An important aspect of railroad environmental risk management involves tank car transportation of hazardous materials. This paper describes a quantitative, environmental risk analysis of rail transportation of a group of light, non-aqueous-phase liquid (LNAPL) chemicals commonly transported by rail in North America. The Hazardous Materials Transportation Environmental Consequence Model (HMTECM)...

Article history: Received 9 September 2013 Received in revised form 14 February 2014 Accepted 24 May 2014 Available online 9 June 2014

Exposure to airborne pollution has substantial adverse health consequences. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) study has estimated that urban air pollution accounts for 6.4 million years of life lost worldwide annually (Cohen et al. 2004). Many harmful pollutants are emitted by automobiles. For example, Currie and Walker (2011) estimate that prenatal exposure to traffic congestion alone r...

Railway infrastructure monitoring is a vital task to ensure rail transportation safety. A rail failure could result in not only a considerable impact on train delays and maintenance costs, but also on safety of passengers. In this article, the aim is to assess the risk of a rail failure by analyzing a type of rail surface defect called squats that are detected automatically among the huge numbe...

With the construction of high-speed railway lines in China, there are growing concerns about the rational transport cooperation between high-speed railway lines and conventional rail lines. A rational transport cooperation scheme can improve railway capacity utilization, train speed, service and the organization quality of railway transportation. The previous research mainly focused on the aspe...

This paper describes a declarative approach to modeling a multimodal transportation network (MTN) composed of multiple connecting transport modes, such as bus, tram, light rail, subway and commuter rail, where within each mode, service is provided on separate lines or routes. The considered model of a network of multimodal transportation processes (MTPN) provides a framework to address the need...

Critics often claim that transportation accident investigations focus on finding someone to blame at the expense of deeper inquiries into the organizational factors that may have contributed to the accidents. Our independent analysis of the results of major National Transportation Safety Board investigations into aviation, marine, rail, highway, pipeline, and hazardous materials accidents refut...

The focus of our research is on rail transportation of intermodal containers. We address the problem of determining day-of-week schedules for both direct and indirect (via a hub) trains and allocating containers to these trains for the rail (linehaul) portion of the intermodal trip. The goal is to minimize operating costs, including a fixed charge for each train, variable transportation and han...