RailEI – The Railway “Everything” Institution?
Yes, we need a name change. Permanent way is no longer a term used in the industry and it means/always meant only track.
But PWI is not now, and it should never be …
VOTE!
The PWI is holding a vote for a proposed name change.
If you are a member of the Institution, vote!
If you are curious, here are my two pence on the matter (seatbelts, please) …
On the shoulders of giants
A non-railway-related story about coins, giants, curvature equivalence, lion’s claws and apples, presenting also the strange optical connection between Isaac Newton and the railway rules for turnout bending.
The tangent method of bending turnouts
A (bit) more accurate alternative method to calculate the equivalent radius for bending turnouts is based on the tangent defined by the crossing angle…
Why don’t we use angular speed and acceleration for railway track curving calculations?
Have you ever wondered why …
(my plan was to publish this a few days ago – sorry for the delay)
The other Bernoulli boy and his lemniscate
When I hear the name Bernoulli I think about some funny high school experiments of spraying coloured water on paper but also about an infinite loop curve the Roads Professor tormented us in Uni. I would have bet both things were discovered by the same Bernoulli. But no. The more known one, D. Bernoulli, the…
Pi is never 3.14 in engineering
One alignment design homework I had for my students was to calculate the installation coordinates for a simple alignment. This was a long time ago, before Excel was a thing. We were using scientific calculators back then; a lot of typing. One of the submissions puzzled me. All the coordinates were almost correct. The length…
Three points = a circle
A few years ago (2000 or about then – the year 2000, I mean) I was charmed so much by a new and interesting software that I decided to learn it by myself. I printed its help and started to learn and do things with it. Long time ago, when it didn’t have ActionScript, it…
A railway track blog 