Summary

Despite decades of attention by operations engineers and by researchers, and even though such efforts have borne a degree of success, the problem of collisions at railroad crossings is perhaps one of the most significant for railroad properties. The costs of collisions are large, climbing and multifold. There is a push towards evolving towards higher speeds in major rail corridors to more closely achieve the promise that rail service presents for providing transportation solutions. It should be apparent that rail crossing incidents, be they violations or destructive collisions, must be addressed in order that speeds can be increased.

The site on which we focus, the San Joaquin Rail Corridor (Bakersfield to Emeryville) has nearly 700 at-grade crossings, with almost 500 of them public. Crossing have a multitude of problems: natural visibility problems (haze, fog), occlusions (railcars, buildings), etc. It is clear that innovative countermeasures should be considered.

Methodology

We propose an immediate three-pronged and systematic approach, designed to:

• Assess the efficacy and usability of unmodulated and later, modulated LED signal, at grade crossings. We will first perform controlled laboratory studies, then we will extend our work to a naturalistic field setting.
• Determine the best means of mounting, recording and archiving train-mounted video data. Perform an initial installation on an Amtrak locomotive, the acquire and analyze an initial set of data. From this data, determine parameters to be derived to root out the drivers' motivations at grade crossing. Provide a first-iteration data reduction to distill these important parameters into preliminary conclusions.
• Examine the overall problem along the corridor and identify the best candidate system. Our methodology will be to first understand the nature of violations then deduce causes (from the two tasks above) We will then examine violation statistics and use a systematic method to determine which grade crossings are best candidates for upgraded installations, along with an estimate of the benefits accrued.