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This article examines the contested and unprecedented process by which the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad laid tracks through Baltimore’s city streets in the 1830s. Laying tracks in busy thoroughfares raised profound questions about the meaning of urban space and the economic function of the city. Track opponents held that city streets should remain open to free-flowing traffic and condemned railcars for monopolizing public space. Track advocates countered that urban prosperity was rooted in the rapid, efficient movement of goods. This was not a battle of traditionalists versus progressives but a clash between competing visions of urban modernity. Examining these competing urbanisms gives us a window into the spatial dynamics of capitalism and the ways in which industrialization reconfigured local space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Railways around the world are experiencing growth in traffic demand and the need to expand their network and line capacity. To accommodate the substantial demand, the conventional railway operator in Taiwan, the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA), is interested in understanding the potential benefit of adopting various advanced signaling systems, such as hybrid or moving-block systems. In this study, the authors developed a set of analytical capacity models for conventional rail operations with advanced signaling systems, which were implemented in the busiest corridor in the TRA system. The empirical results show that advanced signaling systems generally have positive capacity effects. However, the benefit may not be substantial due to constraints from the station track layouts. Therefore, possible capacity improvement alternatives, such as improving track layouts and upgrading signaling systems, should be considered together to determine the optimal capacity improvement plan. The use of these proposed capacity models can help railway agencies with similar operational environments in their capacity management and resource planning projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welding of rail joints on sharp curves is not practicable due to the lack of sufficient lateral resistance of the railway track. Consequently, maintenance costs increase rapidly for many old railway tracks. Moreover, deterioration of the track components, plastic deformation and critical cracks in the rail head, failures in sleepers and fasteners, ballast bed damage and lateral movement of railway track occur in the rail joints. As the resistance of a sleeper to lateral displacement in a ballast bed mainly consists of the frictional forces between the ballast particles and the sleeper bottom, the present study investigated the changes in resistance of railway tracks to lateral displacement using the single sleeper push test on the frictional concrete sleeper (B70-F). The results were then compared with those for the standard sleeper, B70. An experiment was conducted on a track with and without frictional sleepers and its result showed that the lateral resistance of the railway track increased by 64% by using frictional sleepers. In addition, a field investigation was conducted on an actual track with and without B70-F sleepers in order to extend the results and the conclusion was that the resistance of the railway track to lateral displacement increased by approximately 68% when using B70-F sleepers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a model for simulating vehicle–track interaction at high frequencies for investigations of rail roughness growth. The dynamic interaction model developed employs a substructuring technique and the whole system consists of a number of substructures that can be modelled independently. The systems are coupled through the forces at the wheel–rail contact and the railpad. A coupled, rotating flexible wheelset, a flexible track model and a non-Hertzian/non-steady contact model have been implemented and results are presented here for a free wheelset on a symmetrical track system with initial random and sinusoidal roughness. Both rigid and flexible wheelsets are considered. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]