Developing Exposure-Response Relationships for Annoyance Caused by Vibration from Freight and Passenger Railway Traffic

The aim of this paper is to apply a new categorisation algorithm to an existing database of case studies in order to investigate its effectiveness in sorting unknown train vibration signals into freight and passenger train categories for exposure-response analysis. Relatively little work has been performed on the human response to vibration from railway transportation when compared with response to air-borne noise. Data for this work comes from case studies comprising face-to-face interviews and vibration measurements collected within the University of Salford study "Human Response to Vibration in Residential Environments". There are indications within this database that the annoyance response due to freight and passenger trains may be significantly different. The novelty of this work, therefore, is the use an algorithm that separates freight and passenger train vibration signals in order to further analyse the exposure-response relationships due to passenger trains and freight trains separately. This is achieved by analysing the individual vibration signals and separating them based on signal properties that are shown to be significantly different for passenger and freight trains. Initial estimates of exposure response relationships are then constructed using ordinal probit modelling. Initial exposure response-relationships developed using data categorised by the algorithm are presented and the relative success of this method is discussed. The implications of these findings for the potential expansion of freight traffic on rail are discussed. [Work funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) UK, and EU FP7 through the CargoVibes project]