• Derailments account for 70 % of the industry’s average annual accident cost. Machine learning identified factors that more strongly associate with derailments. Extreme gradient boosting outperformed 10 other types machine methods. Railroads are critical to economic health a nation. Unfortunately, railroads lose hundreds millions dollars from accidents each year. Trends reveal derailments cons...

In-plant railroad engine scheduling involves routing and scheduling decisions for a heterogeneous fleet of switching engines to serve a set of time-windowand capacity-constrained transportation requests. Despite an ever-increasing competition, the current planning is purely by pencil and paper. Our paper describes the mathematical and algorithmic developments for addressing in-plant railroad de...

Many railroad lines are approaching the limits of practical capacity, and the estimated future demand is projected to increase 88% by 2035. Therefore, identifying a good multiyear capacity expansion plan has become a particularly timely and important objective for railroads. In this research, we have developed an enhanced parametric capacity evaluation tool to assist railroad companies in capac...

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy SOLVING REAL-LIFE TRANSPORTATION SCHEDULING PROBLEMS By Jian Liu August, 2003 Chair: Dr. Ravindra K. Ahuja Major Department: Industrial and Systems Engineering Transportation by railroads and airlines contains a rich set of optimization ...

This paper investigates the relationship between railroad bond defaults and nancial outcomes in the National Banking System during the Panic of 1873. Contemporary accounts and anecdotal evidence indicate the importance of a boom and bust in the railroad industry to the onset of the panic. I use comprehensive balance sheet data for national banks before and after the panic, along with detailed G...

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...