About

Christopher P. L. Barkan is a Professor and the George Krambles Director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center (RailTEC) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.A. from Goddard College and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany. Prior to joining the university faculty, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and worked for the Association of American Railroads (AAR) in Washington, D.C., where he was involved in research and safety departments for ten years. Since joining the University of Illinois in 1998, Dr. Barkan has significantly expanded the rail transportation curriculum, developing the largest program of its kind in North America, and has led efforts to broaden rail engineering education and research nationwide. His research interests encompass railroad transportation safety and risk analysis, hazardous materials transport, energy efficiency, rail capacity, infrastructure, and the development of new rail technologies. As Director of RailTEC, he oversees research and academic activities aimed at improving rail safety, reliability, and efficiency, maintaining extensive industry contacts across North America. Dr. Barkan has served in various leadership roles within transportation research organizations, including the Transportation Research Board and the American Society of Civil Engineers, and has authored or edited over 100 publications on railroad engineering topics. His work has earned multiple awards, and he is a sought-after speaker at conferences worldwide.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Transport engineering
• Engineering
• Computer Security
• Reliability engineering
• Forensic engineering
• Business
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Operations research
• Automotive engineering

Selected publications

• Probabilistic modelling of optimal placement strategies of hazardous materials railcars in freight trains

  Accident Analysis & Prevention · 2025-02-10 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• International benchmarking of railroad safety data systems and performance – a cross-continental case study

  Journal of Rail Transport Planning & Management · 2023 · 8 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Transport engineering
  PublisherDOI

• Towards measuring national railways’ safety through a benchmarking framework of transparency and published data

  Safety Science · 2023-05-07 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Semi-quantitative risk assessment of adjacent track accidents on shared-use rail corridors

  Journal of Rail Transport Planning & Management · 2022-10-14 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Derailment Analysis for Prediction of Damage and Probability of Release for Novel Railroad Tank Car Designs

  Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board · 2022-11-30 · 10 citations

  article

  Over the past 15 years, there has been substantial research performed to improve the safety of tank cars carrying hazardous materials. This has included a series of full-scale tank car impact tests and the development of impact/puncture models capable of evaluating the performance of existing and novel tank car designs under specific impact conditions. In parallel, statistical information was developed on tank car performance based on data from past accidents. However, such data cannot predict the performance of novel tank car designs involving new materials and configurations. This paper presents an innovative analytical framework to address this gap by simulating railroad tank cars behaviors under various train accident and rolling stock features. The finite element method-based simulation model is developed to generate impact forces on railcars after the initiation of train derailments. The results of the modeling were compared, validated, and calibrated with the real-world train derailment to assure the practicality of the analytical tool. This research is novel as it is the first quantitative, analytical methodology that can accurately and practically assess the physical behaviors of railcar movements and impact forces in train derailments. The results of this study provide new and important information for tank car performance in train derailments, which contributes to the literature in structural modeling of rail tank cars. It also specifies an approach to building a bridge between analytical methods and real-world scenarios and data for estimating tank car conditional probability of release (a frequently used metric for hazardous materials transportation safety).

  PublisherDOI

• International Benchmarking of Railroad Safety Data Systems and Performance – a Cross-Continental Case Study

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• General Model of the Effect of Hazardous Materials Car Placement in Trains and their Probability of Derailment

  Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board · 2022 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Transport engineering
  • Engineering

  Recent changes in freight train operating practices call for improved understanding of the effect of hazmat car placement on hazmat release risk. In existing models, placement of hazmat cars in a train is either assumed to be random or in blocks of grouped cars. There has been little investigation of how different train configurations affect the number of hazmat cars that could potentially derail in an accident. This paper presents a probabilistic model that calculates the probability and number of hazmat cars derailed based on accident characteristics and train configuration. The model distinguishes between hazmat and non-hazmat cars in manifest trains and provides probability distributions and the expected number of hazmat cars derailed under a set of train placement scenarios. The results indicated that the number and distribution of hazmat cars derailed were affected by speed, percentage of hazmat cars in the train (given the same train length), train configuration, and number of hazmat cars in the train (given the same percentage of hazmat cars in the train). The model presented here could be used as a stand-alone tool to evaluate train-configuration-based hazmat car derailment risk, as well as an integral component of an enhanced, comprehensive rail hazmat transportation risk analysis framework. The model results could be used to answer questions in hazmat transportation risk assessment, rail shipment planning and optimization, and tradeoffs related to unit train versus manifest train operation. The results could also inform potential policies about hazmat car placement in trains and operating speed.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantitative Analysis of Changes in Freight Train Derailment Causes and Rates

  Journal of Transportation Engineering Part A Systems · 2020 · 36 citations

  • Forensic engineering
  • Transport engineering
  • Engineering

  The mainline freight train derailment rate of major railroads in the United States declined 49% from 2006 to 2015. Nevertheless, derailments remain the leading cause of major railroad accidents. Identification and quantification of the types of train accidents, the trackage where they occur, and the causes having the greatest effect on train safety and risk is critical to determine the most effective strategies for further improvement. Federal Railroad Administration data were used to quantify factors contributing to the declining accident trend. Most derailment causes declined with the greatest reductions in broken rails and welds, track geometry, and other axle and journal defects. Of the few causes that increased, extreme weather was the largest. An updated statistical model of the relationship between track class, traffic density, method of operation, and derailment rate is also developed. Derailments declined uniformly with respect to all combinations of the three factors, indicating a broad general decline across the network. The new model also provides up-to-date derailment rate estimates for use in risk analysis of railroad freight and hazardous materials transportation.

  PublisherDOI

• Shared Rail Corridor Adjacent Track Accident Risk Analysis - Part 2

  2020-10-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Hazards Associated with HSR Operations Adjacent to Conventional Tracks – Enhanced Literature Review Part I: Summary Report

  2019-08-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• J. Riley Edwards

  Utah State University

  46 shared

• M. Rapik Saat

  45 shared

• Yung‐Cheng Lai

  Chang Gung University

  21 shared

• Marcus S. Dersch

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  19 shared

• C. Tyler Dick

  The University of Texas at Austin

  13 shared

• Ryan G. Kernes

  13 shared

• Chen-Yu Lin

  11 shared

• David A. Lange

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Civil Engineering

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1985

• M.S., Civil Engineering

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1981

• B.S., Civil Engineering

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1979

Awards & honors

• Chair of the 2010 Joint Rail Conference