LED signal lights may get too cold on the signal lens to deice or melt snow and could cause accidents in snowy conditions. The TRB IDEA (Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis) Program's Rail Safety IDEA Final Report 29: Self- Deicing LED Signal for Railroads and Highway Intersections aims to develop and demonstrate a new type of self-deicing LED signals for highway and railroad intersections as a replacement for the existing LED signal lights.

A new prestressing system, named Adaptive Prestressing System, has been proven in this study to be an innovative technique that holds great promise as a transformative, more efficient, and safer prestressing method for concrete crossties in railway systems. The TRB IDEA (Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis) Program's Rail Safety IDEA Final Report 33: Adaptive Prestressing System for Concrete Crossties details this system, which utilizes a unique characteristic of a class of smart materials known a...

Ballast is an important part of railroad infrastructure. It is used as a support base for bearing the load from the track, as well as facilitating drainage of water from the track. Hence, the ballast layer serves an important role in track performance. The TRB IDEA (Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis) Program's Rail Safety IDEA Final Report 30: Ballast Real-time Information System details the development and validation of an integrated system – Ballast Real-time information System (BRIS) – o...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Safety Project 35: Non-contact Deflection Monitoring System for Timber Railroad Bridges summarizes a project that explored the feasiblity of the methodology. Considering the abundance of timber railroad bridges in the nation that have exceeded their design life, a cost-effective and safe deflection monitoring system would be helpful for their regular maintenance.

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Safety Project 34: Prototype System for Managing and Analyzing Enterprise Rail Transport Risks of Hazardous Materials summarizes a project that resulted in a web-based prototype system designed to support railroads with new risk data visualization and decision-making capabilities. The prototype system addresses the following: • determination and prioritization of high-risk network areas by considering comprehensive hazmat movements acros...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Program has released its final report for Project 31: Modeling and Validation of Standards for a Sleeping Compartment on Accessible Passenger Rail Vehicles. This report explored designs for accessible sleeping compartments on single level and bi-level intercity trains that accommodate up to four passengers traveling together including two passengers who may have reduced mobility. Digital modeling of a passenger rail accessible restroom i...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exporatory Analysis (IDEA) program has released Safety Report 32: Railroad Bridge Inspections for Maintenance and Replacement Prioritization Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Laser Scanning Capabilities. Measuring bridge movement under trains in the field is difficult and expensive because a fixed reference point is not normally available, thus creating the need to erect independent scaffolding to create good reference points near the bridge from where to ...

TRB's Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Program Safety 27: Field Evaluation of Ballast Fouling Conditions Using Machine Vision introduces a machine vision-based inspection system to assess ballast degradation levels for an in-service rail track. This system incorporates an approach to ballast sampling, procedures for image acquisition of horizontal and vertical ballast cross sections, and proposes an image-based index called “Percent Degraded Segments” (PDS) that is defined in terms of im...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Safety Project 25: Dynamic Impact Factors on Existing Long Span Truss Railroad Bridges explores the effect of train speeds, specifically speeds higher than the current allowable operating speed limit, on dynamic impact factors for a bridge. The project develops an accurate finite element (FE) model of an existing long-span truss bridge and documents field testing of the subject bridge with actual trains of varying consists, axle loads, a...

TRB’s Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Safety Project 28: Field Validation of Inspection Gauges for Wheel Climb Safety at Switch Points provides a field assessment and validation of chipped point gauges, AAR 1B wheel contact gauges, severely worn wheel profile gauges, and gage-face wear angle gauges, which were developed under IDEA Project S-23 for prevention of wheel climb derailments. The report explores how these gauges performed in their field environment. Selected track inspectors o...