On behalf of the editorial panel, I welcome you to the December edition of Transport. This month, we bring you a somewhat eclectic mix of papers, mainly on the topic of road design and operation, with further papers on railways and geophysics and, finally and rather unusually, a paper on steam engines thrown in for good measure.
Before I consider the papers in turn, I would first like to report on the activities of the editorial panel over the last few months. First, it was my pleasure to be able to attend at ICE headquarters the recent journal awards ceremony, and I would like to extend my congratulations to the authors of the two award-winning papers from this journal published last year. The Rees Jeffreys Award went to the paper by Dijkstra et al. (2014), Forecasting infrastructure resilience to climate change. The second award, the William Webb Prize, went to Hakim et al. (2014) for their paper, UK airfield pavement design using French asphalts.
Regarding matters of the panel itself, I would like to thank the members of the editorial panel who have recently completed their term of office. The panel has benefitted considerably from their guidance and expertise. So thanks to Geoff Dewick, Geoff Rose, Mark Davies and Damian Meehan for their hard work over the last few years, we will be welcoming new panel members in due course. The panel is currently short of people with rail operational and design experience, and anyone in the rail field wishing to consider joining the panel should contact the Journals Editor, Agnes Alvite (agnes.alvite@icepublishing.com).
The panel is currently in the process of reviewing papers for two themed issues of the journal for next year; we will be publishing some excellent papers in due course in a themed issue on transport issues in developing countries, being led editorially by Elizabeth Jones from the Department for International Development. The second themed issue – being led by Paul Johnson from Highways England – will be on transport-related air pollution and air quality, which is very topical given recent issues with Volkswagen. Finally, we have recently issued a call for state-of-the-art review papers (http://bit.ly/1LAJ08I) which we hope to use as lead papers in future editions from mid-2016 onwards.
Now it is time to consider the papers in this issue. The lead paper this month is by Gunn et al. (2015), on Rayleigh wave propagation assessment for transport corridors. This looks at the effect of high-speed trains and issues related to critical velocity, where trains travelling at speed on soft soils can catch up the stress wave propagating through the soil that they generate. This can lead to large dynamic displacements of the track. Although there is much debate on the nature of such behaviour and the soils affected, it has in some quarters been identified as a potential issue for new rail infrastructure such as HS2. So this paper is timely in respect to what can be a controversial topic in the rail industry.
The second paper, by Nguyen et al. (2015), follows the first paper to look at track dynamic response to vehicle loading in the context of the track components themselves. The paper reports on work in Spain based on the country's extensive high-speed rail network.
The next four papers can be grouped into a theme of road safety and standards from an international perspective, with papers from Chile, Iran, Turkey and Italy. Echaveguren et al. (2015) consider operating speed models for horizontal reverse curves, looking at the effect of curve design and, in particular, transitions on accident risk for highway alignments. Mohaymany et al. (2015) then present an evaluation of overtaking manoeuvres on two-lane rural roads, where they find, having used extensive data-handling techniques, that in Iran the preponderance of extensive lengths of two-lane highway can lead to significant overtaking risk, especially where road alignment widths may be sub-standard. Tortum and Atalay (2015) then write on spatial analysis of road mortality rates in Turkey, where they find that in less-developed areas mortality on the roads can be higher as the roads are sub-standard, and in developed areas the amount of traffic can be correlated to accident rates and deaths. This links finally to the paper by Bosurgi et al. (2015), who apply the interval analysis technique to the control of standards applied to roads, and specify how analysis of the application of standards can help in ensuring better design.
The final main transport technical paper in this edition is by Zhou and Tao (2015), which looks at some interesting data-handling methods to optimise freight logistics.
The last paper in this edition, by Andrew (2015), does not really fit in the remit of Transport but was recommended to this journal by the ICE Publishing team. The paper is by a former curator from the excellent Birmingham Science Museum (now the ThinkTank). The paper looks at the development of the Newcomen (atmospheric) steam engine and, while off topic, is nonetheless an excellent paper and an interesting historical read over the Christmas break. If nothing else it may encourage you to visit the Birmingham Museums during the holidays, which I can vouch from personal experience make for an excellent day out.
On behalf of the panel I hope you enjoy this rather varied edition and we wish you a happy Christmas and a prosperous 2016.
