The paper analyses the history of engineering education in Russia, highlighting its most important milestones and features. The author reviews the contributions of outstanding scholars and educators

to training of Russian transport engineers, identiʳes the challenges of the time, and outlines the prospects of engineering education in the transportation industry.

The design standards for artificial structures of high-speed rail lines set the service life of bridge structures in a prescriptive way at 100 years. However, the actual average service life of railway bridges ranges from 40 to 70 years. The service life is one of the key general-purpose characteristics that determine the main parameters of a bridge structure. However, there are no methods or algorithms for predicting and justifying service lives of bridges in the design stage. The limit state equations do not contain a time variable, and the factors of safety take into account the probabilistic variation of the initial parameters, but not their change over time. This study proposes a method for predicting and justifying the service life of unified reinforced concrete bridge structures developed for the High-speed Rail Line No. 1, taking into account the simultaneous influence of climatic degradation factors and high dynamic loads in high-speed conditions. All the initial parameters are random, which is why it is proposed to calculate the service life in a stochastic form, where the calculation results are used to generate a histogram of service life distribution. Based on this distribution histogram, it is possible to determine the service life with a specified probability by using target reliability indexes.

Compute simulation of a UAV flight in a six-degree-of-freedom model involves numerical integration of a system of twelve non-linear ordinary differential equations. The solution quality and simulator speed depend directly on a chosen integration scheme, yet the choice is usually made by habit rather than by quantitative evidence on specific problems. Purpose: Provide a quantitative comparison of five one-step integration methods-explicit Euler, Heun, midpoint RK2, classic RK4, and adaptive Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg (RKF45)- on fixed-wing UAV dynamics problems, using the author’s Python-based simulator as the implementation platform. Results: In a 60-second cruise flight with a step size of 0.01 s, RK4 produces a coordinate error of 8.6·10^-7 m, while explicit Euler, at the same step size, accumulates 1.23 m - a sixorders-of-magnitude gap. In a coordinated turn, Euler error reaches 64 m at the same step size, which is unacceptable. The adaptive RKF45 scheme with tol = 10^-6 during the cruise reduces the number of right-hand-side evaluations from 24,000 (RK4, h = 0.01 s) to 5,900, a fourfold saving at a comparable accuracy. In the wind-gust scenario, the advantage is even larger - 3.700 vs 12,000 evaluations, with both the coordinate and velocity errors smaller than those of fixed-step RK4 by a factor of about twenty. Practical significance: The authors give quantitative recommendations for selecting an integrator depending on the flight mode and requirements for determinacy of the computational cycle.

Railway construction in the adverse climate and environmental conditions of the Arctic Zone in Russia is characterized, on the one hand, by a shortage of local soils of suitable quality due to the prevalence of ice-rich soils in the area, and on the other hand, by a significant increase in requirements for soil material as a result of levelling off the terrain along the route on permafrost soils by building embankments, almost without excavations. All these are factors that make construction significantly more expensive. The authors offer engineering solutions for a significant reduction in the amount of excavation work and requirements for local soil material when building the subgrade.

The primary features of the climate and environmental conditions in the Arctic Zone include huge amounts of snow transport and severe geocryological conditions. The selection of a route location for a project is heavily complicated by the highly developed destructive geocryological processes, with one of them being the downslope viscoplastic flow of waterlogged fine-grained soils in the conditions where they alternately freeze and thaw and are influenced by gravity (solifluction).

The paper presents a technology for modifying the terrain by means of artificial solifluction in areas where a line crosses terrain obstacles, and describes the solutions for both inducing and halting solifluction within the desired limits. The authors discuss the most promising applications of artificial solifluction, such as local terrain obstacles and approaches to bridges crossing non-navigable rivers.

The study puts forward a hypothesis that soils in the base of railway embankments are thermally stabilized by snow deposits as they accumulate in winter and persist through the warm season, and proposes solutions for long-term preservation of snow deposits at the toe of embankments.