Railway Infrastructure Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Social and economic growth, security, and sustainability, around the globe, are at risk of being compromised due to aging and failing railway infrastructure systems. This partly reflects a recognized skill shortage in railway infrastructure engineering. Emerging risks and their significant consequences, with no sign of early warnings, has been recently evidenced by many extreme events, such as the Nepal Earthquakes, the Madrid train bombing, the Brussels Metro Attack, etc. A great deal of past research has emphasized the applications of technology in solving front-line problems in the railway industry. Although practical knowledge has been developed alongside corporate knowledge, science and technology are still lacking in order to innovate and revolutionize the railway industry from a fundamental principle viewpoint. Many fundamental issues, such as choice of materials, durability, capacity, engineering properties, functionality requirements, and design concepts, remain unchanged. Together with the high turnover rate of technical staff within rail industry worldwide, many incidents have repeated themselves, causing high maintenance costs, service cancellations and delays, and even human lives, due to catastrophic incidents.

This Special Issue will address some of the most essential issues currently affecting the safety, reliability and functionality of global rail infrastructure systems. Rebuilding and enhancing urban rail infrastructure faces problems, beyond the search for engineering solutions. These issues resonate with one of the major grand challenges in engineering aiming to restore and improve urban infrastructure and built environments, where it will, not only be necessary to devise new approaches and methods, but also communicate their value and worthiness to society at large. This Special Issue will accept various novel and original research topics related to railway infrastructure systems, including, but not limited to:

• Stability and dynamics
• Safety, risks and uncertainty
• Infrastructure engineering
• Structural engineering and materials
• Transportation geotechniques
• Rail transportation
• Mechanics, prognostics and diagnostics
• Health monitoring, inspection, NDT&E (non-destructive testing and evaluation) and signal processing
• Big data analytics and railway operations
• Multi hazards and climate change adaptation
• Train-track interaction and wheel-rail interface
• Drainage, surveying, photogrammetry, remote sensing and drone technology
• Railway and transportation technologies

Dr. Sakdirat Kaewunruen
Dr. Akira Aikawa
Prof. Alex M. Remennikov
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Infrastructures is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.