Preface

The railway serves people as a significant means of transport since the mid-19th century. Its development has passed through different stages, from intensive growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the role of dominating means of transport in the first half of the 20th century, certain collapse in the second half of the 20th century connected with effective com‐ petition from road transport, to characteristic renaissance in passenger transport, resulting from appearance of high-speed trains, and persevering tries to rebuild importance of the freight transport, e.g., through the introduction of multimodal transport, at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.

In all these periods, engineers and researchers paid a lot of attention to improvement of ef‐ fectiveness in broad terms, safety, comfort of travel, and unification of transport means and infrastructure. The imposed increase in traveling speed, by competition of air transport among others, put before designers very high and qualitatively new demands, both in terms of technical performance, particularly the speed, as well as safety and comfort. The realiza‐ tion of these objectives was possible to a high extent thanks to the intensive development of the technology in general and computer technology in particular, which includes both the hardware and the software and their contribution into our lives in the second half of the 20th century.

While talking about railways development, the economic issues cannot be ignored. The pay‐ back period of investment expenditure for the modern railway infrastructure, including the most modern traffic control and command systems, and also for the modern rolling stock is long. Besides, the benefits from investments in railway development are often difficult to determine precisely. Due to these reasons, only the developed countries can afford new in‐ vestments. The other countries face difficulties in dealing with these issues and sometimes simultaneously even with maintaining what they already have. In spite of that, it has to be admitted that the present times are the good period for railways, when looking at it global‐ ly.

This book focuses on selected research problems of contemporary railways. The first chapter is devoted to the prediction of railways development in the nearest future. The particular areas of intensive development at specific geographic locations for them are defined. The next two chapters are focused on the problems of safety. The first of these chapters discusses the safety and security problem in general, precisely from the system point of view. In the second one, both the general approach and a particular case study of a critical incident with regard to railway safety are presented. In the fourth chapter, the question of railway infra‐ structure studies is presented, which is devoted to track superstructure. Both the experimen‐ tal results and numerical calculations are of interest in the chapter. In the fifth chapter, the modern system for the technical condition monitoring of railway tracks is discussed. The compact on-board sensing device and the diagnosis software are presented. The last chapter focuses on modeling dynamics of the railway vehicle, taking the numerical approach. Also, two example research issues of the vehicle dynamics are resolved with the use of numerical simulation, where the dynamical models are exploited.

The content of the book comes mainly from offers for the book chapters received by the edi‐ tor from the authors while organizing the book project under the working title "Railway" In fact, the influence of the editor on this content is negligible. The scope of this book is quite broad. Despite the eclectic content of the book and the limited number of chapters, the edi‐ tor hopes that many readers will find this book interesting and useful.

> **Prof. Krzysztof Zboinski** Faculty of Transport Warsaw University of Technology Poland
