International cost efficiency benchmarking played a central role in informing the Office of Rail Regulation’s (ORR) determination of Network Rail’s future funding during the 2008 periodic review (PR08) of the company’s finances. This paper sets out how international benchmarking can inform a regulator’s decisions on efficiency and, in particular, how international econometric studies can be use...

Several European countries and Japan are in various stages of privatizing and/or introducing more competition in passenger rail service. This process has been furthered in Europe by a directive from the Commission of the European Communities (1991) requiring member states to separate operations from infrastructure on the books and give international groupings of trains access to their infrastru...

Electromagnetic levitated and guided system is commonly used in the field of people transport, tool machines frictionless bearing and conveyor system. In the case of low speed people transport vehicles, the electromagnetic levitation offers the advantage of a very salient motion and of a reduced maintenance of the rail.In this work FEM based analysis and design of different structure of rail (g...

The rapid growth of transport requirements in China will incur increasing transport energy demands and associated environmental pressures. In this paper, we employ a generalized data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the relative energy efficiency of rail, road, aviation and water transport from 1971 to 2011 by considering the energy input and passenger-kilometers (PKM) and freight ton-kil...

Railroads play a key role in the transportation of hazardous materials in North America. Rail transport differs from highway transport in several aspects, an important one being that rail transport involves trains in which many railcars carrying hazardous materials travel together. By contrast to truck accidents, it is possible that a train accident may involve multiple hazardous materials cars...

transfer-transport of the waste is one of key functional elements in solid waste management from technical and financial viewpoint. unfortunately very few reach activities has been conducted in this field regarding local characteristic of phenomenon which urges undertaking local surveys and research projects. tehran organization of waste recycling and composting has decided to investigate diffe...

In 2010, Klang Valley has only 17% trips each day were completed using public transport, with the rest of the 83% trips were made through private transport. The inclination towards private car usage will only get worse if the transport policy continues to be inefficient and ineffective. Under the National Key Economic Area, the priority aimed to stimulate the increase of modal share of public t...

Safety levels at highway – rail level crossing locations continue to be a major concern at most of developing countries. Basically more than half of these accidents occur at public crossings, where active warning devices are in place and functioning properly. In most cases, accidents occurred when road users ignored the gates and passed through them or if they stopped on the tracks before the g...