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Technical Reports

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Locomotive Track Hazard Detector Program (LTHD) Interim Report

This interim report summarizes work performed by The MITRE Corporation for the Federal Railroad Administration Office of Rail Safety Research to develop a Locomotive Track Hazard Detector (LTHD). The objective of the LTHD program is to develop a simple and inexpensive unmanned track geometry...

Lightweight Vehicle Track Shunting

The objective of this contract was to determine the extent of the shunting problem on lightweight rail vehicles and identify research recommendations to resolve it. This study discloses that special precautions must be taken before single-unit lightweight railroad cars can be operated on common...

Improvement in Magnetic Techniques for Rail Inspection

Current inspection of rail for internal defects is carried out by ultrasonic and/or magnetic techniques. This report covers work directed toward advancing present-day magnetic technique for inspecting rail for internal flaws. The major emphasis was placed on improving the speed and detectability of...

Hopper vs. Tank Car Truck Loads

This report describes the results of tests conducted at the Transportation Test Center (TTC) in Pueblo, Colorado to ascertain differences between the ride characteristics of a hopper car with D-5 and D-3 springs and those of a tank car with D-3 springs. Testing involved operating speeds of 10 to 60...

Fundamental Studies Related to Wheel/Rail Contact Stress

This Final Report summarizes the research performed and-provides a brief review of the major results of the program. The problems discussed include: the development of cost-effective methods for finding the wheel-rail contact patch, finding subsurface internal stresses, determining points where...

Freight Car Dynamics: Final Report

The objective of this research project was to develop techniques to analyze the lateral dynamic behavior of railroad freight cars. The effort included development and correlation of theoretical techniques for predicting freight car dynamic behavior, and use of the techniques to investigate the...

Freight Car Dynamics: Field Test Results and Comparison with Theory

Field tests of a'conventional rail freight car were conducted to provide data for comparison with theoretical analyses of rail freight car dynamic behavior. These tests, carried out by the Association of American Railroads and the Union Pacific Railroad, were designed to provide experimental...