A SUSTAINABILITY OPTION: A META-ANALYTIC EVALUATION OF RAIL SERVICE QUALITY IN PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION STUDY AND PASSENGER SATISFACTION

These contradictory findings, as well as the increased emphasis among transport professionals on having satisfied passengers, highlight the important information on passenger pleasure to appraise existing data. And also evaluate the meta-analytical relationship of the reported passenger satisfaction findings. However, the equity and disconfirmation model are most significantly associated with passenger satisfaction, according to the document. Discovery shows that the analysis measures and procedure elements often alter the strength of the association between satisfaction and its experiences and outcomes. The authors examined the consequences of these impacts and suggest numerous research avenues for future study.

A Model for Integrating Rail Services with other Transportation Modalities: Identifying the Best Practices and the Gaps for California’s Next State Rail Plan

The California State Rail Plan (CSRP) is among the best rail plan documents published by any jurisdiction in the United States to date. As such, the CSRP is used in this paper as the basis of comparison to other state rail service plans. These plans will have been submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) on record as of June 2020—as required under Section 303 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA) of 2008. The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices and gaps that may inform California and other states in their future rail service plan development. This paper is grounded in the realization that, while the general outline of FRA requirements is uniform for all states, the actual content and inclusion of these requirements in the myriad state plans varies greatly. For example, California was granted an exception to help update FRA Rail Plan Guidance for its 2018 Rail Plan, other states have complained that FRA guidance and requirements on rail service planning have put state rail agencies in the position of constantly writing plans with little or no time to implement them. Throughout this research, the authors identify all the elements of FRA guidelines as reflected in the CSRP and rail plans of other states. This report also identifies the best features and planning strategies that may inform and improve the state rail planning process going forward, steps that will positively contribute to the public benefit of enhanced rail systems.

Integrated Multiple-Defect Detection and Evaluation of Rail Wheel Tread Images using Convolutional Neural Networks

The wheel-rail interface is regarded as the most important factor for the dynamic behaviour of a railway vehicle, affecting the safety of the service, the passenger comfort, and the life of the wheelset asset. The degradation of the wheels in contact with the rail is visibly manifest on their treads in the form of defects such as indentations, flats, cavities, etc. To guarantee a reliable rail service and maximise the availability of the rolling-stock assets, these defects need to be constantly and periodically monitored as their severity evolves. This inspection task is usually conducted manually at the fleet level and therefore it takes a lot of human resources. In order to add value to this maintenance activity, this article presents an automatic Deep Learning method to jointly detect and classify wheel tread defects based on smartphone pictures taken by the maintenance team. The architecture of this approach is based on a framework of Convolutional Neural Networks, which is applied to the different tasks of the diagnosis process including the location of the defect area within the image, the prediction of the defect size, and the identification of defect type. With this information determined, the maintenancecriteria rules can ultimately be applied to obtain the actionable results. The presented neural approach has been evaluated with a set of wheel defect pictures collected over the course of nearly two years, concluding that it can reliably automate the condition diagnosis of half the current workload and thus reduce the lead time to take maintenance action, significantly reducing engineering hours for verification and validation. Overall, this creates a platform or significant progress in automated predictive maintenance of rolling stock wheelsets.

RAIL TRANSPORTATION AND CORE-PERIPHERY RELIANCE IN ISRAEL

Many policy makers suggest that rail is the solution for the development of the periphery, often conceived as a space suffering from under-development and lack of accessibility to the core. However, this policy, promoted around the world, does not consider core-periphery reliance as one of the rail investments' impacts. This study will examine the question: to what extent does the peripheral city, connected to the rail service, has a larger reliance on the core city? This study is a cross-sectional study that focuses on the passenger rail of an existing line to the periphery and of a planned line. The research reveals that rail does not necessarily induce the local development of the periphery but it induces larger reliance on the core.