SMART Orders 18 FRA Compliant Self-Powered Rail Cars

In mid-December 2010, the Board of Directors of Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART)unanimously approved a contract with Sumitomo Corporation to build SMART’s passenger rail vehicles at a new Nippon Sharyo plant in Illinois. The contract covers the manufacture and delivery of up to 18 self-powered rail cars (nine two-car trains) and cost $56,853,739 – more than $23 million below the original engineer’s estimate for vehicles.

These fully FRA-Compliant DMUs will be the signature feature of the SMART project, a 70-mile passenger train and parallel bicycle-pedestrian pathway from Cloverdale to Larkspur. The vehicle selection process has been a major focus of the district since nearly 70 percent of the voters in Marin and Sonoma approved funding for the project November 2008.

Sumitoma and Nippon Sharyo presented information concerning their team and their proposed cars at the annual meeting of the Self-Powered Rail Car Technologies Subcomittee on Tuesday January 25, 2011.

Click here for more information concerning the SMART project
Click here to see Nippon Sharyo's DMU Presentation

Rail Transit Safety: Is There a Real Difference Between Cities?

In December 2009, the US DOT proposed to establish and enforce minimum Federal safety standards for rail transit systems to correct the status quo condition where 27 separate state programs are responsible for rail safety “resulting in a situation in which there are inconsistent practices and effectiveness”. This short paper conducts a statistical analysis of publicly available safety data to empirically address two questions:

• How safe is rail transit compared with other modes of transport?
• Is there a statistically significant record of inconsistent safety among rail transit agencies?

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Hybrid DMU tests in Japan

Fuel savings of up to 20% are anticipated during tests of a power car and three DMUs fitted with a prototype hybrid battery-diesel system which reuses braking energy for acceleration.

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Contributed by Colin R. Leech, P.Eng. Senior Engineer, Transit Priority City of Ottawa