The railroad industry was substantially deregulated by the Staggers Act in 1980. While railroad rates, as measured by industry-wide revenue per ton-mile, declined since that time, it is unclear why rates declined. Changes in commodity mix, length of haul, shipment size, lading weight, equipment ownership, railroad costs, competition from other modes, and demand for railroad transportation have ...

This paper proposes an ant colony optimization algorithm to assist railroad yard operational planning staff in their daily tasks. The proposed algorithm tries to minimize a multi-objective function that considers both fixed and variable transportation costs involved in moving railroad cars within the railroad yard area. This is accomplished by searching the best switch engine schedule for a giv...

T HROUGH an amendment to the Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act, approved by President Truman on July 31,1946, the Railroad Retirement Board was charged with the responsibility of establishing and administering a sickness insurance program for railroad employees.’ Thus, sickness benefits now form an integral part of the railroad retirement and unemployment insurance systems. The programs for p...

Collapsible soils could widely be found in central part of Iran and has caused lots of problems for roads and railroads in that region. Appearance of wide cracks in the collapsible soil near the Tehran-Semnan railroad tracks has caused some worries regarding the safety and performance of the railroad. However, due to the high traffic of the railroad, it is impossible to block the road for remed...

The RRB administers comprehensive retirement/survivor and unemployment/sickness benefit programs for railroad workers and their families under the Railroad Retirement Act (RRA) and Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act (RUIA). These programs provide income protection to railroad workers and their families during old age and in the event of disability, death, temporary unemployment, or sickness. T...

Using modeling and simulation users can apply realistic interactions with their synthetic environments representing real world. In this study the synthetic environment is a hardware railroad model representing a miniature replica of a full-size railroad system under study. The hardware model is tested by means of real-time adaptive software simulator consisting of two subsystems: the virtual ra...

The participants in the grain logistics system need forecasts of railroad grain carloads. Although forecasting studies have been conducted for virtually every mode, no forecasting studies of quarterly railroad grain transportation have been published. The objectives of the paper are (1) specify a US quarterly railroad grain transportation forecasting model, and (2) empirically estimate the mode...

Using modeling and simulation users can apply realistic interactions with their synthetic environments representing real world. In this study the synthetic environment is a hardware railroad model representing a miniature replica of a full-size railroad system under study. The hardware model is tested by means of real-time adaptive software simulator consisting of two subsystems: the virtual ra...

Attractive train schedules are quite important for the success of public rail transport. We consider schedules which are repeated after some xed time period. Periodicity is a well accepted, convenient attribute of all major railroad systems. Since trains share the public railroad network, we have to handle many connicting demands. Increasing competition from transportation alternatives as well ...

As a next generation of Global System for Mobile Communications – Railway (GSM-R), 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE)/ LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is considered for railroad wireless communication, i.e., LTE-Railway (LTE-R). Railroad wireless communication has its own requirements and functions since railroad wireless communication is very closely related to safety. In...