Technical Criteria and Procedures for Evaluating the Crashworthiness and Occupant Protection Performance of Alternatively Designed Passenger Rail Equipment for Use in Tier I Service

Criteria and procedures have been developed for assessing crashworthiness and occupant protection performance of alternatively designed trainsets to be used in Tier I (not exceeding 125 mph) passenger service. These criteria and procedures take advantage of the latest technology in rail equipment crashworthiness and include aspects that are fundamentally different from current regulations, such as the scenario-based train-level requirements, which have no counterpart in Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)‘s current Tier I regulations. Numerical values of the pass/fail criteria have been selected to provide an equivalent level of crashworthiness as the current Tier I regulations. For example, while the occupied volume integrity requirements have been relaxed from the current regulations, the criteria for preservation of the occupied volume for a collision with a locomotive-led train have been added to compensate. In other cases, such as roof integrity, the existing regulations can be applied to alternative equipment.

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