The rapid and large-scale construction of urban rail transit in China in recent years has drawn worldwide attention. The progress report and analysis would be a good reference for regional urban transit planning and policy, and for financial investment and service improvement in future. This paper offers a high-level summary of infrastructure statistics. In particular, this paper reviewed the spatial service coverage, passenger service performance and operational efficiency of urban rail transit in Mainland China and analyzed the development characteristics, such as the developing scales and multi-type urban rail transit modes based on the Annual Report of the China Urban Mass Transit work from 2008 to 2015. Suggestions and trends for further development of urban rail transit in China are proposed.

The length of metro lines with driverless train operation (DTO) systems is increasing globally and is predicted to triple in the next 10 years. This paper gives the history and future trend of the DTO systems. The opportunities provided by the DTO systems, such as lower operation costs, increased capacity, and energy efficiency, are explained and the relevant research are reviewed. Furthermore, the challenges faced by the DTO systems are analyzed, such as safety issues, train control technology, and emergency situations.

Metro systems around the world have many differences in their design and operation, one aspect of which is the level of automation. The most advanced technology available allows for unattended train operation with no staff on-board, which can bring a number of benefits. As a result, this is becoming increasingly common for new-build metro systems (such as the Dubai Metro), as well as for upgrades of traditional driver-led systems (such as Paris Métro Line 1). This paper uses the Tyne and Wear Metro as a case study to highlight the potential benefits and obstacles of implementing driverless trains on an existing metro system. This investigation has two parts: a review of the challenges of implementing increasing levels of automation for the existing Metro infrastructure and a simulation exercise to compare automatic train operation with manual driving on the core section of the Metro network. The results of the simulation exercise show that significant increases in the capacity of the Tyne and Wear Metro system are possible when automatic train operation is implemented in conjunction with resignalling. However, low adhesion conditions represent a significant risk to achieving this capacity increase reliably, and additional measures to mitigate low adhesion conditions would be required. The study also discusses the infrastructure upgrades required to convert an existing system to unattended train operation. The most significant obstacle for the Metro is that it mostly runs at ground level, with some sections shared with main line services. The costs associated with securing the tracks and ensuring compatibility with main line trains mean that the Metro is not a particularly promising application for driverless train operation at this time. Nonetheless, the issues discussed in the paper are very much relevant for other metro systems, and the methodology of this study is easily transferrable.

Railway transport consists of two main asset classes of infrastructure and rolling stock. To date, there has been a great deal of interest in the study and analysis of failure mechanisms for railway infrastructure assets, e.g. tracks, sleepers, bridges, signalling system, electrical units, etc. However, few attempts have been made by researchers to develop failure criticality assessment models for rolling stock components. A rolling stock failure may cause delays and disruptions to transport services or even result in catastrophic derailment accidents. In this paper, the potential risks of unexpected failures occurring in rolling stock are identified, analysed and evaluated using a failure mode, effects and criticality analysis-based approach. The most critical failure modes in the system with respect to both reliability and economic criteria are reviewed, the levels of failure criticality are determined and possible methods for mitigation are provided. For the purpose of illustrating the risk evaluation methodology, a case study of the Class 380 train’s door system operating on Scotland’s railway network is provided and the results are discussed. The data required for the study are partly collected from the literature and unpublished sources and partly gathered from the maintenance management information system available in the company. The results of this study can be used not only for assessing the performance of current maintenance practices, but also to plan a cost-effective preventive maintenance (PM) programme for different components of rolling stock.

Online user-generated content provides a valuable source for identifying dimensions of services. This study proposes a framework for extracting the dimensions of consumer satisfaction of public transportation services using unsupervised latent Dirichlet allocation model. A pilot study was performed on 17,747 online user reviews collected from 1452 public transportation agencies (including streetcar, light rail, heavy rail, boat, and aerial tram) in the United States over 8 years. The proposed approach is able to identify a few dimensions that were not discussed in the previous literature. This research also provides an alternative method to collectively gather users’ feedback and efficiently pre-process textual data related to transit customer satisfaction.

Avoided emissions attributable to the reduction in personal automobile trips for passenger rail riders are quantified based on real-world measurements. The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) sponsors the Piedmont passenger rail service between Raleigh and Charlotte, NC. Per passenger-kilometer locomotive emissions were quantified based on portable emissions measurement system measured exhaust concentrations and duty cycles, or the fraction of trip time spent in each throttle notch setting of the prime mover engine, from 68 one-way trips of six Tier 0+ and Tier 1+ locomotives, and actual ridership data. Motor Vehicle Emissions Simulator (MOVES) software was used to estimate light-duty gasoline vehicle (LDGV) emission factors. Moving a passenger from an LDGV to a Piedmont train would lead to a net reduction in carbon dioxide (CO₂) and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions by 44–94 %, respectively, between Raleigh and Charlotte, based on the assumption that the driver is the only LDGV passenger. However, locomotive nitrogen oxides (NO _x), hydrocarbons (HC), and particulate matter (PM) emission factors were 4–11 times higher than for the LDGV, respectively. Delays for either the train or highway vehicles did not substantially alter the key findings. If a Tier 4 locomotive was used, NO _x, PM, and HC emission rates would be 90–99 % lower than current NCDOT locomotives. The use of real-world data representative of actual train operations provides an accurate basis for comparing rail and personal vehicle energy use and emissions and for identifying key factors affecting variability in the comparison.

In this work, suspension characterization of a rapid transit vehicle is performed with a multi-body dynamic model that represents full degrees of freedom of a rapid transit vehicle. The effects of lateral suspension properties on passenger ride comfort and stability are investigated by variation of critical suspension parameters using design of experiment method. The critical suspension properties are obtained for the best values of car body lateral acceleration and car body lateral stroke. The tangent track time response of the car body verified the negligible effect of both lateral viscous dampers at primary suspensions and longitudinal anti-yaw dampers at secondary suspensions on the passenger ride comfort and stability of a rapid transit vehicle.