01474134

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2374-12

http://scholar.google.com...rkan&publication_year=2013

Railroad transportation plays a critical role in safely and economically moving hazardous materials throughout North America. Effective management of the risk of hazardous materials transportation is a high priority of both the American rail industry and government. A number of strategies and technologies have been implemented or are being developed to reduce this risk. Each risk reduction strategy has an effect on rail safety as well as a corresponding implementation cost. In addition, risk reduction strategies may have interactive effects. However, little prior research has addressed the interactive effects between different risk reduction strategies or how elements of them should be compared or combined, or both, to achieve the maximum risk reduction in the most cost-effective manner. A preliminary methodology was developed to estimate the reduction in the risk of the release of hazardous materials by implementing integrated risk reduction strategies, including accident prevention, tank car safety design enhancement, and changes in train operating practices such as train speed reduction. An analysis showed that risk reduction was affected in differing degrees by operating conditions, accident cause, effectiveness of accident prevention technologies, tank car safety design, percentage of tank car fleet requiring upgrade, and train speed. This study represents the first step in a systematic process of quantitative risk analysis of railroad freight transportation for local, regional, and systemwide safety improvement and is intended to assist decision makers in the development of an integrated cost-efficient risk reduction framework.

01503754

13-1811

English

0000-0002-4348-7432

pp 102–110

2013

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309286893

Print

Figures (3) ; References (42) ; Tables (4)

Hazardous materials; Railroad safety; Railroad transportation; Risk analysis; Tank cars; Train operations

North America

Freight Transportation; Railroads; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:26PM

• Characterization of Railroad Ballast Behavior Under Repeated Loading: Results from New Large Triaxial Test Setup
• Comparison of Capacity of Single- and Double-Track Rail Lines
• Competitiveness of High-Speed Rail: Analysis for Corridor Between Lisbon, Portugal, and Madrid, Spain, Based on Discrete Choice Models
• Development of Multicriteria Decision Method for Evaluating High-Speed Rail Corridor
• Development of Two-Stage Hybrid Method to Solve High-Speed Rail Train Scheduling Problem
• Dynamic Wheel Loads of High-Speed Rail at Speeds Greater Than 400 km/h
• Economic Impacts of Amtrak Intercity Passenger Rail Service in Michigan: Community-Level Analysis
• Hierarchical Decomposition Methods for Periodic Railway Timetabling Problems
• High-Speed Rail Network Design and Station Location: Model and Sensitivity Analysis
• Impact of European Railway Traffic Management System on Human Performance in Railway Operations: European Findings
• Impacts of Short-Term Land Use by High-Speed Rail on Large Metropolises: Case Study of Madrid, Spain
• Investigation of Aggregate Properties Influencing Railroad Ballast Performance
• Measuring Rail Seat Pressure Distribution in Concrete Crossties: Experiments with Matrix-Based Tactile Surface Sensors
• Modeling Rail Operating Costs for Multimodal Corridor Planning
• Predicting Potential Railway Operational Disruptions with Echo State Networks
• Simulating Ballast Shear Strength from Large-Scale Triaxial Tests: Discrete Element Method
• Simulation-Based Rail Transit Optimization Model
• System for In Situ Measurement of Neutral Temperature in Continuous-Welded Rail: Results from Laboratory and Field Tests
• Track Stiffness Transition Zone Studied with Three-Dimensional Sandwich Track Model
• Ultrasonic Tomography for Three-Dimensional Imaging of Internal Rail Flaws: Proof-of-Principle Numerical Simulations
• Use of Recycled Tire Rubber to Modify Track–Substructure Interaction