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Research Results

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Reduced-Scale Rail Car Floor Fire Test Specimen Feasibility Study

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) contracted with Jensen Hughes (JH) to conduct ongoing research on the feasibility of reducing the size of the test article for floor fire resistance testing. This computational study was conducted to determine the conditions necessary to demonstrate that...

Fire Resistance Tests of Reduced Scale Rail Car Floor Assemblies

The Federal Railroad Administration contracted Jensen Hughes (JH) to conduct tests to validate the methodology for reducing the size of a test specimen for rail car floor fire resistance compliance test. The tests were conducted on May 20–24, 2019, at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)....

Full-Scale Shell Impact Test of a DOT-113 Tank Car

On November 19, 2019, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) conducted a full-scale shell impact test of a DOT-113C120W (DOT-113) tank car at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, CO. A DOT-113 is a tank within-a-tank designed to transport specified cryogenic materials by rail...

Trespasser Intent Determination and Evaluation (TIDE) Criteria

Findings showed that probable suicide determinations were similar between the official determination by a medical examiner or coroner and the TIDE criteria. However, TIDE was more likely to see accidents as inconclusive due to the absence of evidence. The lack of information...

Fatal Trespasser Strikes in the United States: 2012-2017

The results of the analysis show that California, New York, Florida, and Texas consistently had the highest number of fatal trespasser strikes, regardless of intent. Fatal suicide strikes most often occur during the spring, while non-suicides occur most often in the summer....

System-Wide Implementation of Rail Right-of-Way Incursion Treatments

From 2016 through 2018, the Volpe Center partnered with SunRail to develop, install, and evaluate promising vehicle ROW incursion prevention engineering treatments. Following this demonstration project, in early 2018 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)...

Rail Safety Training for Law Enforcement

The Rail Safety Training Course for Law Enforcement project builds upon QinetiQ North America’s (QNA) previous experience in developing first responder training. Specifically, in 2015, QNA developed a video sponsored by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research, Development...

State Trail Statutes

This document contains a matrix of existing State laws and statutes related to trails and rails-with-trails for all 50 States and the District of Columbia. It provides links to the relevant statutes. Trail managers and railroad companies can review these State statutes to ensure the validity of...

Yard Impact Test of a Tank Car

In 2018, the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) Office of Research, Development and Technology conducted a series of impact tests for different car configurations at various coupling speeds to better understand the load environment of tank cars during yard operations, and to identify...