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In collaboration with the Federal Railroad Administration, Transportation Technology Center, Inc. used the Rainy Section of the High Tonnage Loop at the Facility for Accelerated Service Testing in Pueblo, CO, to develop a new track settlement model. Research was conducted in 2019. The team...
As part of ongoing Federal Railroad Administration-funded research examining the behavior of fine-filled ballast when exposed to moisture, Transportation Technology Center, Inc., used the Rainy Section at the Facility for Accelerated Service Testing to study the effectiveness of spot tamping in...
The Rail Transportation Engineering Center (RailTEC) at the University of Illinois (Illinois) is investigating spike failures in timber tie track to determine the root cause(s) and develop failure prevention strategies. This research is part of an ongoing investigation into spike failures...
In 2022, the Federal Railroad Administration and the Association of American Railroads completed short-term field experiments to measure the rail forces in steep grades and high-degree curvature on Norfolk Southern Railway. This experiment was conducted to understand the rail stress distribution...
In 2022, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) contracted with Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI) to conduct validation studies of CIVA software’s rail models for hand-held, angled beam, shear vertical wave (SW) inspections. The research team generated side-drilled holes (SDHs) at...
Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (MxV Rail), through a research project funded by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), developed a Concept of Operations (ConOps), documented the infrastructure design, and developed software to support a virtualized fully scalable train braking...
Researchers crash-tested off-the-shelf wheelchair securement devices in a train-to-train impact test at the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colorado, on August 11, 2022. Two wheelchair securement devices and one backboard (baseline experiment) were each tested with a Hybrid III 50th...
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) co-sponsored Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI) on a trackwork inspection effort scheduled for completion in September 2022. This research demonstrated the potential for the low-frequency ultrasonic testing (UT) nondestructive evaluation (NDE...
This document highlights the complex nature of rail suicide data collected from international peer-reviewed articles, and from the United States. The purpose of this effort is to identify the types of rail suicide data that exist, and to understand how they can be used to develop and select...
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) contracted Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI) to expand on existing mechanics-based ballast condition forecasting models. This report demonstrates how one of the mechanics-based models performs against field data and makes recommendations for...