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This chapter provides a taxonomy of key rolling stock types and covers the key engineering principles. This chapter concentrates on the aspects of the rolling stock that make it sustainable in terms of passenger transportation; these aspects are primarily safety and crashworthiness. These are specific items that contribute to make the rolling stock and hence rail system more sustainable; passengers need to be confident that they are travelling in safe rolling stock and the vehicle consist, manufacturing technique or materials used should not compromise the crashworthiness aspects. For this reason, all aspects of this chapter reference vehicle safety and crashworthiness.

Gregory P. Stone (1921–1981) made original contributions to the fields of urban sociology, social psychology, sociology of sport, and sociological theory. His work gave rise to a set of empirically grounded concepts including nonranked status aggregates, personalization, universes of appearance, and personal and collective identity. These concepts developed over time, were based on quantitative research, and provide continuity to Stone’s work. This essay will elaborate on these concepts in order to consolidate and interpret Stone’s contribution to sociology.

This chapter is based on 68 interviews in 12 mobile home parks that were part of a larger ethnographic study, conducted in 2005–2010 in West-Central Florida. Data analysis revealed diverse patterns of perception, sentiment, and interaction among neighbours, here understood as ‘neighbour culture’, both across and within communities. American mobile home communities are characterised by a high propinquity of residents and exposure to cultural housing stigma; however, these conditions alone did not determine local neighbour culture. In the analysis, I illustrate prominent patterns of neighbouring, ranging from perceptions and treatments of neighbours as (imagined) ‘family’ in senior communities to, partially, ‘trailer trash’ in suburban family communities. Going beyond description, I argue that the identified supportive, minimalist, and antagonistic forms of neighbour culture are linked to broader spatial and social structural contexts, as well as personal identities. This chapter’s findings have the potential to strengthen the theoretical framing and research of neighbouring in local and global perspectives in the future.

In this chapter the potential to use water-based Trombe walls to provide heated water for building applications during the summer months is investigated. Design Builder software is used to model a simple single-story building with a south-facing Trombe wall. The effects of using different thermal storage mediums within the Trombe wall on building heating loads during the winter and building cooling loads during the summer are modeled. The amount of thermal energy stored and temperature of water within the thermal storage medium during hot weather conditions were also simulated. On a sunny day on Toronto, Canada, the average temperature of the water in a Trombe wall integrated into a single-story building can reach ∼57°C, which is high enough to provide for the main hot water usages in buildings. Furthermore, the amount of water heated is three times greater than that required in an average household in Canada. The results from this work suggest that water-based Trombe walls have great potential to enhance the flexibility and utility of Trombe walls by providing heated water for building applications during summer months, without compromising performance during winter months.