Protection of critical transportation infrastructure such as railroad station is an important topic in these days. In this paper, we develop a new rule based approach to video surveillance system for detecting situations where pedestrians may be in peril, as well as suspicious action or interactions at railroad station. We analyze here two general types of pedestrian involved behaviors: (i) sin...

Scholars have long recognized the important differences between the northern and southern rail networks. Business historians focusing on northern enterprises have documented an impressive list of accomplishments: railroads pioneered modern accounting methods; railroads introduced new management techniques and organizational structures; and railroads helped transform national and international c...

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...

The number of railroad events reported to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's Hazardous Substances Emergency Events Surveillance system increased from 84 in 1993 to 177 in 1998. Comparisons of data on railroad and non-railroad events were made. The results overall indicated a greater potential impact of railroad events on public health. A median number of 2039 persons were li...

After the establishment of the first quarantine station in the Republic of Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) in 1377, the states and principalities of Italy developed a sophisticated system of defensive quarantine in an attempt to protect themselves from the ravages of plague. Using largely unknown and unseen historical maps, this paper reconstructs the extent and operation of the system used. It i...

Railroad trespassers are persons on railroad property whose presence is prohibited or unlawful. Most trespassers are walking along or across railroad tracks. In 1997, fatalities to railroad trespassers became the leading cause of railroad-related deaths in the United States. In 1998, 513 persons were injured and 536 persons were killed while trespassing (Federal Railroad Administration, unpubli...