At the start of November, TRAIN faculty and students travelled to Urbana, Illinois for the 24th annual Railroad Environmental Conference.
Prof. Dick and Steven Shi helped plan, organize and facilitate a pre-conference “Workshop on Infrastructure Life-Cycle Carbon Emissions Assessment for Railway Track Maintenance: Supporting Sustainable Decision-Making for Railway and Transportation Infrastructure“. The workshop was developed in conjunction with our research collaborators at Michigan Technological University as part of our research project funded by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).
Prof. Dick also moderated a series of presentations from the various ARPA-E LOCOMOTIVES program project teams and a panel discussion on “Modeling to Support Rail Decarbonization: Needs, Challenges and Opportunities” featuring representatives from BNSF Railway, Progress Rail, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and the Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office (DoE VTO). During the ARPA-E sessions, Jason Lustbader, project lead PI from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, presented on active TRAIN research to develop the “Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System (ALTRIOS)”.