Oscar Peña
UTRGV Civil Engineering student Oscar Peña, completed his UTCRS REU experience at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Mr. Peña showed a deep interest in geometric and structural design. He found an important situation to address in the fact that federal requirements do not exist for the design of Highway-Railway Grade Crossings (HRGCs). Most of the public and private HRGCs in the United States are built by individual analysis of the highway and roadway geometry, rather than working existing guidelines provided by different national or state associations. For this reason, accidents involving high-centered vehicles at HRGCs are still common. Mr. Peña modeled existing HRGC guidelines in AutoCAD Software to determine if different combination and heavy vehicles placed on the HRGC resulted in a high-centered situation. With the results obtained, he worked on the design of guidelines in order to avoid high-centered vehicle situations. His work developing a complete set of functional HRGC design guidelines for combination vehicles has laid the groundwork to improve the safe transportation of goods and commodities.