Railroads
Sled Tests Using the THOR-50M ATD and Quasi-Static Tests of Workstation Tables for Passenger Trains
The industry safety standard for fixed workstation tables on passenger railcars, APTA PR-CS-S-018-13, draft Rev. 2, provides two options for test procedures and requirements when evaluating crashworthy tables for protecting passengers during a collision. MGA Research Corporation performed six...
Fully Scalable Train Braking Simulation Environment
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...
Large-Scale Testing and Numerical Modeling of Full- and Reduced-Scale Rail Car Floor Assemblies
A previously developed methodology for reducing the physical scale of test articles for fire performance testing of rail car floors was benchmarked using a series of large-scale tests and validated finite element simulations. The simulations showed that the experimental differences between the...
Train-to-Train Impact Test: Wheelchair Securement Experiments
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...
Feasibility of Special Trackwork Inspection Using Ultrasonics
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...
The Complexities of Rail Suicide Data
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...