Life Cycle Assessment of Alternative Traction Options for Non-Electrified Regional Railway Lines

The railway sector is facing significant challenges in addressing the increasing concerns related to climate change, environmental pollution and scarcity of resources. This especially applies to often non-electrified regional railway networks, with passenger services provided by diesel-driven vehicles. Innovative propulsion system concepts offer...

Sustainability of Railway Passenger Services: A Review of Aspects, Issues, Contributions and Challenges of Life Cycle Emissions

This paper presents a review of research and models regarding sustainability of railway passenger services. In order to take into account all relevant aspects in terms of environmental impacts of a railway passenger service, a holistic system perspective is required, that includes a whole life cycle assessment. A life cycle approach is important...

Deep convolutional neural networks for detection of rail surface defects

In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network solution to the analysis of image data for the detection of rail surface defects. The images are obtained from many hours of automated video recordings. This huge amount of data makes it impossible to manually inspect the images and detect rail surface defects. Therefore, automated...