1. 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

3. 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

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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. Proposed Quiet Zone in Lincoln, NE

9. 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

10. UNL HRGC Test Bed

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

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

16. Equipment at Upstream Locations

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

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

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

20. UNL HRGC Research Railroad traffic signal preemption Data archiving
Human factors

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

22. 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

23. Train Speed Detection Problem

24. 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

25. 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

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

27. Simulation – No preemption

28. Simulation – Preemption

29. 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

30. 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

31. Video Collection

32. Store Video in Digital Format

33. Describe Events on Video

34. 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

35. Human Factors
Video archiving work detected numerous safety issues

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

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

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