The demand for safe, fast, and reliable rail services continues to be the reason for concern in all the countries across the globe. Lack of operational efficiency and reliability, safety and security issues, and aging railway systems and practices are haunting various countries to bring about a change in their existing rail infrastructure. The global rail industry struggles to meet the increasi...

Freight tram systems can potentially reduce commercial road vehicle use and, consequently, congestion, accidents, air pollution, noise levels, and maintenance costs. This paper explores the new application for urban rail system as a sustainable solution freight distribution. A significant problem in using is determining most efficient route, terms of related costs accessibility distribution cen...

We built three simulation models that can assist rail transit planners and operators to evaluate high and low probability rail-centered hazard events that could lead to serious consequences for rail-centered networks and their surrounding regions. Our key objective is to provide these models to users who, through planning with these models, can prevent events or more effectively react to them. ...

In recent decades transport geography has been transformed by a topical emphasis towards passengers, which I perceive somewhat as a bias. The modes and terminals that support passengers have consequently received the bulk of the attention and parsing the topics presented at conferences such as the AAG confirms this view. Freight transportation has a reputation of being ‘‘uninteresting’’, probab...

Long term demand for freight movements in North America is expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades. The railroads are poised to take on this additional traffic assuming the capacity is available. Measuring the capacity of these rail lines is complicated by the interrelationships between asset utilization, reliability, and throughput. There is not a single metric that captures th...

ITE JOURNAL / DECEMBER 2004 INTRODUCTION The incorporation of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) into goods transport promises to increase productivity, security and efficiency. This feature reviews emerging examples of “passive” data collection efforts in several states. Work remains to transform these opportunities into needs identified by freight planners and researchers. Freight movem...

Research on freight transportation has seen a tremendous increase in the last decades, yet it lags behind that on passenger travel, particularly at a macro-level suitable for nation-wide policy analysis. A key challenge in freight demand modeling is the availability of data on key drivers of demand such as cost, time, and trip length which usually is proprietary and expensive. Moreover freight ...

This primary objective of this paper is to examine the causes for the change in energy consumption in the transport sector in India. The pattern of energy consumption and their causes for change are benchmarked against select countries. A mathematical model that decomposes changes in energy consumption to various factors has been used. The changes in the energy consumption are attributed to gro...

This paper explores the development of rail systems in Ireland and Australia. The paper highlights the different trajectories of both systems and charts the experiences and influences of Empire and Commonwealth on both. In Australia the rail system was developed as a way to promote nation building and overcome isolation while in Ireland both prior to and after partition the system enabled acces...