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...