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...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Safety Project 26: Remote Sensing with Mobile LiDAR and Imaging Sensors for Railroad Bridge Inspections describes results from a research effort to investigate the applicability of two remote sensing approaches–one based on Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and the other one on imaging sensors—to help detect concrete cracks and displacement of bridge components. The report explores the development and evaluation of prototype image proc...

TRB’s Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Program Final Report for Safety-IDEA Project 24: Railroad Bridge Dynamics and Ratings describes research that investigated train impact factors on bridges for speeds above 90 mph to be used in capacity ratings of existing bridges. Bridge rating calculations are performed to determine the safe capacity of existing structures. The American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA) Manual for Railway Engineering (MRE) is the...

TRB’s Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) has released Rail Safety Project 22: Laser Cladding of Welds to Improve Railroad Track Safety that explores the use of a laser-based technology called laser cladding, which may reduce surface and near-surface defects resulting from thermite field welds of rail. Thermite field welds are often used to splice together continuous welded rail segments or to replace damaged sections of rail. The procedure has the potential to increase the life...