sector in 1890. Expansion of the railroad network may have affected all counties directly or indirectly — an econometric challenge that arises in many empirical settings. However, the total impact on each county is captured by changes in that count...

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...

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...

The current paper examines whether or not reductions in transportation costs characterize long-run patterns of production specialization in a regional economy, and the possible welfare effects of these patterns on price convergence and wage dispersion. In answering this question I exploit a natural experiment in the Austro-Hungarian (or ”Habsburg”) Empire, where massive railroad development occ...

Collapsible soils could widely be found in central part of Iran and has caused lots of problems for roads and railroads in that region. Appearance of wide cracks in the collapsible soil near the Tehran-Semnan railroad tracks has caused some worries regarding the safety and performance of the railroad. However, due to the high traffic of the railroad, it is impossible to block the road for remed...

New technologies offer ways for railroads to reduce costs, increase market share, and achieve higher profitability. Determining the best opportunities requires understanding of the marketplace and translation of technological improvements into competitive advantage for the rail industry. This three-year research effort uses the Performance-Based Technology Scanning (PBTS) methodology for identi...

the exponential growth of the flow of goods and passengers, fragility of certain products and the need for the optimization of transport costs impose on carriers to use more and more multimodal transport. in addition, the need for intermodal transport policy has been strongly driven by environmental concerns and to benefit from the combination of different modes of transport to cope with the in...

The RRB administers comprehensive retirement/survivor and unemployment/sickness benefit programs for railroad workers and their families under the Railroad Retirement Act (RRA) and Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act (RUIA). These programs provide income protection to railroad workers and their families during old age and in the event of disability, death, temporary unemployment, or sickness. T...