MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W796039993

Diesel Railcar: A Look Ahead

2000· article· en· W796039993 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
William D. Middleton

Bibliographic record

VenueRailroad history · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicRailway Systems and Energy Efficiency
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSuccessor cardinalDiesel fuelService (business)EngineeringAeronauticsBusinessAutomotive engineeringMarketing
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.681
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.166
Teacher spread0.158 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueRailroad historySame topicRailway Systems and Energy EfficiencyFrench-language works237,207