Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before the advent of the diesel locomotive, the development of practical internal combustion power had made possible an intriguing variant, the self-propelled passenger car. Surely few railway technologies have had quite the roller-coaster fortunes of the gasoline- or diesel-powered railcar. Born early in the twentieth century, the self-propelled railcar has been through various stages of popularity and decline ever since. In fact, only a few years ago, its day seemed to be all but over in North America. In 1993, the Maryland Commuter Rail Service (MARC) operated its last trip with Budd Rail Diesel Car (RDC) equipment. That left only a fast-dwindling number of Canadian intercity services still operating with railcar equipment. The Budd RDC had been out of production since 1962, and the surviving cars were fast wearing out. Budd's successor design had been unsuccessful, leaving the North American market without a suitable replacement vehicle. But if it has not yet quite returned from the dead, diesel railcar technology has become the subject of an extraordinary new level of interest during the last few years. Driving the renewed interest has been both a growing number of prospective new starts in regional or intercity services, for which the inherent characteristics of the self-propelled vehicle are particularly well suited, and a growing record of success for advanced diesel railcar designs in a number of overseas markets. Where only a few years ago there were no vehicles on the market that fully complied with current Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) safety standards, railway suppliers are now offering a wide range of choices. Two small-scale passenger rail services quietly began operating with diesel railcar equipment several years ago, and early in 1997 the first new North American regional rail service operating with diesel railcars began running at Dallas, Texas. Quite a few more seem likely. A look back into railroad history reveals that there's nothing new about the self-propelled railcar. A number of designs were developed during the first decade of the century.1 The most successful of these was introduced in 1906, when General Electric developed the first in a long line of gasolineelectric cars. GE had sold nearly a hundred of its gas-electric cars when it
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.047 | 0.027 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".