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Design of Powered Rail Vehicles and Locomotives
Published in Simon Iwnicki, Maksym Spiryagin, Colin Cole, Tim McSweeney, Handbook of Railway Vehicle Dynamics, 2019
Maksym Spiryagin, Qing Wu, Peter Wolfs, Valentyn Spiryagin
It is believed that the term ‘light rail vehicle’ originally came from Britain in order to describe vehicles used in urban transportation. The formal definition of light rail made by the American Public Transportation Association states [5]: ‘An electric railway with a “light volume” traffic capacity compared to heavy rail. Light rail may use shared or exclusive rights-of-way, high or low platform loading and multi-car trains or single cars. Also known as “street cars,” “trolley car” and “tramway.”’
Case study
Published in Johansen Agnar, Nils O. E. Olsson, Jergeas George, Rolstadås Asbjørn, Project Risk and Opportunity Management, 2019
Johansen Agnar, Nils O. E. Olsson, Jergeas George, Rolstadås Asbjørn
We will use a light railway project in a medium-sized city as an example of how different uncertainty management principles should be used in practice. This case is based on a real project, but we have modified the case description to avoid too much detail and to focus instead on the issues discussed in the previous chapters. Light rail is a kind of tram typically used in urban and suburban areas. A light rail can have its own dedicated area for tracks but also uses tracks located on roads and in public spaces. Light rail has a lower speed and more frequent stops than conventional (or heavy) rail but is more modern and faster than traditional trams.
Applying Technology to Sustainability, Part II
Published in Julie Kerr, Introduction to Energy and Climate, 2017
One of the more promising modes of public transport is rail, particularly electric urban rail. Light rail provides various benefits relating to cost effectiveness; the low maintenance needs and low energy demands of light rail make this form of transportation highly efficient. Environmental benefits include the reduction of CO2, as well as the reduction of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide (Figure 15.8).
Assessing the social costs of urban transport infrastructure options in low and middle income countries
Published in Transportation Planning and Technology, 2020
Later, Brand and Preston (2003) added total external cost to compare total social costs of 15 different PT modes including conventional bus, light rail and heavy rail systems, and personal rapid transit at a strategic planning level. In the stand-alone model, total social costs of the 15 conventional and advanced PT technologies are calculated for a 12 km route corridor. Demand is assumed to be fixed, ranging from 1,000 to 200,000 daily passengers. Final outputs of the stand-alone model include average social costs, marginal operating costs and marginal external costs of congestion (in pence per passenger-km). The results show that the conventional bus has advantages for low daily demand of less than 40,000 passengers per day in a 12 km public transport route. Suburban heavy rail is the best mode when demand ranges from 40,000 to 88,000 passengers per day, whilst Underground has advantages when demand is higher than around 100,000 passengers per day. Based on the study of Brand and Preston (2003), Li and Preston (2015a) revised the speed-flow and waiting time equations to assess total socials costs of PT in different operating environments including mixed traffic, exclusive PT and grade-separated PT with respect to endogenous demand.
A meta-analysis and synthesis of public transport customer amenity valuation research
Published in Transport Reviews, 2019
Chris De Gruyter, Graham Currie, Long T. Truong, Farhana Naznin
Table 5 provides a more detailed summary of public transport customer amenity values through reporting median values (and their associated minimum and maximum ranges) by amenity type, journey stage and public transport mode. The distribution of train/metro vs. bus results are also illustrated in Figure 2. There is a lack of values available for tram/light rail-based amenities, compared with those for train/metro and bus. This is consistent with the earlier finding in Table 3 which highlighted the relatively small number of tram/light rail-based amenity studies that have been undertaken to date. There are also gaps in the valuation of some train/metro and bus amenities for the access/egress journey stage. These include information and security related amenities for train/metro, and facilities and condition related amenities for bus. However, overall there is an interesting pattern between the bus and train/metro values: bus values for out of vehicle amenities (access/egress, waiting and boarding/alighting) are in general higher than those for train/metro, although out of vehicle journey stages were not found to significantly influence the bus amenity valuations, as reported by the meta-analysis later in this paper. However, for in-vehicle amenities, train/metro values are considerably higher than bus. This might be representative of the relative importance of in-vehicle time in train which is typically larger due to longer travel distances.
Comparison of locomotive energy storage systems for heavy-haul operation
Published in International Journal of Rail Transportation, 2018
Maksym Spiryagin, Qing Wu, Peter Wolfs, Yan Sun, Colin Cole
ESSs in automobile engineering have been comprehensively studied [6,7]. However, it is necessary to mention that all approaches or methods proposed in those studies cannot be directly and easily transferred to railway applications because there are significant differences in design and operational scenarios existing between road and railway vehicles. The further application of ESSs for railway vehicles also requires considering a great number of parameters that include locomotive and train design characteristics (size, weight, etc.), energy and power operational components. The latters are directly connected with operational cost and maintenance life cycles that can be delivered from appropriate locomotive train technical and operational design analyses. The main energy storage devices that can be applicable for the railway application have been classified and analysed in [8–12]. Based on these analyses, three main type of technologies such as batteries, flywheels, and supercapacitors are most applicable for railway vehicles [9–11,13–16]. It is necessary to mention that supercapacitor technology is generally in use for the tram application (light rail) only [16–18].