The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Test Bed Elizabeth G. Jones Assoc. Professor of Civil Engineering and Assoc. Director of the Mid-America Transportation Center

Railroad Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln On-going railroad research sponsored by Federal Railroad Administration Real-time measurement of track stiffness Wireless communication systems Highway-rail grade crossings (level crossings) Several other smaller projects

Long Term Goals of Project Eliminate crashes at grade crossings related to highway traffic operations Integrate highway and rail systems

Research Objectives Develop permanent and portable test bed systems for detailed study of highway-rail interactions at highway-rail grade crossings (HRGCs) Demonstrate test beds

HRGC Test Bed Development Test Bed Selection Criteria Crossing near signalized intersection High potential for traffic to back up on tracks High potential for traffic delayed by trains to interfere with other traffic History of past accidents at crossing Interest of city traffic engineer Existing infrastructure

HRGC Selected Test Bed Characteristics 35th & Cornhusker & BNSF Crossing near signalized intersection – YES High potential for traffic to back up on tracks – YES High potential for traffic delayed by trains to interfere with other traffic – YES History of past accidents at crossing – YES FRA database indicates 2 accidents in five years Interest of city traffic engineer – YES – proposed quiet zone

Proposed Quiet Zone in Lincoln, NE

HRGC Selected Test Bed Characteristics 35th & Cornhusker & BNSF Crossing near signalized intersection – YES High potential for traffic to back up on tracks – YES High potential for traffic delayed by trains to interfere with other traffic – YES History of past accidents at crossing – YES FRA database indicates 2 accidents in five years Interest of city traffic engineer – YES – proposed quiet zone Existing infrastructure – YES City of Lincoln traffic signal cabinets connected to City of Lincoln’s fiber network Established connection between City of Lincoln and UNL’s network

UNL HRGC Test Bed

Near signalized intersection HRGC Test Bed Location 35th & Cornhusker (BNSF track – double track) Near signalized intersection High potential for traffic delayed by trains to interfere with other traffic West View of Test Bed Grade Crossing

HRGC Test Bed Location 35th & Cornhusker (BNSF track – double track) High potential for traffic to back up on tracks Northwest View of Test Bed Grade Crossing

Equipment at HRGC Looking southeast at HRGC from City’s Camera UNL Camera aimed at HRGC City’s Camera aimed at 35th & Cornhusker Grade Crossing Gate Looking southeast at HRGC from Traffic control cabinet with communications equipment

Equipment at HRGC Video encoder (MPEG-2) in traffic control cabinet (two video channels) Video channel of HRGC Video channel from City camera Video decoder at City of Lincoln Public Works

Equipment at Upstream Locations Video camera (day/night) Doppler radar detector Installation of upstream equipment currently in progress

Equipment at Upstream Locations

UNL HRGC Test Bed Cornhusker 27th Street Video & Radar Video

HRGC Test Bed Portable System Autoscope Cameras Wireless Antenna Doppler Radar Van portion of portable system

HRGC Test Bed Portable System Trailer portion of portable system Wireless Antenna Autoscope Camera Calibrating Autoscope & setting detectors

UNL HRGC Research Railroad traffic signal preemption Data archiving Human factors

Railroad Traffic Signal Preemption Project Hypotheses Intelligent signal preemption using train arrival information can significantly improve safety at HRGCs

Railroad Traffic Signal Preemption Railroad signal preemption requires upstream detection of trains Want to know when the gates close and when they open Need to know Speed of train upstream of HRGC If train is accelerating or decelerating Length of train

Train Speed Detection Problem

Train Speed Detection Video detection can discriminate between trains but signal is noisy Radar gets “confused” with more than one train and has varying noise

Current Work Use a Kalman filter to fuse the radar and video detection speed measurements Reduce noise in speed measurement Improve speed measurement Process model Measurement model Radar data Video detection data Fused data Estimate Update Kalman filter model

Current work Simulation to test preemption algorithms using fused data Without preemption With preemption

Simulation – No preemption

Simulation – Preemption

Data Archiving - Video Video is often used in the study of HRGCs Rich source of data that can be used for many studies Rarely used for more than one study, however Archived video with systematic description can make the video data source useable for more studies Objective is to show how this can be done with a small example

Data Archiving - Video Steps to archiving video and efficiently querying the archived video Efficiently store the video in a digital format MPEG4 part 10 (H.264) video compression standard specially designed to deliver high quality video at lower bit rates and smaller file sizes than previous video encoding standards Describe video using an ontology An ontology is a formal specification of the terms and the relations among these terms within a domain Query database of video description that is “linked” to the digital video

Video Collection

Store Video in Digital Format

Describe Events on Video

Query Event Database Used video captured for preliminary studies of HRGC from another project Limited video Four partial days of video collection Total of 31 hours of video collected Purpose is to demonstrate how video archiving can be done for efficient queries

Human Factors Video archiving work detected numerous safety issues

Future Work Human factors Intelligent automobiles Quiet zones Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) Quiet zones

Acknowledgements Federal Railroad Administration Federal Highway Administration Nebraska Department of Roads City of Lincoln, NE

Elizabeth G. Jones ejones1@unl.edu Thank you! Elizabeth G. Jones ejones1@unl.edu