Increased railway patronage worldwide is putting pressure on rolling stock and infrastructure to operate at higher capacity and with improved punctuality. Condition monitoring is seen as a contributing factor in enabling this and is highlighted here in the context of rolling stock being procured with high capacity data buses, multiple sensors and centralised control. This therefore leaves scope...

A survey of 17 transit-oriented developments (TOD) in five U.S. metropolitan areas showed that vehicle trips per dwelling unit were substantially below what the Institute of Transportation Engineer’s Trip Generation manual estimates. Over a typical weekday period, the surveyed TOD housing projects averaged 44 percent fewer vehicle trips than that estimated by the manual (3.754 versus 6.715). Ve...

Vertical dynamics modeling and simulation of a six-wheel unmanned military vehicle (MULE) studied in this paper. The Common Mobility Platform (CMP) chassis provided mobility, built around an advanced propulsion and articulated suspension system gave the vehicle ability to negotiate complex terrain, obstacles, and gaps that a dismounted squad would encounter. Aiming at modeling of vehicle vertic...

Brake squeal relating to the application of tread block brakes on rail cars can generate significant noise annoyance issues and presents a challenging problem due to the associated technical complexities as well as inherent design constraints. In this paper the phenomenon of brake squeal occurring on a rail vehicle is investigated using experimental techniques. The operational vibration respons...

Non-linear characteristic of tire forces is the main cause of vehicle lateral dynamics instability, while direct yaw moment control is an effective method to recover the vehicle stability. In this paper, an optimal linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller for roll-yaw dynamics to articulated heavy vehicles is developed. For this purpose, the equations of motion obtained by the MATLAB sof...

Human factors research has played an important role in reducing the incidents of vehicle-train collisions at rail grade crossings over the past 30 years. With the growing popularity of in-vehicle infotainment systems and GPS devices, new opportunities arise to cost-efficiently and effectively alert drivers of railroad crossings and to promote safer driving habits. To best utilize this in-vehicl...

The vibrations produced by trains include two parts which are deterministic and random vibrations. Due to variation of dynamic loads and patterns of load-time, the random vibration of moving train is one of the most important issues in the field of railway engineering. One of the important sources in producing the train vibrations is rail roughness and irregularities. In this paper, responses o...

This paper applies a nonparametric statistical method, hierarchical tree-based regression (HTBR), to explore train-vehicle crash prediction and analysis at passive highway-rail grade crossings. Using the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) database, the research focuses on 27 years of train-vehicle accident history in the United States from 1980 through 2006. A cross-sectional statistical ana...

In this paper we present the concept for reliable vehicle-autarkic collision detection developed for a Rail Collision Avoidance System (RCAS) that is based on direct train-to-train communication. Similar to existing systems in air and maritime transport, the RCAS approach allows vehicle-autarkic detection of imminent collisions. Designed as a safety overlay system, it shall warn and advise trai...

Turnouts are the weak spot in high-speed rail systems, and it is simple for phenomenon of wheel–rail force carbody lateral acceleration over-limit to arise when train passes through, which affects service life running stability train. In this paper, turnout with selected analysis, profiles wheel monitored. Then, vehicle–turnout coupled multi-body dynamics model simulated. Additionally, portable...