Railroads
Trespasser Detection Systems on Railroad Rights-of-Way
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, under the direction of DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration Office of Research, Development, and Technology, conducted a research study to evaluate the effectiveness of trespass detection technology on rail property linked to and controlled...
Trespasser Detection on Railroad Property Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe), under the direction of DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research, Development and Technology (RD&T), conducted a research study that evaluated the effectiveness of...
An Automated, Drone-Based Inspection System
MTRI Inc. and Michigan Technological University developed and demonstrated a drone-based system for automated inspection of grade crossings. The prototype system can determine whether vertical approach grades create a risk for vehicles to get stuck on tracks, assess the adequacy of visual sight...
Predicting Fully-Developed Passenger Rail Car Fire Heat Release Rate
This report provides the results of the initial development of scaling laws for use in developing cost effective experimental measurements of a passenger rail car heat release rate (HRR) history as well as modeling approaches for predicting passenger rail car HRR. Scaling laws were successfully...