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To improve ride comfort in railway vehicles, the suppression of vertical bending vibration and rigid-body-mode vibration in the car body is essential. In this paper, a system is proposed that aims to reduce bending and rigid-body-mode vibration simultaneously by introducing damping control devices in the primary and secondary suspensions. The technique involves a control system of primary vertical dampers and air springs; the former are used to suppress the first bending mode vibration; the latter, to suppress the rigid-body-mode vibration. The results of both simulations and vehicle running tests on the Sanyo-Shinkansen line demonstrate that this system reduced vertical vibrations in the bogies and the car body using the sky-hook control theory. In the running tests in particular, the system reduced the vertical vibration acceleration PSD peak value in the first bending mode to almost 20 per cent and in the rigid body mode to almost 50 per cent compared with the case when the system was not used. As a result, the ride quality level LT (a widely used index of ride comfort in Japan) decreased by at least 3 dB, indicating greater ride comfort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]