Novel Design for Passenger Railcar Retention Systems

Additional passenger fatalities and injuries can occur in rollover-type derailment accidents due to failures of glazing retention mechanisms on passenger railcars. In recent accidents, a key failure mode is shearing off the external rubber gasket that secures the glazing panes as the side of the railcar drags along the ground. Once the gasket fails, the glazing pane is pushed inside, leaving an opening that passengers can be ejected, often fatally, out of the railcar.The chief technical objective of Phase I is to devise and demonstrate feasibility of multiple novel design concepts for glazing securement systems that have improved glazing retention resistance during derailment loads while remaining compliant with FRA’s safety regulations for emergency exit and emergency access windows. Redundancy will be a key feature of these concepts such that when the primary glazing retention system fails, a backup retention system will prevent the glazing pane from been pushed inside/outside the railcar. The concepts will be evaluated numerically using high-fidelity finite element models. Results from these models will also be used to inform the development of a technology plan for progressing the most promising concepts to a more mature level including Phase II planning for scale model testing.