Design and operation of rail vehicles are multidisciplinary and multidimensional tasks that require a wide range of knowledge. Conventional rail vehicle design and numerical assessment procedures separate the objective vehicle from its train operational environment. Meanwhile, conventional train operational studies could not consider the specific details of rail vehicle designs. These limitations are mainly due to the high cost of train operational tests and challenges from complex modelling and time-consuming simulations. The necessity of considering the train operational environment in the rail vehicle design process and computer simulations is evident from industry reports and academic publications.
Advancements in computing techniques and simulation methods now allow rail vehicle design and simulations to take account of various characteristics of the train operational environment. These advancements also allow train operational simulations to consider the details of rail vehicle designs. These details can be modelled in mechanical systems, mechatronic systems and electrical systems. The emerging design procedure implies both vehicle details and train operational environment. This special issue called for relevant ideas and studies from experts in academia and industry.
Six papers are presented in this special issue. Bosomworth et al. used parallel computing techniques to handle large-scale simulation tasks, using which to investigate the influence of train dynamics on rail foot heat transfer. Both Bosso et al. and Wang et al. studied the interaction between vehicles and infrastructures; the former was for railway vehicles while the latter was for maglev vehicles. Two papers were presented for to topic of Longitudinal Train Dynamics. The one by Oprea was about train starting while the one by Wei et al. was about train braking. Zou et al. studied the influence of wheel diameter differences on locomotive wheel–rail interface in train operational environment.
The guest editors would like to thank all publishing authors for their time and knowledge contributions to this special issue. We also thank the authors whose papers were not accepted for their time spent on preparing the manuscripts. Acknowledgement is also made to the chief editors of the journal for their support and guidance during the organisation of this special issue.