2017/07/29 by Paul Chinowsky, Jacob Helman, Sahil Gulati +2 · 83 citations
Engineering · Environmental Science · #Aerodynamics and Fluid Dynamics Research #Wind and Air Flow Studies #Vehicle emissions and performance #Climate change #Leverage (statistics) #Environmental science #Greenhouse gas #Rail network #Vulnerability (computing) #Track (disk drive) #Range (aeronautics) #Transport engineering #Computer science #Business #Engineering #Computer security
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.tranpol.2017.05.007
published in Transport Policy 75, 183-191 (Elsevier BV)
openalex publication_date 2017/07/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
The rail network in the US is the largest network within any single country at 140,000 miles of Class 1 tracks. The network is predominantly focused on freight traffic with the exception of key passenger corridors along the eastern seaboard and in the upper Midwest. This extensive rail network enhances connectivity, but also raises the question of potential vulnerability to climate changes over the next century. Specifically, projected changes in temperature highlight the vulnerability of tracks to temperature increases and the accompanying issue of track expansion, which under current operating policies can lead to train delays, and in the most extreme cases can lead to derailments. In this study, the issue of potential impacts to the rail network are analyzed in terms of the cost of potential increases in delays that will occur due to responses of train network operators to temperature increases. Impacts analyzed using a range of climate models indicate that the rail network may incur an increase in delay-minute costs over typical historic costs of between 25 and 45 billion cumulatively through 2100 under a low greenhouse gas emissions future, and between 35 and 60 billion under a high emission scenario. However, these costs could be reduced by up to an order of magnitude if current sensor technologies are incorporated into tracks, coupled with refinements to current speed reduction policies that better leverage temperature monitoring capabilities.