Death on the Persian Corridor

Using industry publications and American archival documents from the Allied occupation period, chapter 5 focuses mainly on railway accident prevention measures to illustrate that railway operations required a perfect alignment of sociopolitical, technological, and environmental pieces. The material structure of the railway alone was insufficient to achieve the production of safe, speedy, and stable movement of trains. Seeing speed as corruptible through human behavior and perfectible through human endeavor, technocrats of the IRO and the Allied forces tried to contain its danger by reforming the embodied practice of movement among workers. They enacted safety regulations and sought standardization in many realms, specifying mundane physical motions of workers for particular procedures. The chapter also suggests that workers were not passive objects of reform but used their knowledge of the infrastructural system for goals different from those of technocrats.

Structural design of an over-track building with mid-story isolation

<p>In order to use urban space effectively in Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), over-track buildings (built over railways), are becoming increasingly popular in Japan. From a construction and structural design point of view, the basement structure just beneath railways generally cannot be built while railway operations continue (interruption to operations is not permitted, In general).</p><p>This paper presents the structural design of a mid-story isolated high-rise building constructed over railways in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. The paper shows, not only the philosophy of the system, but also the structural design, full-scale experiments, and evaluation of the performance in each structural element. The authors believe that such a structural design will be one of the effective solutions to the over-track building.</p>

Empirical dynamics of railway delay propagation identified during the large-scale Rastatt disruption

Transport networks are becoming increasingly large and interconnected. This interconnectivity is a key enabler of accessibility; on the other hand, it results in vulnerability, i.e. reduced performance, in case any specific part is subject to disruptions. We analyse how railway systems are vulnerable to delay, and how delays propagate in railway networks, studying real-life delay propagation phenomena on empirical data, determining real-life impact and delay propagation for the uncommon case of railway disruptions. We take a unique approach by looking at the same system, in two different operating conditions, to disentangle processes and dynamics that are normally present and co-occurring in railway operations. We exploit the unique chance to observe a systematic change in railway operations conditions, without a correspondent system change of infrastructure or timetable, coming from the occurrence of the large-scale disruption at Rastatt, Germany, in 2017. We define new statistical methods able to detect weak signals in the noisy dataset of recorded punctuality for passenger traffic in Switzerland, in the disrupted and undisrupted state, along a period of 1 year. We determine how delay propagation changed, and quantify the heterogeneous, large-scale cascading effects of the Rastatt disruption towards the Swiss network, hundreds of kilometers away. Operational measures of transport performance (i.e. punctuality and delays), while globally being very decreased, had a statistically relevant positive increase (though very geographically heterogeneous) on the Swiss passenger traffic during the disruption period. We identify two factors for this: (1) the reduced delay propagation at an international scale; and (2) to a minor extent, rerouted railway freight traffic; which show to combine linearly in the observed outcomes.