As state transportation planners seek to build or support sustainable transportation systems in an era of economic challenges, they find few publicly available rail analysis models for stakeholders to examine the environmental impacts, socio-economic effects and costs associated in investing in rail infrastructure. This paper, taken from a University Transportation Center Program (UTCP Region 6...

This report evaluates criticism of rail transit systems. It examines claims that rail transit is ineffective at increasing public transit ridership and improving transportation system performance, that rail transit investments are not cost effective, and that transit is an outdated form of transportation. It finds that critics often misrepresent issues and use biased and inaccurate analysis. Th...

Condition assessment and maintenance planning of railway infrastructure is a prerequisite for safe reliable train operation. As the loads are constantly increasing, condition track must also be further developed. Existing methods can describe well in many cases, but they will reach their limits with faster deterioration processes shorter time windows inspection maintenance, both associated high...

Presented is a 0.9 V rail-to-rail constant gm CMOS amplifier input stage consisting of complementary differential pairs and a gm control circuit. The gm control circuit eliminates the gm dead zone, which occurs in the conventional rail-to-rail amplifier with ultra-low supply voltages. The proposed amplifier input stage has a constant gm that varies by +2.3% for rail-to-rail input common-mode le...

Preventing broken-rail-caused derailments is a high priority for the rail industry and government. The current practice is to periodically inspect rails using non-destructive technologies such as ultrasonic rail inspection. Determining the optimal inspection frequency is a critical decision in railway infrastructure management. The objective of this paper is to develop an analytical framework t...

Rail surface defects such as the abrasion, scratch and peeling often cause damages to the train wheels and rail bearings. An efficient and accurate detection of rail defects is of vital importance for the safety of railway transportation. In the past few decades, automatic rail defect detection has been studied; however, most developed methods use optic-imaging techniques to collect the rail su...

The type and magnitude of loads passing through the track superstructure have a great impact on both the design and the performance of concrete sleepers and fastening systems. To date, the majority of North American research focusing on quantifying rail infrastructure loading conditions has been conducted on heavy-haul freight railroads. However, the results and recommendations from these studi...

A mechanism is suggested by which the membranes of lamellar bodies are converted to tubular myelin (TM) in the lung. It is argued that a simple corrugation of the membranous sheets can produce the TM formation. Such corrugation would occur in response to simple stresses acting on the lamellar body membranes. The intersections of the tubular figures are formed by fusion of adjacent corners in th...

Metal corrugated surfaces have the potential of enhancing optical absorption through surface plasmon (SP) excitation facilitated by light-metal interactions. The successful utilization of metal corrugation induced optical absorption can improve the response of free carrier absorption (FCA), based HEterojunction Interfacial Workfunction Internal Photoemission (HEIWIP) detectors. This article rep...