Even though rail transportation is one of the most fuel efficient forms of surface transportation, fueling costs are one of the highest operating cost head for railroad companies. In US, unlike Europe, fueling costs are indeed, by far, the single highest operating cost. For larger companies with several thousands of miles of rail network, the fuel bills often run into several billions of dollar...

There are situations where a system in mind needs to be tested before it is built. 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 of the actual size railroad. Simulation software, used to test the railroad system, consist...

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...

For real world railroad networks, we consider minimizing operational cost of train schedules which depend on choosing different train types of diverse speed and cost. We develop a mixed integer linear programming model for this train scheduling problem. For practical problem sizes, it seems to be impossible to directly solve the model within a reasonable amount of time. However, suitable decomp...