In the late 1980s, grain-hauling railroads began offering alternatives that have made shipping decisions more strategic. Shippers now confront alternatives ranging from nearby and unguaranteed ordering to various durations of forward and guaranteed shipment. Each has varying penalties for cancellation and payments from the railroad for nonperformance, and differing risks and payoffs. Because of...

The railroad network carries 40 % of the freight in the US. Railroad bridges are the most critical part of the network and they need to be properly maintained for safety of operations. Railroad managers inspect the bridges to assess their structural condition. Railroad managers are interested in measuring displacements under train crossing events to prioritize their bridge management and safety...

Even with the recent technological advancements in smartcars, safety is still a major challenge in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art self-driving vehicles mostly rely on visual, ultrasonic and radar sensors to assess the surroundings and make decisions. However, in certain driving scenarios, the best modality for context awareness is environmental sound. In this study, we propose an acoustic...

This paper describes an optimization model developed to determine the most efficient way to enhance the safety design of tank cars used to transport toxic inhalation hazard (TIH) materials in North America and a quantitative risk analysis conducted to assess the risk and potential benefit of implementing enhanced safety-design tank cars. The conditional probability of release and the car's weig...

To determine the employment characteristics of workers covered jointly by old-age and survivors insurance and the railroad retirement program, a sample of the work histories from the Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and the Railroad Retirement Board has been analyzed. In the analysis the hypothesis has been developed that, as time progresses, virtually all railroad workers will at some...

The design of vehicles transporting hazardous materials has important public safety and economic implications. Conventional wisdom among industry and government has held that a thicker tank on railroad tank cars and trucks reduces risk. However, a thicker tank increases vehicle weight and thus leads to an increase in the number of shipments required to transport the same amount of product and c...