Liberalisation process has just started in the Turkish rail market with the new law recently entered into force in order to comply with EU Directives. In the liberalised markets, service quality is the decisive factor that rail undertakings can use to create difference and achieve competitive advantages. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the customer perceived service quality for rail fre...

The increase in global competition and energy prices over the past decade has forced industries to search for potential savings in their transportation supply chains and logistics systems. In some industries, such as the forest products industry, minimizing the transportation costs of raw materials is even more crucial. The relatively low value and high weight of their raw materials accounts fo...

This paper proposes a simulation model to analyze the handling and the transfer system of containers in Le Havre seaport. The decision variables of simulation are determined by using the CPLEX optimization software. The goal is to determine the least expensive strategy for the transfer of a set of containers between container terminals. The simulation model is developed using an object-oriented...

As high speed rail is becoming increasingly popular around the globe, alignments are being forced onto marginal land due to land costs and the requirement for straight tracks. Rail foundations spread the applied wheel loads to prevent damage to the underlying in-situ soil upon which tracks are built. Designs which cannot sustain the resulting stresses will cause serviceability issues and will r...

This paper introduces a discrete event simulation for crew assignments and crew movements as a result of train traffic, labor rules, government regulations and optional crew schedules. The software is part of a schedule development system, FRCOS (Freight Rail Crew Optimization System), that was co-developed by Canadian National (CN) Rail and Circadian Technologies, Inc. The simulation allows ve...

Nanoelectronic devices and interconnects will most likely exhibit substantial performance variability. Delivering high performance under such uncertainty conditions will require implementing more complex control and communication mechanisms between system components, in comparison to those used state of the art synchronous design. A key issue becomes thus to assess how the increased densities a...

In the present paper, challenges and prospects of the European railways, along with a proposal for a new strategy policy and specific measures are presented. The declining course of European railways concerning traffic and revenues is first analyzed. Conditions to introduce intra - modal competition are surveyed, among them separation of infrastructure fro...

Abstract: To ensure the rail transportations safety, evaluation of fatigue behavior of the rail steel is necessary. High cycle fatigue behaviour of a rail steel was the subject of investigation in this research using fracture mechanics. Finite element method (FEM) was used for analyzing the distribution of the stresses on the rail, exerted by the external load. FEM analysis showed that the ...